America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  And if it’s a neither of the above, he will say “we move forward.” You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, “President” Juncker covers his ears and says, “Nya, nya, nya, can’t hear you!”

  Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a preordained correct answer. Yet “President” Juncker distilled the great flaw at the heart of the EU constitution into one disarmingly straightforward expression of contempt for the will of the people. For his part, the architect of the constitution—the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing—was happy to pile on: why, even if the French and Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing, as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text,” declared M. Giscard. During his labors on the constitution, he’d told me he saw himself as “Europe’s Jefferson.” By referendum night he’d apparently become Europe’s Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is that his ingrate subjects had no need to read beyond the opening sentence: “We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people.”

  After that, the rest doesn’t matter: you can’t do trickle-down nation-building. That’s another feature of the paternalistic welfare state—that the paternalists, the rulers, come to regard the electorate as children, to be seen but not heard. Hence Europe’s ever-widening gulf between a remote disconnected political establishment and a population with a growing list of concerns its leaders refuse to discuss. To carry on supporting the Euroconsensus of the Junckers and Giscards is not so much a vote to commit suicide but a vote to take as many people over the ledge with you as possible.

  The transatlantic “split” has nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq, and can’t be repaired by a more Europhile president in Washington: you can’t “mend bridges” when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. If Americans think that the post-bombing 2004 Spanish election result was a disgrace, look down the road to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the United States, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader’s 2 or 3 percent in swing states. Think about an election in which 20 percent of the voters are a self-segregating Muslim bloc. If Washington had a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe in 2001 or 2003, you do the math ten or fifteen years hence.

  If there is a ten or fifteen years hence. The U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. I think that’s rather a cautious estimate myself. Ever since September 11, I’ve been gloomily predicting that the European powder keg’s about to go up, and that within the next couple of election cycles the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way. If you were one of those “redneck Christian fundamentalists” the world’s media are always warning about apropos America, you might think the Continent’s in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse—although in tribute to Euro-perversity they’re showing up in reverse order: Death—the demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed; Famine—the end of the lavishly funded statist good times; War—the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest—the recolonization of Europe by Islam.

  Happily, most Europeans are far too “rational” and “enlightened” and “post-Christian” to believe in such outmoded notions as apocalyptic equestrians. Nonetheless, in some still barely articulated way, many of them understand that their continent is dying, and it’s only a question of whether it goes peacefully or through convulsions of violence.

  On that point, I bet on form.

  DEATH

  There are many agreeable aspects of old Europe—old buildings, good food, foxy-looking women who dress to show themselves off. Compared to a strip mall in Jersey, the Continent is “sophisticated.” But it’s sophisticated in the sense that a belle époque Parisian boulevardier is sophisticated—outwardly dapper and worldly, inwardly eaten away by syphilis and gonorrhea. It’s only a question of how many others the clapped-out bon vivant infects before his final collapse. The seventeen nations that have slipped below the “lowest-low” fertility rate of 1.3 and remained there are embarking on a historically unprecedented exercise in self-extinction. I certainly hope some countries can summon the will to change: I don’t believe the Poles and Hungarians saw off the Soviets only to be consumed by a disaster from the Western end of the Continent a generation later. But the logic of the European Union is to ensnare the least decayed polities in the problems of the Euro-core—the Germans and the French—and the latter’s problems are not something anybody else should willingly yoke himself to.

  By 2050, there will be 100 million more Americans, 100 million fewer Europeans. In 1970, there were 4.6 million Italians under five years old. By 2004, there were 2.6 million. And the fewer babies you have today, the fewer grown-ups are around to have babies in twenty years. What do you figure the 2020 numbers will look like? If you think that a nation is no more than a “great hotel” (as Canadian novelist Yann Martel approvingly described his own country), you can always slash rates and fill the empty rooms—for as long as there are any would-be lodgers left out there to move in. But if you believe a nation is the collective, accumulated wisdom of a shared past, then a dependence on immigration alone for population replenishment will leave you lost and diminished.

  Americans take for granted all the “it’s about the future of our children” hooey that would ring so hollow in a European election. In the 2005 German campaign, voters were offered what would be regarded in the United States as a statistically improbable choice: a childless man (Herr Schröder) vs. a childless woman (Frau Merkel). Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged African proverb—“It takes a village to raise a child”—only to discover they got it backward: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village. And most of the villagers still refuse to recognize the contradictions: you can’t breed at the lethargic rate of most Europeans and then bitch and whine about letting the Turks into the European Union. Demographically, they’re the kids you couldn’t be bothered to have.

  One would assume a demographic disaster is the sort of thing that sneaks up on you because you’re having a grand old time: you stayed in university till you were thirty-eight, you took early retirement at forty-five, you had two months a year on the Côte d’Azur, you drank wine, you ate foie gras and truffles, you marched in the street for a twenty-eight-hour work week…. It was all such great fun there was no time to have children. You thought the couple in the next street would, or the next town, or in all those bucolic villages you pass through on the way to your weekend home.

  But the strange thing is that Europeans aren’t happy. The Germans are so slumped in despond that in 2005 the government began running a Teutonic feel-good marketing campaign in which old people are posed against pastoral vistas, fetching gays mooch around the Holocaust memorial, Katarina Witt stands in front of some photogenic moppets, etc., and then they all point their fingers at the camera and shout “Du bist Deutschland!”—“You are Germany!”—which is meant somehow to pep up glum Hun couch potatoes. Can’t see it working myself. The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness—war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents—and yet their people are strikingly gloomy. They especially got rid of that oppressive Christianity. In the words of the official slogan of John Lennon International Airport at Liverpool: “Above us only sky.” In Europe, they embraced the sappy nihilism of “Imagine” wholeheartedly:

  “Imagine there’s no heaven.” No problem. Large majorities of Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians are among the first peoples in human history to be unable to imagine there’s any possibility of heaven: no free people have ever been so voluntarily secular.

  “Ima
gine all the people/Living for today.” Check.

  “Imagine there’s no countries.” Check. The EU is a post-nationalist pseudo-state.

  “Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too.” You got it.

  And yet somehow “all the people/Living life in peace” doesn’t seem to be working out.

  You can’t help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11:61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn’t reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

  What’s the most laughable article published in a major American newspaper in the last decade? A strong contender would be a column published in the New York Times in July 2005 by the august Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline is “French Family Values,” and the thesis is that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values,” the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly.” On the Continent, claims Professor Krugman, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff—to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

  How can an economist make that claim without noticing that the upshot of all these “family friendly” policies is that nobody has any families? Isn’t the first test of a pro-family regime its impact on families?

  As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they don’t go to church and they don’t contribute to other civic groups, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair.

  So what do they do with all the time?

  Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: they regard capitalism red in tooth and claw as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. And in fairness some of their quasi-state corporations are very pleasant: I’d much rather fly Air France than United or Continental. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren’t Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got? Their pop culture is more American than it’s ever been. Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies. Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a swell idea. It’ll come in very useful for large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015.

  “When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do,” writes Charles Murray in In Our Hands, “ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.” The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into “lowest-low fertility,” where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912—before record collections, or even teenagers, had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV packages, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It’s a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

  FAMINE

  In 2005, responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany was reported to be considering the introduction of a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of the media group Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government—and, if polls are to be believed, the German people—believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

  Great. At least the appeasers of the 1930s did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the new. If you want the state of the Continent in a nutshell, consider this news item from the south of France, 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month. She was ninety-four when she croaked, so she’d presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: “Frenchman Lived with Dead Mother to Keep Pension.”

  That’s the perfect summation of Europe: welfare addiction over demographic reality.

  Think of the European Union as that flat in Marseilles, and the Eutopian political consensus as the stiff, and lavish government largesse as that French guy’s dead mom’s benefits. Take the one-time economic powerhouse of the Continent—Germany—and pick any of the usual indicators of a healthy advanced industrial democracy: Unemployment? The highest since the 1930s. House prices? Down. New car registration? Nearly 15 percent lower in 2005 than in 1999. General nuttiness? A third of Germans under thirty think the United States government was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11.

  While the unemployment, real estate, and car sales may be reversible, that last number suggests the German electorate isn’t necessarily the group you’d want to pitch a rational argument to, especially about the urgent need either to give up the unsustainable welfare state or to produce a population capable of sustaining it—whether by immigration, trans-human science, or the old-fashioned method of a box of chocolates, the lights down low, and Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi. Here’s another statistic: 30 percent of German women are now childless. Among German university graduates, it’s over 40 percent.

  Yet according to polls taken before the inconclusive 2005 German elections, 70 percent of people want no further cuts in the welfare state and prefer increasing taxation on the very rich (whoever he is), and only 45 percent of Germans agreed that competition is good for economic growth and employment. It seems things are going to have to get a lot worse before European voters will seriously consider “necessary reforms” and “painful changes.” And the longer European countries postpone the “painful” reforms, the more painful they’re going to be.

  Almost every issue facing the European Union—from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities—has at its heart the same root cause: a huge lack of babies. Every day you get ever more poignant glimpses of the Euro-future, such as it is. One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that’s easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few peop
le flushing to keep the flow of waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructure expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand.

  There’s no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s, but the early indications are that it’s going to be expensive. One notes again that the environmentalists got it exactly backward: it’s not a question of “sustainable growth” but of sustainable lack of growth. And no advanced society has attempted that experiment till now. For purposes of comparison, by 2050 public pensions expenditures are expected to be 6.5 percent of GDP in the United States, 16.9 percent in Germany, 17.3 percent in Spain, and 24.8 percent in Greece. In Europe, we’re talking not about the prospect of having to reduce benefits but about so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu. American reformers like to say that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. The EU has a vastly greater problem: the entire modern European edifice is a Ponzi scheme. And the political establishments in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, et al. show no sign of producing leaders willing to confront it.