Mark Steyn is, I think, a bit less optimistic than Victor Davis Hanson in this long, but very recommended essay from The New Criterion in which he looks at long term demographic trends in the west and how they will play out in the rest of this century. The bad news is that much of what we used to call the west will vanish as the population of Old Europe ages, dies and is replaced by Muslims with a higher birth rate. And as Old Europe dies, so will the culture that took 2500 years to build. By the end of this century Europe will have become Eurabia and what is left of western culture will be the province of America and those countries of the modern world which survive the wave of violent Arabism which is now sweeping the globe.
I now have begun to think that in the end we Americans will once again be called on to fight in Europe as we did twice in the past. Not right away, mind you. My liberal democratic parents, who have done so much to bring it about, will not live to see the fruits of their multicultural leftism come to flower. But my generation will see it and so will my young nieces and nephews who will have to fight if we all wish to survive and keep our freedom. It is not hard to imagine a Muslim Eurabia launching all-out war on the rest of the world. They have already as much as declared war on the west. If they become the majority in the countries of Old Europe, then it is logical to conclude that they will use the wealth and resources at their disposal to bring about their Islamic Utopia. Inevitably it will be at the point of a gun. Whether the rest of us resist is, of course, the question. The answer will depend on whether leftism and multiculturalism is first defeated here at home and whether there are enough of us remaining to do so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.
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