The Crescent and the Continent

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell (Doubleday, 432 pp., $30.00)

When the British government recently announced a plan to spend nearly $20 million to reassure “white enclaves” that they had nothing to fear from nonwhite immigrants, it was a tacit admission that much of the public harbored serious doubts about the virtues of immigration. This is not exactly news. Polls show that some 70 percent of Britons believe that there are too many immigrants in their country. Majorities throughout Western Europe agree, and Muslim immigrants in particular are viewed with suspicion. Though we’re often told—not least by Europeans—that Europe has moved beyond such archaic notions as ethnicity, religion, and nationhood to embrace multiculturalism, the widespread concern over Islamic immigration suggests that Europeans have not made peace with the demographic changes reshaping their societies. What are those changes and how did they come about? More pressingly, what do they portend for Europe’s future?

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is Christopher Caldwell’s effort to answer these questions. It is a judicious survey of mass immigration, specifically Muslim immigration, and its impact on Europe over the past half-century. Caldwell, a well-traveled columnist for the Financial Times and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is not the first to take up this subject. But his learned, levelheaded, and elegantly written study may be the finest and most insightful diagnosis of Europe’s immigration woes to date.

In Caldwell’s account, mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.

Source:
The Crescent and the Continent
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