Europe's powder keg
J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer
newsobserver.com
If we're lucky, the clash of civilizations will not end with a bang but a whimper, not with a mushroom cloud but the cry of the baby that brings a Muslim majority to Western Europe.
Demographers say that shift could happen as early as 2050. It might take longer. But unless something really frightening happens, it appears inevitable.
The U.S. population is also changing due to Hispanic and other immigrants. But where America's evolution is interesting, Europe's is alarming.
Bruce Bawer probes this difference in his indispensable new book, "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within" (Doubleday, $23.95, 247 pages). In troubling detail he describes the social and economic problems strangling Western Europe -- epitomized by last summer's Muslim-led riots across France -- and its leaders' inability to confront them. The result is a portrait of a powder keg continent.
Bawer is a gay American writer best known for "Stealing Jesus" (1997), a withering critique of the values and increasing political power of Christian fundamentalists in the United States. After completing that book, he moved to Europe because of its enlightened social policies, especially its embrace of same-sex marriage. During his eight years in the Netherlands and Norway, where he still lives, Bawer became increasingly disturbed by the dark side of Europe's celebrated tolerance.
Unlike in the United States, where immigrants are considered Americans when they set foot on our soil, indigenous Europeans put great stock in bloodlines. Europeans, he writes, are "intensely aware of ethnic difference. ... The single most important thing about you was whether you were one of them or not."
The children of immigrants, and their children, he says, are considered outsiders, despite their European roots. "Even those Muslim immigrants who openly try to distance themselves from the Muslim community," he writes, "are seen as members of a group whose common identity is determined entirely by skin color."
Facing immense obstacles to integration, immigrants and their children tend to anchor their identity in the accepting arms of their faith. Where most immigrants come to the United States hoping to become Americans, Bawer writes, "Many Muslim immigrants arrive in Europe with very different ambitions. All want a share in Western prosperity; fewer care to adapt to Western ways."
Unwilling to assimilate these new immigrants, European nations have established policies that discourage intermarriage and expand Muslim-only ghettos. Bawer says many European Muslims arrange marriages for their daughters with residents of poor, rural villages back home. These men "put the brakes on -- or even reverse -- whatever progress the European-born spouse might have toward becoming Westernized."
No one can doubt the seriousness of this problem. A society cannot remain healthy when its fastest-growing group feels disconnected. The more challenging part of Bawer's argument rests on two ideas: that many of European Muslims reject the West's bedrock values and that the continent's leaders and her people have little interest in aggressively defending the best parts of their culture.
On those points, Bawer is both fuzzy and compelling. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to make useful generalizations about any group. To suggest, as Bawer does, that European Muslims are hostile to "pluralism, tolerance, democracy and sexual equality" begs innumerable qualifications.
However, he redresses this through an important qualification between Muslims and Islamists. The first group is akin to what Americans might call the "silent majority" -- those who may not feel comfortable in their adopted land but are not actively hostile to it. The Islamists are the fire-breathers who preach hatred against their new homelands. Their vocal members hope to turn Europe into a Muslim nation under strict religious laws hostile to homosexuals, Christians and other infidels.
Islamists, Bawer asserts, often dominate the discourse because of a deadly mixture of timidity, alienation and racism. Moderate Muslims rarely challenge their radical brethren because they see little gain in risking their necks for a society that holds them at arm's length. Meanwhile, the racism that infects indigenous Europeans has not led them to clamp down on malcontents but to adopt a form of political correctness that centers on the tolerance of even gross acts of intolerance.
Analysis by anecdote is always dicey, but Bawer catalogs many incidents in which officials excuse Muslim rapists because their Western victims "dressed provocatively," attribute gay-bashing incidents to general anger at "oppression" and anti-Semitic violence to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. "Immigrants to Europe are allowed to perpetuate even the most atrocious aspects of their cultures," he writes, "but the flip side of this is that no one, including themselves, will ever think of them as Dutch or German or Swedish."
A perfect storm of historical forces has weakened Europe's ability to face these threats. Centuries of bloody wars and the long retreat from religion have made the continent wary of confrontation and strong beliefs. While Americans -- sometimes to our peril -- insist that there are things worth fighting for, Europeans do not. As we saw in the Balkans in the 1990s, when peaceful resolution fails, they are out of cards. Stepping provocatively into the land of Freud, Bawer quotes a Danish newspaper columnist who contends that Europe's history has spawned a cultural death wish among its leaders and indigenous people. " 'The Nazis made Europe think it is doomed and sinful ... and deserves what it has coming.' "
Thus the powder keg: A surging, alienated population with strong beliefs rubbing against established groups unable to change or defend their ways. The wild card is Western Europe's bloody history. It is tempting to believe that the 61 years of relative peace since Hitler's defeat is the norm. In fact, it is an anomaly. If Europe's enlightened leaders cannot face the future, its darker forces may be unleashed once more.
* * * |
