Europe As We Know It...

This article is reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.



Europe as We Know It is Dying

What Will Follow the Winter of Western Civilization?

by Steven W. Mosher

It’s happened before.

Writing a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Polybius observed “nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”

He concluded by urging his fellow Greeks to return to their historic love of family and children. “The remedy is in ourselves,” he wrote. “We have but to change our morals.” His advice, unfortunately, went largely unheeded.

The demographic winter of the Greek city-states led to economic stagnation and military weakness, which in turn invited invasion and conquest. After a century of increasing dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome finally annexed the Greek city-states in 146 B.C.

Will a Europe in the grip of a similar demographic winter come to a similar unhappy end? Certainly Europeans of today, like the Greeks of old, are barely having children. The birthrate across the entire continent is far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany have total fertility rates, or TFRs, of only 1.4 or so, while Poland and Russia languish at 1.32 and 1.2 respectively. The more or less generous child allowances these countries pay the prolific has scarcely caused these numbers to budge. The birth dearth continues to widen.

Meanwhile, adherents of pro-family sects such as Islam are moving in, having children, and repopulating historic Christendom. Is this process likely to continue? And to what end?

Most Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East have fertility rates two or three times as high as Europe. Afghanistan and Somalia, whose fertility rates are above 6 children (6.62 and 6.4 respectively), may be outliers. But other Middle Eastern countries with above-replacement TFRs include Iraq at 4.86, Pakistan at 3.65, and Saudi Arabia at 3.03. Even immigrants from the most Westernized Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia average nearly twice as many children as the extant populations of most European countries.

While falling fertility may be humanity’s general fate, it is this differential fertility that will determine Europe’s destiny. Although the birthrates of Muslim immigrants to Europe are far lower than they were just a generation ago, they are still far more open to life than highly secularized Europeans. Moreover, these immigrants, once in place in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., tend to maintain their relatively high fertility for a generation.

As a result of this potent mix of immigration and procreation, the number of Muslims will continue to grow. Europe as a whole, some demographers suggest, will have a majority Muslim population by 2100.

What a strange twist of history! Over the centuries, various Muslim armies have repeatedly attempted to conquer Europe. Time and time again, at Tours, Vienna, at Lepanto, at Malta, they were thrown back. Yet now what their forebears were unable to accomplish by force, their distant descendants will achieve by peacefully winning the Battle of the Cradle.

Whether they will be radicalized or secularized Muslims is the central question. If they are radicalized, then we can expect efforts to impose Sharia law in country after country, along with the growing persecution of the Christian minority. Catholics in Germany, for example, may come to be treated in largely the same way that Coptic Christians in Egypt have been for the last few centuries, that is to say, as second-class citizens, to be maligned, taxed and beaten almost at will.

If, on the other hand, the second- and third-generation Muslims are largely secularized, then the Christian minority will be, presumably, treated somewhat better, though still subject to some level of discrimination. As everyone knows by now, the Secular Left preaches a tolerance that it generally does not practice.

Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe will probably find themselves living in what might be called a pre-Constantine moment. In others words, they will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.

At the present moment, Europeans still control their own destiny. As Polybius, were he alive today, would surely remind them: “The remedy is in yourselves. You have but to change your morals.”

Whose Democracy?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

On December 6th, 2011, the Associated Press put out a story about Hillary Clinton's comments concerning the first elections in Egypt after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. The story suggested that the United States leadership considered the elections in Egypt to be fair, especially in juxtaposition to the concurrent Russian parliamentary elections. However, Clinton warned in the story that democracies need to hold as unviolable the human rights of their citizenry, in particular their women, and that certain parties who had won majorities in Egypt were a potential roadblock to the establishment of a just democracy.

While this may look like a well-reasoned response to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Nour, both of which are demonstrably hardcore "Islamists," the reality is that the problems with her statement are manifold. In fact, Clinton's reprimand and warning is not only deceptive and naive, but also almost entirely laughable. Forgive me if it seems like I call anything dealing with the revolution in Egypt laughable; quite frankly, I see nothing to laugh about with anything going on in that country at the moment. I do, however, feel compelled to laugh when I hear something as ridiculous as Mrs. Clinton's statements.

The reasons for my bitter mirth all spring from the same error, and Mrs. Clinton carries the consequences of her error in several different directions and so must my answers tend as well. I will start from the error and move towards its consequences.

The problem with her statement lies in her profound misunderstanding of the term "democracy" which she is so fond of throwing around especially in regards to the Arabs and their so-called "spring." A democracy is, as I have always been taught, direct rule by the people by majority vote, where every single person receives representation by the mere fact of their having one vote to cast and one voice to add to the discussion. (The ancient Greek philosophers characterized a democracy as the least good form of government and the closest kind of society to anarchy, but that discussion is for a different time.)

Now, I say she misunderstands democracy not necessarily because she doesn't understand the definition I gave above. Her misunderstanding is made clear in the assumptions she draws from democratic elections.

The first example of unclear thinking that she offers is that she immediately jumps to talking about the universal rights of man and how democracies and transitions to democracies must respect them, especially the rights of women snd free religious expression. Huh? I fail to find in the definition of a democracy the charge that "all democracies must respect human rights to be true democracies." Ironically, a purely democratic government is not terribly interested in human rights, it is only interested in what the majority of the people want.

This first erroneous assumption leads directly into the second, which is that the majority of people always desire what is good. This is historically provable to be untrue. An angry mob does not usually display sound judgment or moral rectitude in its actions, but hey, the mob's will is the will of the majority of its members.

Mrs. Clinton's second mistake translates very neatly into her third, which is that all democracies must conform to our American revolutionary ideas in order to be just and true. This means in effect that if a democracy emerges overseas in the Arab world and the majority of the people elect a party that is hostile to the United States' policies, that democracy is suddenly null and void.

Her thought process suddenly becomes a ridiculous oxymoron. The Egyptians can have their democracy, as long as the majority of people in said democracy elect to follow policies that conform to American ideas.

The icing on this idiotic cake is the Secretary of State's naive idea that just because the Egyptians desire free and fair elections, that they also desire a state which tolerates other religious groups besides Islam and that women will be treated fairly and justly. This is in fact a fantasy of alarming proportions. Nations governed by Sharia law have historically been at odds with Western ideals, and Egypt is no different. In fact, the elections suggest that Egyptians (at least Egyptian men) desire the establishment of Islamic law as the law of their land judging by the votes they freely and democratically cast.

Hillary Clinton in effect would give America the option of voting for its mores and its way of life, and effectively deny any other democracy the right to do the same. It is peculiar that a staunch feminist and renowned liberal like Mrs. Clinton would show such little tolerance to another, when all that she and her party will preach about is tolerance and fairness.

Henry Ford, the premiere supplier of affordable transportation back in his day, once famously said that you could have his Model T in any color, so long as it was black. The same is true with America's leadership, both the current and the previous administrations. Mrs. Clinton and the rest of us must erase from our minds the idea that freedom and democracy is something we grant to other nations as something that is uniquely American branded and conditional. To persist in such a way of thinking is not only unpatriotic, but is the allowance of a "soft" tyranny of the United States over the rest of the world.