America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  Germany has a shrinking economy, a shrinking and aging population, and potentially catastrophic welfare liabilities. Yet the average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable would suggest closing the gap. The Dutch and the Norwegians are even bigger slackers.

  This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. It’s a product of the U.S. military presence, a security guarantee that liberated European budgets; instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. But even with reduced defense expenditure, the European welfare state depends on economic growth and population growth. The former is now barely detectable and the latter is already in reverse.

  After the rejection of the European Constitution, Jacques Chirac reacted to his impertinent electorate’s appalling lèse-majesté by appointing as French prime minister a man who was the very embodiment of the ruling elite’s serene insulation from popular opinion—Dominique de Villepin, the magnificently obstructionist big-haired foreign minister in the run-up to the Iraq war. Aside from his Byronic locks, M. de Villepin also writes sub-sub-sub-Byronic doggerel. Whenever he turns up on CNN, starry-eyed Democrat viewers send cooing e-mails to Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty, wondering why their own vulgar republic can’t produce a political leader who speaks English with such suave erudition—a veritable Rimbaud to Bush’s Rambo. So, in his first big speech in the gig, Monsieur Sophisticate was at pains to reassure French voters that the internal tensions of a pampered lethargic over-regulated welfare society could all be resolved through “Gallic genius”: “In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action. Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius.”

  Ooh-la-la! C’est magnifique! C’est formidable, n’est-ce pas? All those elegant nouns just waiting for a stylishly coiffed French genius to steer the appropriate course between the Scylla of solidarity and the Charybdis of initiative, between protection and daring, immobilism and action, inertia and panic, stylish insouciance and meaningless gestures, abstract nouns and street riots, etc, etc. The French electorate has relatively down-to-earth concerns: crime, jobs, immigration. But for a man of letters that’s all too dreary and prosaic compared with an open-ended debate between solidarity and initiative stretching lazily into the future.

  Across half a century, Continental politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. Austria was the classic example: year in, year out, whether you voted for the center-left party or the center-right party, you wound up with the same center-left/center-right coalition presiding over what was in essence a two-party one-party state. In France, M. Chirac isn’t really “center-right” so much as ever so slightly left-of-right-of-left-of-center—and even that distinction only applies when he’s standing next to his former prime minister, the right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of center Lionel Jospin. Though supposedly from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the 2002 presidential election they wound up running against each other on identical platforms, both passionately committed to high taxes, high unemployment, and high crime.

  Americans often make the same criticism of their own system—the “Republicrats,” etc.—but the United States still has a more genuinely responsive politics with more ideological diversity than anywhere in Western Europe. On the Continent, the Eurodee and Eurodum mainstream parties are boxed into a consensus politics that’s no longer viable. The people are weary of certain aspects of this postwar settlement—permanent double-digit unemployment and the Islamization of their cities—but they’re not yet ready to give up the social programs, the short work weeks, long vacations, and jobs for life. Europe’s structural problems would require immense cultural change to correct. Is it likely that Europe will muster the will for “painful economic reforms”? It was always a political project masquerading as an economic one, and thus the ruling class’s investment in it is largely emotive and ideological. Hence the Guardian’s attack on the British prime minister for demanding reform of the Common Agricultural Policy:

  It is unreasonable of Mr. Blair to repeatedly flourish as if self-evidently outrageous the simple arithmetic of 40 percent of spending on 4 percent of the European workforce, when rural life is of such social, psychological and aesthetic importance to a vastly larger proportion of the continent’s population.

  I think “aesthetic importance” means “we have to drive past a lot of French farms to get to our holiday homes.” Rural life was central to France’s sense of itself. But so was the Catholic Church, and it’s empty now. And so were Catholic-size families, and they’re down to one designer kid. So the character of those quaint villages is utterly changed. Why should the British taxpayer subsidize an ersatz French heritage park about as authentic as Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame? If Pierre’s given up the church and the family, what’s the big deal about giving up the farm?

  Ah, well, it won’t be a problem much longer. Under its present economic arrangements, it’s Europe that’s bought the farm.

  WAR

  According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Évreux the first weekend of November 2005 was supposed to be the annual fête de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smoldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of fifty vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by—what’s that word again?—“youths.”

  Over at the Place de la Mairie, M. le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheese-tasting. “A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation,” he told reporters. “Well, they don’t form part of our universe.”

  Maybe not, but, unfortunately, you form part of theirs.

  M. Debré, a close pal of President Chirac’s, was a little off on the numbers. There were an estimated two hundred “youths” rampaging through Évreux. With baseball bats. They injured, among others, a dozen firemen. “To those responsible for the violence, I want to say: Be serious!” M. Debré told France Info radio. “If you want to live in a fairer, more fraternal society, this is not how to go about it.”

  Oh, dear. Who’s not “being serious” here? In Normandy, it’s not just the cheese that’s soft and runny. Granted that France’s over-regulated economy severely obstructs the social mobility of Muslim immigrants, even M. Debris—whoops, sorry—even M. Debré cannot be so out of touch as to think “seriously” that the rioters were rioting for “a fairer, more fraternal society.” But maybe he does. The political class and the media seem to serve as mutual reinforcers of their own obsolete illusions.

  In December 2002, I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation that “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark.” At the time, this was taken by the Left as confirmation of my descent into insanity: Europe was still regarded as a bastion of progress. By 2006, the Right was querying the thesis, arguing that the Bush Doctrine is a crock: how can liberty save the Muslim world when Muslims are jeopardizing liberty in Europe?

  Well, they’re not contradictory positions. In the Middle East, it may well be that, as the gnarled old Yankees tell tourists, you can’t get there from here. But I’d argue there’s a sporting chance of being able to get at least partway there from the here and now of the present Muslim world. Whatever their problems, most Islamic countries will be embarking on their evolution into free states as reasonably homogenous societies. European nations face the trickier job of retaining their freedoms at a time of increasing societal incoherence: they’re getting there from here in the one-way express lane, and they’re not going to like where they end up. About si
x months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent’s Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. Don’t take my word for it. It was a Hamburg cell that pulled off September 11, a British subject who was the shoe-bomber, a London School of Economics graduate who had Daniel Pearl executed…

  True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations and then evolved into successful “multicultural” societies. But the Continent isn’t multicultural so much as bicultural. You have hitherto homogeneous Scandinavian societies whose cities have become 40 percent Muslim in the space of a generation. Imagine colonial New England when it was still the Mayflower crowd and one day they woke up and noticed that all the Aldens and Standishes, Cookes and Winslows were in their fifties and sixties and all the young guys were called Ahmed and Mohammed. That’s what’s happened in Rotterdam and Malmö. There are aging native populations and young Muslim populations and that’s it: “two solitudes,” as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there’s three, four, or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing “We Are the World.” But if there’s just two—you and the Other—that’s generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it’s no longer quite clear who’s the majority and who’s the minority—a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian, or Dutch maternity ward.

  Take Fiji—not a comparison France would be flattered by, although until the late 1980s the Fijians enjoyed a century of peaceful, stable, constitutional evolution the French were never able to manage. At any rate, Fiji is comprised of native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. Fifty-fifty, give or take, with no intermarrying. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, officer of the Order of the British Empire, staged the first of his two coups.

  Is it that difficult to sketch a similar situation for France? Even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec. Picture a French election circa 2020: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and M. de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Jean-Marie Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well? Or would the temptation to be France’s Colonel Rabuka prove too much?

  And the Fijian scenario—a succession of bloodless coups—is the optimistic one, and not just when measured against such notable bicultural societies as Rwanda. After all, the differences between Fijian natives and Indians are nothing compared to those between the French and les beurs. All those Bush Doctrine naysayers who argue that Iraq is an artificial entity that can never be a functioning state ought to take a look at the Netherlands. You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland? Europe’s problems don’t nullify the Bush Doctrine so much as present a more urgent case for it.

  As to the “French” “youth,” a gentleman in Antibes cautioned me against characterizing the disaffected as “Islamist” and advised me to examine them more closely. “They look like L.A. gangsters,” he said, “not beturbaned prophet-monkeys.”

  Leaving aside more than a few cries of “Allahu Akhbar!” on the streets, my friend is correct. But that’s the point. The theoretical virtue of “multiculturalism” is that it’s a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives us the worst of all worlds: the worst attributes of Muslim culture—the subjugation of women—combined with the worst attributes of Western culture—license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old-school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today’s identity of choice for the world’s disaffected.

  In 2001, Paris elected its first openly homosexual mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, and, as always, this was taken as evidence of how cool and relaxed everyone is about the whole gay thing nowadays. M. le Maire certainly worked hard to put the gay in gay Paree—potted palms and parasols along the Seine all summer long, etc. His big idea was the Nuit Blanche—the “Sleepless Night”—of October 5, 2002, when the city’s landmarks would be open for one big all-night party. Come to the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and if you make it through till dawn there’ll be free coffee and croissants. City Hall itself was done up like a stylish ’tween-wars nightclub—and no state security metal detectors on the doors, because, after all, what genuine jazz boîte would have such things?

  And that’s where M. Delanoë was, in the thick of the festive throng, when he got stabbed. His assailant missed his aorta by less than an inch, but gamely the mayor insisted that the party go on while he was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for a three-hour operation that saved his life.

  His would-be killer was a Muslim immigrant, Azedine Berkane. But, as the establishment was at pains to emphasize, the good news is that he wasn’t a terrorist. No, he’s just a Muslim who hates homosexuals.

  And that’s good news how, exactly?

  Le Monde reported from M. Berkane’s wretched riot-prone ghetto the views of his neighbors: “He was a bit like us,” said one. “We’re all homophobic here, because it’s not natural.”

  “It’s against Islam,” said another. “Muslim fags don’t exist.”

  A traditional terrorist has demands which are in most cases subject to circumstances: He doesn’t want your troops on his soil? Okay, we don’t really need them there anyway.

  But a Muslim who hates you just cuz? That’s all but impervious to external pressure.

  The old joke about British Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land: hence today a Western democracy and a disaffected Muslim population exist in (for the most part) two solitudes on the same piece of real estate. But doesn’t that sum up Europe too? The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn’t. And as their numbers grow it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. When France began contemplating its headscarf ban in schools, it dispatched government ministers to seek the advice of Egyptian imams, implicitly accepting the view of Islamic scholars that the Fifth Republic is now an outlying province of the Dar al-Islam. As the Zionist Entity can testify, that’s not a club you necessarily want to be signed up for (though it helps explain why the Quai d’Orsay can live with Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third).

  And what happens when, say, Iran starts spreading a little terror start-up money through France and the Netherlands the way the ayatollahs have done in Lebanon and Gaza? What would it take to persuade a European Muslim to blow himself up in an Amsterdam gay bar?

  Few EU leaders have a clue what to do about this, but, as France’s headscarf law and Britain’s Incitement to Racial Hatred bill underline, mediation between what Tony Blair called (in the wake of the Tube bombing) “our way of life” and Muslim values has already become a central dynamic of European political culture—a remarkable achievement for a minority few Europeans were more than vaguely conscious of before September 11. Meanwhile, acr
oss the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology—fierce, glamorous, and implacable. Here’s the final irony, and perhaps the most distressing of all to European anti-Semites: in one of history’s better jests, in this scenario they’re the Jews.

  CONQUEST

  As the Guardian reported in London in 2005: “French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.”

  Ah, those “French youths.” You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the “youths” are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieues of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as “French,” and likely never will. Four years after September 11, it turned out there really is an explosive “Arab street,” but it’s in Clichysous-Bois. Since the beginning of this century, French Muslims have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They’re losing that battle. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

  The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins in the ’burbs, but 732 AD—as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within two hundred miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground “like a wall…a firm glacial mass,” as The Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname “Martel”—“the Hammer.”