by Mark Steyn
Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. Many of the developed world’s citizens gave no conscious thought to Islam before September 11. Now we switch on the news every evening and, though there are many trouble spots around the world, as a general rule it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali, Muslims vs. Danish cartoonists in Scandinavia. The environmentalists may claim to think globally but act locally, but these guys live it. They open up a new front somewhere on the planet with nary a thought.
Why? Because they’ve got the manpower. Because in the seventies and eighties, Muslims had children (those self-detonating Islamists in London and Gaza are a literal baby boom) while Westerners took all those silly doomsday tomes about “overpopulation” seriously. We still do. In 2005, Jared Diamond published a bestselling book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A timely subject, so I bought a copy. More fool me. It’s all about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. That’s why they’re not in the G-7 or a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies.” Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. Russia’s collapsing and it’s nothing to do with deforestation. It’s not the tree, it’s the family tree. It’s the babes in the wood. A people that won’t multiply can’t go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in. Because, when history comes a-calling, it starts with the most basic question of all:
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
WELFARE AND WARFARE
Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social-democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we’re piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.
In my town in New Hampshire, the population peaked in 1820 and then declined until 1940, when it started edging up again until it stands today almost at what it was two centuries ago. The opening up of the west killed Granite State sheep farming, and young people fanned out across the plains, or to the mill towns in southern New England. It’s sad to see cellar holes and abandoned barns and meadows reclaimed by the forest. But it didn’t kill my town because we had no extravagant social programs to which our old-timers had become partial. Similarly, in the post–Gold Rush Yukon, one minute the saloons are bustling and the garters of the hoochie-koochie dancers are stuffed with dollar bills; next they’re all shuttered up and everyone’s skedaddled out on the last southbound dogsled. But the territory isn’t stuck trying to figure who’s going to pay for the hoochie-koochie gals’ retirement complex. Unlike the emptying saloons of White Horse and Dawson City, demography is an existential crisis for the developed world, because the twentieth-century social-democratic state was built on a careless model that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it.
You might formulate it like this:
Age + Welfare = Disaster for you
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way
By “will,” I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans; as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents in the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere. Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.
We are witnessing the end of the late twentieth-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those Fascists and Republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim’s pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they’ll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.
FIGHTING VAINLY THE OLD ENNUI
Which brings us to the third factor—the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what’s at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn’t always seem obvious that there’s any connection between the “war on terror” and the so-called “pocketbook issues” of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal “deficit” isn’t the problem; it’s the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen’s sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on September 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis The End of History—written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism—is that the victors didn’t see it as such. Americans—or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans—may talk about “winning” the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and the Germans and the Canadians don’t. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies—they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not to be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it’s hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.
In Thomas P. M. Barnett’s book Blueprint for Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as “Indian territory.” It’s a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding
down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours. Here’s another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland’s radical imams settle the metropolis. And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today’s Indian territory, countries that can’t feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
But beyond that, the very phrase “Indian territory” presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s “Indian territory” was relatively ordered a generation or two back—West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swathes of the map have spiraled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favor the latter.
The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced—but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won’t be nation states and they’ll have no interest in becoming nation states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. September 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.
I never thought I’d find myself in the Doom-Mongering section of the bookstore, and, to be fair to myself, there is one significant difference between what you’re about to read and the frostbitten-population explosions-foraging for zinc scenarios above. I’ll come to that difference in a moment, because it’s critical to understanding the central equation in human development: the intersection of demography and will. Demography is mainly a matter of number-crunching, dry statistics. The second phenomenon—will—is a little less concrete, but just as important.
When Osama bin Laden made his observation about people being attracted to the strong horse rather than the weak horse, it was partly a perception issue. You can be, technically, the strong horse—plenty of tanks and bombs and nukes and whatnot—but, if you’re seen as too feeble ever to deploy them, you’ll be kitted out for the weak-horse suit. He wasn’t thinking of Europe, whose reabsorption within the caliphate Islamists see as all but complete. Rather, he was considering the hyperpower. In late September 2001 Maulana Inyadullah was holed up in Peshawar awaiting the call to arms against the Great Satan and offered this pithy soundbite to David Blair of Britain’s Daily Telegraph: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.”
Compare Mr. Inyadullah with the acclaimed London novelist Margaret Drabble, also speaking in the Daily Telegraph, just after the Iraq war. She feels the same way, at least about carbonated beverages: “I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win.”
Look at Ms. Drabble’s list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s, you weren’t worried about the Soviets’ taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third Reich movies. America is the most benign hegemon in history: it’s the world’s first non-imperial superpower and, at the dawn of the American moment, it chose to set itself up as a kind of geopolitical sugar daddy. By picking up the tab for Europe’s defense, it hoped to prevent those countries lapsing into traditional power rivalries. Nice idea. But it also absolved them of the traditional responsibilities of nationhood, turning the alliance into a dysfunctional sitcom family, with one grown-up presiding over a brood of whiny teenagers—albeit (demographically) the world’s wrinkliest teenagers. America’s preference for diluting its power within the UN and other organs of an embryo world government has not won it friends. All dominant powers are hated—Britain was, and Rome—but they’re usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it’s controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell’s Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you’re against, America is the prime example of it.
That’s one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it’s so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy. “We are,” warns Al Gore portentously, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe.”
Think globally, act lunarly. The “balance of energy” between Earth and “the rest of the universe”? You wouldn’t happen to have the statistical evidence for that, would you? Universal “balance of energy” graphs for 1940 and 1873? Heigh-ho. America is a threat not because of conventional great-power designs, but because—even scarier—of its “consumption,” its way of life. Those Drabble-detested Cokes and burgers are straining the Earth in ways that straightforward genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of this fantasy is very revealing about how unthreatening America is.
But others cast the hyperpower’s geniality in a different light. Visitors to America often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan usually found below a bold Stars and Stripes: “These Colors Don’t Run.” To non-Americans, it can seem a trifle touchy. But for a quarter century the presumption of the country’s enemies was that those colors did run—they ran from Vietnam, they ran from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, they ran from Somalia. Even the successful campaigns—the inconclusively concluded 1991 Gulf War and the air-only 1999 Kosovo war—seemed manifestly designed to avoid putting those colors in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colors ran from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, just as Zarqawi figured those colors would run from the Sunni Triangle. Being seen not to run—or, if you prefer, being seen to show “resolve”—should be the indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. Were these colors to run from Iraq, it would be the end of the American era—for why would Russia, China, or even Belgium ever again take seriously a superpower that runs screaming for home at the first pinprick?
Don’t take Osama’s, or Saddam’s, or Mullah Omar’s, or the Chinese politburo’s word for it. Consider those nations who (a) regard themselves as broadly well-disposed toward America and (b) share the view that Islamism represents a critical global security threat, yet (c) have concluded that the United States lacks the will to get the job done. You hear such worries routinely expressed by the political class in India, Singapore, and other emerging nations. The British historian Niall Ferguson talks about “the clay feet of the colossus.” Admiral Yamamoto’s “sleeping giant” has become harder to rouse—the La-Z-Boy recliner’s a lot more comfortable and pampering than the old rocker on the porch. In Vietnam, it took 50,000 deaths to drive the giant away; maybe in the Middle East, it will only take 5,000. And maybe in the next war the giant will give up after 500, or 50, or not bother at all. Our enemies have made a bet—that the West in general and the United States in particular are soft and decadent and have no attention span. America has the advantage of the most powerful army on the face of the planet, but she doesn’t have the stomach for war, so it’s no advantage at all. After all, if you were a typical viewer of CNN International (which makes CNN’s domestic service look like a 24/7 Michael Savage channel), what would have made the biggest impressio
n on you since September 11? That America has the best, biggest, and most technologically advanced military on the planet? Or that the minute you send it anywhere hysterical congressmen are shrieking that we need an “exit strategy”? The corpulent snorer in the La-Z-Boy recliner may have a beautifully waxed Ferrari in the garage, but he hates having to take it out on the potholed roads. Still, it looks mighty nice parked in the driveway when he washes it.
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
If Europe’s dwindling manpower and will are a one-way ticket on the oblivion express, numbers plus will is the most potent combination of all: serious people power. What does it mean when the fastest-growing population on the planet is a group that, to put it at its mildest, has a somewhat fractious relationship with the characteristics of a free society?
Can the developed world get more Muslim in its demographic character without becoming more Muslim in its political character? And what consequences does that have for art and culture, science and medicine, innovation and energy…and basic liberties?
Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists, but they will still be recognizably European. It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors. Or maybe the all-black Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! is a better comparison: Pearl Bailey instead of Carol Channing, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive, whoever’s at the switch.
