Had the Spanish government responded to the Madrid bombings by announcing that in light of this irrefutable confirmation of al Qaeda’s connection to Iraq, Spain would now not only refuse to withdraw but quintuple its troop strength, the more rational calculators among those tempted to emulate the bombers might have been given pause to ponder. Imagine Schroeder speaking thus: Never give in— never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. That, of course, is what Churchill said—and it is Churchill, not Chamberlain, whom history has vindicated—but it is impossible to imagine any contemporary European leader saying any such thing.
How is it possible that Europeans could fail to see in Spain’s flight, to hear in the rhetoric of its leaders, the echo of Neville Chamberlain? How is it possible that Europe could again be embracing appeasement? Why are Europeans so unwilling to fight for their civilization and so willing to surrender to wicked, bloodthirsty ideologues who despise every value and freedom Europeans profess to cherish? Chantal Delsol’s answer makes sense: They cannot imagine fighting for a cause because they no longer believe a cause may be worth a fight.
CHAPTER 6
NO PAST, NO FUTURE, NO WORRIES
RECENTLY, WANDERING THROUGH PERUGIA, in Italy, I stopped in the Pasticceria Sandri, a ravishing, high-ceilinged pastry shop built in 1871. I took in the pyramids of chocolates on filigreed silver platters, wrapped in sparkling blue-and-silver foil; the extravagant platters of pastries made from raisins, spices, figs, walnuts, apples, cocoa powder; the boxes of panettone, wrapped in thin golden paper, piled high on the countertops. The air was fragrant with anise and almonds and the whole bakery seemed to sparkle, as if dusted in spun sugar. The exuberantly frescoed walls were decorated with toys—glassy-eyed antique dolls and marionettes, cheerful wooden drums, soldiers, brightly painted figurines, music boxes. I am sure that every Italian in Perugia has nostalgic memories of that shop, of the way Mamma took them there for a sfogliatelle with hot chocolate after school, as a special treat. The place was, clearly, designed to delight children.
But there were no children in the Pasticceria Sandri. Not one. Nor were there any on the streets of Perugia. I looked carefully, in the evening, when the crowds poured into the Corso for the passeggiata. The city’s twelfth-century aqueduct culminates at the piazza in a marble fountain with sculpted panels depicting animals and mythological creatures. There were no children examining them, no parents gently explaining, Now, that is a unicorn, Bruno, and that, that is a faun.
The piazza is framed on one side by an opulent palace built of travertine and local stones, on the other by the high Gothic windows and Baroque façade of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, where Urban IV is buried, and where, under the portico, a section of the city’s original Roman walls endures. There were no parents pushing strollers past the palace, no grandparents coaxing hesitant toddlers down the cathedral stairs. I saw thousands of Italians walking, shopping, gabbling with friends, taking aperitivi, sitting on the San Lorenzo steps and watching the other people passing by—but I did not see one single child.
On my flight to Italy, I had noticed an article in the in-flight magazine about a long-limbed woman in her thirties, evidently at her leisure at a beach resort. Wearing a gauzy white dress, she stood at the edge of the sea, gazing into the horizon, alone. She lounged in the solarium, alone. She sipped a tropical drink, alone. On the next page, a sidebar translated the text into crude English:
The portrait of a generation in skirt that rides a new philosophy of life: gathering in urban tribes and—above all—escaping from marriage. About thirty years old, with good education and a medium-high income, good looking, single for choice rather than for need, they are an army of women living in solitude as a period of their life, maybe transitory, certainly positive. A portion of the existence suspended among the dependence upon the parents, the complications of life in pair and the responsibility towards the family. A privileged moment to live alternating happy hours with friends to evenings at home, with a cucumber mask on the face, watching a movie and weeping, eating a light single-portion dinner, wearing an old sweater and wool unmatched socks. Spinster, therefore, has no more a negative meaning.
I looked up at the flight attendant who was pouring my coffee. She seemed remarkably cheerful for a spinster who had spent the past night weeping alone in her unmatched socks with a cucumber mask on her face, whether that had a negative meaning or not.
The sociological developments so cheerfully celebrated in that magazine are in fact an utter catastrophe for Italy, as they are in the rest of Europe. Not since the Great Plague has Europe’s population been so dramatically gutted. Italian women are, as the magazine correctly noted, postponing marriage. When they do have children, late in life, they are having very few of them—rarely more than one. Over the past twenty-five years, Italy’s birthrate has plummeted. It is now the lowest in Western Europe.23
If a society has modern standards of medical care, the inevitable correlate of a decline in births is a rise in the elderly proportion of the population. Italy is now the first country in human history with more people over the age of sixty than under the age of twenty. If current trends continue, according to the UN’s projections, the next fifty years will see Italy’s population drop from 57.5 million to 45 million. The youngest generation, children under the age of fourteen, will shrink by 14 percent. The cohort of people between fifteen and sixty-four— working age—will shrink by 44 percent. The aged population, over sixty-four, will grow by 50 percent. There will be a 160 percent increase in the population of Italians over the age of eighty.1 Imagine the state of Italian universities, music, literature, theater, the arts when its population comes to be distributed in that manner.
The contraction of Italy’s population has had drastic economic repercussions already. Italian industries are suffering severe labor shortages. Italy’s extensive welfare system—funded through workers’ wages—is going bankrupt. Ten years ago, Italians who had worked for twenty-five years could look forward to retiring at the age of forty-three with a pension that amounted to 80 percent of their salary. The narrowing tax base has forced the government to raise the retirement age to fifty-seven. In 2008, it will be raised again to sixty.2 The government recently proposed raising it to sixty-five, a suggestion that triggered labor unrest and strikes.24
The Italian case is the most extreme, but throughout Europe the birthrate has been declining since the Second World War. Demographers speak of the total fertility rate, or the number of children the average woman is apt to have over the course of her reproductive life span. That rate is now about 1.5 in Europe. Scandinavia, Britain, and the Netherlands are slightly more fecund—total fertility rates there are slightly above 1.7. But Ireland and France are the only countries in the European Union where fertility approaches the so-called replacement rate of 2.1, the level required to keep population levels stable.25 When total fertility rates drop below a certain point, a shrinking population will enter a sudden, steep spiral of decline. Demographers call this phenomenon negative momentum, and Europe is on the verge of it. Gross domestic product will drop commensurately. Imminent depopulation means that no one need worry about Europe’s aspirations to become an economic superpower, or any kind of superpower, for that matter.
Unless these trends reverse themselves—and there is no reason to imagine they will—European countries will soon be unable to make payments on their extensive pension and health care programs. No serious economist disputes that at this rate, barring reform, Europe’s pension schemes, along with the rest of its costly social welfare programs, will bankrupt the Continent within a generation. Immigration is Europe’s only hope. There is no alternative, unless Europeans are prepared to give up on the welfare state, and they are not. Whenever pension reform is proposed in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, protesters immediately take to the streets
in numbers sufficient to bring civic life to a halt and cause swift, devastating economic damage. It does not seem to trouble them that the economies they are damaging are the source of the welfare payments they are trying to protect. Labor unrest and demonstrations routinely cripple French transportation and public services. Italy—all of it—is more or less permanently on strike.
But immigration in numbers adequate to rectify the population decline will come at a huge cost in social stability, particularly if the majority of immigrants are Muslims, as they are now. Immigration levels are nowhere near high enough now to offset the diminution of Europe’s native population: to do so they would have to be five to ten times higher still. Particularly given Europe’s high rate of unemployment—some 15 to 20 million Europeans are jobless—it is hardly likely that so many immigrants could easily be culturally, politically, or economically integrated.
The latter point is so obvious that it hardly needs to be argued, but if in doubt, consider this: Shortly after September 11, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci published a passionate and undisciplined polemic called The Rage and the Pride. In passages that infuriated anti-discrimination activists—who sought to have the book banned— Fallaci castigated her countrymen for permitting immigrants to overrun Italian cities. Here she describes a tent erected in the center of Florence by Somali vagrants:
Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters-in-law, and if they had their way, their relatives’ relatives as well. . . . A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors. A tent, finally, furnished like a sleazy little apartment: seats, tables, chaise-lounges, mattresses for sleeping and for fucking, ovens for cooking food and plaguing the piazza with smoke and stench. . . . Thanks to a radio tape player, enriched by the uncouth wailing of a muezzin who punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells. Add to all this the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the marble of the Baptistery. (My, these sons of Allah sure have a long range! However did they manage to hit the target when they were held back by a protective railing that kept it nearly two whole meters away from their urinary equipment?) And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore al Vescovo: that exquisite Romanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse.3
Fallaci was of course immediately condemned by Europe’s politicians, clergy, academics, and journalists as a hysterical bigot. This she may be—I’m staying out of this one—but here is the point: The Rage and the Pride, a violent, uncensored anti-immigration manifesto, was also the most successful book ever published in Italy. The entire first edition, 200,000 copies, sold out within hours. For months, the publisher printed 50,000 new copies a day. Italians who had never before visited a bookstore waited on line for copies. It was also the number one best-seller in Germany, France, and Spain. The success of Fallaci’s book should be a hint that Europeans are not adjusting well to immigration, nor are immigrants adjusting well to Europe.
Anti-immigration parties are gaining strength across the Continent. If immigration rises to ten times the current levels, Europe will explode. If it doesn’t, Europe will implode.
“ITALIANS HAVE, YOU KNOW, BEEN AROUND FOREVER”
However uneasily Italians view immigration, few seem fully to appreciate that the only alternative, if their country is to avoid terminal decline, is reproduction. When I was last in Rome, a friend introduced me to two Roman girls, both from distinguished Roman families. Giulia Arceri is twenty and Cristina Rossi is twenty-one. We sat on a bench beneath a spreading Roman pine in the courtyard of a villa on the crest of the Janiculum, Rome’s highest hill, where the shadows cast by the sharp light made the courtyard look like a chiaroscuro painting by a Renaissance master, and discussed Italy’s future. “Are you worried,” I asked them both, “about the decline of Italy’s population?”
Giulia looked at me as if I had asked whether she was alarmed by the remilitarization of Alpha Centauri. “No,” she said finally.
“Does anyone in Italy worry about it?” I asked.
They both giggled. At last Cristina spoke up: “I don’t think so.”
“Why not? After all, if current trends continue, there will be no Italians.”
They soaked that thought in for a while. Giulia waved her hand in the general direction of the Coliseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Forum. “I guess we think,” she said, “that Italians have, you know, been around forever.”
They have been around forever, that’s what’s so mystifying about it, and that’s what makes all the explanations generally on offer for this demographic transformation seem so inadequate. Some attribute the decline of Italy’s population to rapid industrialization, which, accompanied by urbanization, has broken up traditional family networks. They note that rural Italians traditionally viewed children, who provided farm labor, as an economic asset, whereas urbanized Italians see them as an economic burden. Some note that better medical services, and a resultant decrease in infant mortality, have led Italians to bear fewer children in the expectation that more will survive.
It is not just Europe. Virtually every advanced industrial democracy is suffering from population decline. But there is one enormous exception: the United States. If industrialization, urbanization, and medical advances necessarily led to population decline, one would expect the American population to be declining fastest of all. During the 1970s, American fertility briefly dropped below the replacement rate. But in the 1990s, the trend reversed itself. The United States now has an annual population growth of 1.1 percent, higher than China’s and by far the highest of the developed countries. There are 3 million new Americans born each year. The population of the United States is about 293 million. If the total fertility rate stays at current levels, there will be about 600 million Americans by the end of the century.
Some see the cause of Italy’s population decline in the diminished role of the Church and the loss of traditional Catholic values. (Italy’s Catholics have been vigorous lobbyists for solutions to save the Italian family from extinction, but they have not been particularly successful, and Rome, as it happens, has the lowest fertility rate in Italy.) Others place the blame on the Italian government, which has taken few measures to provide child care or social support to mothers. Some fault Italy’s high housing costs, which encourage children to live with their parents well into middle age. The Italian rental market is over-regulated, making it difficult to find a house or apartment. It is nearly impossible to get a mortgage to buy a home: The Italian banking sector, which runs on a complex, antique system of family crossshareholding that protects banks from competition and takeover, is Europe’s least competitive and least responsive to market demand.
Quite a few commentators point to the near-congenital immaturity of Italian men, who, Italian woman complain—and complain, and complain, and complain—are lazy, spoiled, self-indulgent, unfaithful, slovenly, and swinish, unwilling to help with household chores, incapable even of dressing themselves without their mother’s aid. Italian women, evidently, consider them unfit for reproduction.4
All these theories doubtless have some explanatory power. But none is fully satisfying. If a woman badly wants to have a baby, she will go to great lengths to do so, whatever the economic obstacles and the inconvenience, even if she has no partner at all. One need only spend a day at a fertility clinic to see that this is so. So why do Italians—and Europeans generally—now need to be coaxed, forced, cajoled, or bribed into doing something that has always been viewed as the central imperative of existence, the act that most lends meaning to people’s lives?
THE LOSS OF A VISION
Something else about Italy immediately strikes the visitor as odd. Again take Perugia: The city center is an ancient, melancholy maze of arched caverns and twisting alleys,
built on a jutting hill that dominates the Tiber Valley. In the winter, fog snakes over the rooftop gardens and pours into the narrow streets. Perugia was the capital of the Etruscan empire, and an imaginative spectator can inspect the original Etruscan gates, thousands of years old, and for a flicker of a moment see ghostly Etruscans passing below, then scuttling off through the misty, narrow streets, fretting about the prospect of imminent obliteration by the Romans.
But if you descend that hill to the outskirts of the city, you will see housing projects made of clapboard and cheap, cracking cement. The buildings are tall and unornamented. They are not made of local stone and they do not use local colors. They look like giant tomb-stones. The squat concrete shopping malls on the outer rings of the city are sprawling, unplanned developments completely antithetical in spirit to traditional Italian architecture and civic design. If historically the Italian city was contrived to draw city dwellers into the streets in a kind of daily communal celebration, these suburbs seem designed to foster anomie and indifference to civic life. All the suburbs around Italy’s great cities—Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples— look like this.
These gloomy suburbs are where Italians live now, not the picturesque city centers, which have become too costly for all but the most successful urban elites and the handful of ancient families who pass their apartments from one generation to the next. Ordinary Italians visit the city center as an outing, or to shop, then return to their modern neighborhoods. They no longer live on charmingly haphazard streets scaled to a pedestrian size—they live on streets laid out in rectangular grids, where the traffic and pollution are nearly overwhelming. In the winter, when it rains, the oppressive concrete buildings turn dark and glowering. The long concrete blocks form wind tunnels. In the summer, there are no shady alleyways. To save heat or to keep out the sun, the windows are always shuttered, and the shutters are made of ugly metal, giving the impression that the buildings have no windows at all—they appear to be nothing more than concrete and metal walls.
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