Is “Old Europe” Doomed?
by Theodore Dalrymple
February 6th, 2006
The late Professor Joad, a popularizer of philosophy rather than a philosopher in the true sense, used to preface his answer to any question by saying, “It depends on what you mean by…”—in this case, “doomed.”
The word “doomed” implies an ineluctable destiny, against which, presumably, it is vain for men to struggle. And this in turn implies a whole, contestable philosophy of history.
Historical determinism has two sources: first the apparent ability of historians, who of course have the benefit of hindsight, to explain any and all historical events with a fair degree of plausibility, even if their explanations of the same events differ widely, thus giving rise to the impression that if the past was determined, the future must be determined also; and second the tendency of people to assume that current statistical or social trends will continue, or in other words that projections are the same as predictions. One has only to consider the exponential growth of a bacterium on a Petri dish, which if continued would mean that the entire biosphere would soon consist solely of that organism, to realize that projections do not necessarily give rise to accurate predictions.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that a pall of doom does currently overhang Europe. In retrospect, the Twentieth Century may be considered Europe’s melancholy, long withdrawing roar (to adapt Matthew Arnold’s description of the decline of religion). And just as, according to Disraeli, the Continent of Europe would not long suffer Great Britain to be the workshop of the world, so the world would not, and did not, long suffer the Continent of Europe to dominate it, economically, culturally and intellectually. Europe’s loss of power, influence and importance continues to this day; and however much one’s material circumstances may have improved (just take a look at photographs of daily life in France or Britain in the 1950s and compare them to daily life there today), it is always unpleasant, and creates a sense of deep existential unease, to live in a country perpetually in decline, even if that decline is merely relative.
Combined with this is the fact that most European populations experience a profound feeling of impotence in the face of their own immovable political elites. (My wife, who was born in Paris 56 years ago, cannot remember any period of her life from adolescence onward when M. Chirac was not a prominent figure in French public life, and had he not died after a mere fifty years at or near the top of the greasy pole, the same might have been said of M. Mitterand.) This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.
The principal motor of Europe’s current decline is, in my view, its obsession with social security, which has created rigid social and economic systems that are extremely resistant to change. And this obsession with social security is in turn connected with a fear of the future: for the future has now brought Europe catastrophe and relative decline for more than a century.
What exactly is it that Europeans fear, given that their decline has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in absolute material well-being? An open economy holds out more threat to them than promise: they believe that the outside world will bring them not trade and wealth, but unemployment and a loss of comfort. They therefore are inclined to retire into their shell and succumb to protectionist temptation, both internally with regard to the job market, and externally with regard to other nations. And the more those other nations advance relative to themselves, the more necessary does protection seem to them. A vicious circle is thus set up.
In the process of course, the state is either granted or arrogates to itself (or, of course, both) ever-greater powers. A bureaucratic monster is created that takes on a life of its own, that is not only uneconomic but anti-economic, and that can be reformed only at the cost of social unrest that politicians naturally wish to avoid. Inertia intermittently punctuated by explosion is therefore the most likely outcome.
Hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen, despairing of finding a job at home where about a quarter of people in their twenties are unemployed, have crossed the Channel to take advantage of Britain’s relatively flexible labor market: which, however, the British government is in the process of destroying by means of ever-closer regulation in the French centralist style.
Since coming to power, the current British government has increased public expenditure enormously, such that the British tax burden now exceeds that of Germany, which itself is a very heavily taxed economy. The ostensible purpose of this expenditure has been to improve public services while serving the cause of social justice, a rhetoric that the public has hitherto believed; the hidden purpose, or at least effect, has been to create administrative jobs on an unprecedented scale, whose principle function consists of obstruction of other people as they try to create wealth, and to bring into being a political clientele dependent upon government ‘largesse’ (half the British population is now in receipt of government subventions as part or the whole of their incomes). Not only will this lead to economic disaster, but it naturally results in the psychology succinctly described by Hilaire Belloc in the moral of his cautionary tale about Albert who was eaten by a lion at the zoo when he strayed from the nurse who took him there:
And always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
The dependent population does not like the state and its agents, indeed they hate them, but they soon come to fear the elimination of their good offices even more. They are like drug addicts who know that the drug that they take is not good for them, and hate the drug dealer from whom they obtain their drug, but cannot face the supposed pains of withdrawal. And what is true of Britain is true, with a few exceptions, everywhere else in Europe.
In the name of social justice, personal and sectional interest has become all-powerful, paralyzing all attempts to maximize collective endeavor. Nowhere is this clearer than in France, where a survey published in the left-wing newspaper, Liberation, showed that three times as many people had warm feeling towards socialism as towards capitalism. (The ambition of three quarters of French youth is to be employed by the state). Yet French defense of personal and sectional interest is so ferocious that it renders reform almost impossible, at least without violence on the streets. Workers in the French public transport system, who enjoy privileges that would have made Louis XIV gasp, strike the moment that any reduction in them is even mooted, all in the name of preserving social justice as represented by those privileges, despite the fact that striking brings misery and impoverishment to millions of their fellow-citizens, and their privileges are bankrupting the state. The goal of everyone is to parasitize everyone else, or to struggle for as large a slice of the economic cake as possible. No one worries about the size of the cake itself. Apres moi, le deluge has become the watchword not of the king alone, but of the entire population.
France is perhaps worse in this respect than most other European countries, but it is not in an entirely different class or category from them. It hardly needs pointing out that the rest of an increasingly competitive and globalized world is not going to be sensitive to the same concerns as European governments; and while it is possible that European countries will nevertheless survive or pay their way economically by finding niche markets, this would represent a marginalization of a continent accustomed to thinking of itself as the centre of the world. Of course, marginalization is not the same as doom, unless you believe that being important in the world is itself all-important.
But there are other threats to Europe. The miserabilist view of the European past, in which achievement on a truly stupendous scale is disregarded in favor of massacre, oppression and injustice, deprives the population of any sense of pride or tradition to which it might contribute or which might be worth preserving. This loss of cultural confidence is particularly important at a time of mass immigration from very alien cultures, an immigration that can be successfully negotiated (as it has been in the past, or in the United States up to the era of multiculturalism) only if the host nations believe themselves to be the bearers of cultures into which immigrants wish, or ought to wish, to integrate, assimilate, and make their own.
In the absence of any such belief, there is a risk that the only way in which people inhabiting a country will have anything in common is geographical; and civil conflict is the method in which they will resolve their very different and entrenched conceptions about the way life should be lived. This is particularly true when immigrants are in possession, as they believe, of a unique and universal truth, such as Islam in its various forms often claims to be. If the host nation is so lacking in cultural confidence that it does not even make familiarity with the national language a condition of citizenship (as has been until recently the case in Great Britain), it is hardly surprising that integration does not proceed very far.
The problem is multiplied when a rigid labor market is capable of creating large castes of people who are unemployed and might well remain so for the whole of their adult lives. To the bitterness caused by economic uselessness will then be added, or rather be multiplied by, the bitterness of cultural separation. In the case of Islam this is particularly dangerous, because the mixture of an awareness of inferiority on the one hand, and superiority on the other, is historically a very combustible one. Latin Americans have felt it towards the United States, Russians towards Western Europe, Chinese and Japanese towards Europe and America, no doubt among many other examples.
Doom or further decline is not inevitable, however, though avoidance of it requires active effort. The auguries are not good, not only because of the political immobilism that elaborate systems of social security have caused in most European countries, but because of the European multinational entity that is being created against the wishes of the peoples of Europe (insofar as they can be gauged).
The European Union serves several purposes, none of which have much to do with the real challenges facing the continent. The Union helps Germans to forget that they are Germans, and gives them another identity rather more pleasing in their own estimation; it allows the French to forget that they are now a medium sized nation, one among many, and gives them the illusion of power and importance; it acts as a giant pension fund for politicians who are no longer willing or able successfully to compete in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, and enables them to hang on to influence and power long after they have been rejected at the polls; and it acts as a potential fortress against the winds of competition that are now blowing from all over the world, and that are deeply unsettling to people who desire security above all else.
Apocalyptic thought is curiously pleasurable. Doom is too strong a word, in my view; I think it would be more accurate to say that Europe is sleepwalking to further relative decline. But we should also modestly remember that the future is, ultimately, unknowable.
February 6th, 2006 at 11:21 am
[…] Cato Unbound has an excellent piece by Theodore Dalrymple asking is Old Europe doomed? Dalrymple raises a very interesting point about the nature of contemporary European society: […]
February 6th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Europe’s Melancholy, Long Withdrawing Roar
Theodore Dalrymple has a typically superb essay titled, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” on the CATO Unboard Website. If you’d like to place the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006, and The Great Burning Citroen Crisis of 2005 into context, this is…
February 6th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Is “Old Europe” Doomed
A friend, which I wish will start blogging one day, sent me link to Theodore Dalrymple’s essay: Is "old Europe” doomed . In this short essay Dalrymple point directly into the issues that leading to Europe’s decline, or in my…
February 7th, 2006 at 10:04 am
[…] Which is why I am also linking you to this superb essay from Cato Unbound. You will thank me after you read it. You will also want to order the book, so I’ve made it easy for you! […]
February 7th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER
President Bush phoned the Danish Prime Minister today to express support: U.S. President George W. Bush called Denmark’s prime minister on Tuesday to voice support for the Nordic country, whose embassies are the target of violent protests over cartoon…
February 8th, 2006 at 4:32 am
Europe’s Woes
I just finished reading a very well-written essay titled “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” published by the libertarian Cato Institute. Incidentally, just a few days ago, I was reading an article in the latest issue of The Economist that explored in some d…
February 9th, 2006 at 2:49 am
[…] Theodore Dalrymple has a fascinating essay titled, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” Let’s hope not. How its leaders deal with this cartoon mess will provide some important clues. […]
February 9th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Thursday’s Daily News
The Currency of Corruption - Rep. Jeff Flake, NY Times Pork Is Unhealthy - Brian Riedl, National Review GOP Strategy Portrays Dems as the ‘Angry Left’ - Associated Press Health Savings Accounts Work - Michael Cannon, Cato Walloping Wal-Mart…
February 10th, 2006 at 11:08 am
[…] CATO | Dalrymple::Is “Old Europe” Doomed? […]
February 10th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
[…] Die westlichen Gesellschaften scheinen derzeit tatschlich auf einem Pfad zu sein, der schwerlich in Richtung mehr Freiheit fhrt. Die Rumsfeld’sche Formel vom sklerotischen Alten Europa bewahrheitet sich mindestens wirtschaftlich zusehends, wiewohl die neuen Europer durch ihren ungestillten Hunger noch einen Schuss Vitalitt in die EU einbringen - wie lange noch? Wohl nur bis das bestehende Wohlstandsgeflle ausgeglichen ist. […]
February 12th, 2006 at 7:33 am
[…] If you haven’t already seen the link via LGF or The Anchoress, you ought to take a look at Theodore Dalrymple’s article, which asks Is Europe Doomed? His answer is a qualified affirmative. He expects decline to continue. […]
February 12th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
[…] Negli Usa salta fuori questo saggio del Cato Institute che si chiede se l’Europa come la conosciamo sia destinata a fare una brutta fine (semplificazione estrema, meglio dargli una letta), in Russia sono convinti che entro 50 anni il vecchio continente sar ricoperto per met da ghiaccio eterno. […]
February 13th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Is “Old Europe” Doomed?
Apocalyptic thought is curiously pleasurable. Doom is too strong a word, in my view; I think it would be more accurate to say that Europe is sleepwalking to further relative decline. But we should also modestly remember that the future is, ultimately,…
February 13th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
[…] Several American writers have recently damned Europe, insisting a “pall of doom” hangs over the continent [Link]. The criticisms many of them make (Theodore Dalrymple, Michelle Malkin, Fareed Zakaria and more) are quite revealing as to how Americans and some others from both political leanings think of Europe. […]
February 13th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
[…] This is not encouraging. Neither is this. PermaLink […]
February 13th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
FEAR OF CHANGE
Anne Applebaum has commented on Theodore Dalrymples piece on Europes doomed future by listing three aspects political leadership, embracing the new Europe and stop being obsessed with the US that she believes are currently holding Europe back…
February 14th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
QotD: Sclerotic States
In the name of social justice, personal and sectional interest has become all-powerful, paralyzing all attempts to maximize collective endeavor. Nowhere is this clearer than in France, where a survey published in the left-wing newspaper, Liberation, s…
February 15th, 2006 at 6:05 am
[…] Europa in declino. Dopo Theodore Dalrymple (su Cato Unbound), Timothy Smith, Charles Kupchan, Anne Applebaum e Fareed Zakaria (anche su Newsweek) dice la sua anche Daniel Drezner: Europe’s decline does not mean it’s influence in international institutions will automatically fall. International organizations have notoriously sticky rules, and those rules benefit those who were powerful in the past. By any measure of power, Britain and France have no business being permanent members of any Security Council that keeps India or even Japan out. Yet there they stay, for two reasons: 1) It’s costly to change the rules; and 2) The U.S. doesn’t want to change them. For all of the guff about transatlantic tensions, the U.S. is still keenly aware that it has more shared prferences with Europe than with other regions of the globe. Until that changes, European countries may decline, but they won’t fall. […]
February 15th, 2006 at 6:27 am
[…] Europa-Debatte. Fareed Zakaria, Chef von Newsweek International, hat einen kurzen Essay über den “Niedergang und Fall Europas” geschrieben (mittlerweile von der Washington Post als Op-Ed nachgedruckt). Und auf Cato Unbound fragt Theodore Dalrymple: “Ist ,Alteuropa’ verloren?”. Dazu gibt es “Reaction Essays” unter anderem von Charles Kupchan und der Washington Post-Kolumnistin Anne Applebaum. Applebaum schreibt: Yet on reading the “Is Old Europe Doomed” essay, I was reminded of a recent conversation with a friend, another American Europhile, now resident in East Asia. Sadly, we agreed that the Europeans who bash “wild” Anglo-Saxon capitalism, who believe America is an unregulated jungle, and who feel smug and safe within their secure welfare states are deeply, deeply deluded. They haven’t yet realized that the economic and social challenge presented by the successful societies of Asia is hundreds of times more dangerous to their way of life than the caricature they’ve created of the challenge presented by the United States, a country which is nearly as over-regulated as their own. If the rise of China continues apace, I’m afraid Dr. Dalyrymple’s final phrase—that Europe is “sleep-walking to further relative decline—might even be too mild. At some point, it’s also possible that Europe’s decline, for all the reasons he listed, might even cease to be relative. […]
February 15th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Is “Old Europe” Doomed?
February 16th, 2006 at 7:45 am
[…] El asunto tratado en Febrero no puede ser más actual ni más acuciante: «¿Esta condenada la Vieja Europa?» […]
February 16th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
[…] Glad you asked! If you have yet to check out the February issue of Cato Unbound, which asks, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” then now’s a great time to catch up. All the formal replies to Theodore Dalyrmple’s lead essay are in, and the informal conversation has just begun with a response by Dalrymple. (Choice line: “Multiculturalism is not couscous: it is the stoning of adulterers . . .”) […]
February 16th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Darymple: Unfortunately I have to Disagree
Rare is the view of Europe more pessimistic than mine. However Theodore Darymple comes awfully close. Darymple, wrote an answer to the question Is Old Europe Doomed? I would call Europes love of the welfare state as the symptom, not the disease.
February 17th, 2006 at 9:52 am
QotD: Social Assistance
The dependent population does not like the state and its agents, indeed they hate them, but they soon come to fear the elimination of their good offices even more. They are like drug addicts who know that the drug…
March 6th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Buy Danish Campaign is working! Il Jyllands-Posten rileva che la campagna per comprare i prodotti danesi sta funzionando alla grande, e ciò non era previsto. Insomma: anti-boicottaggio batte boicottaggio 3 a 0 Theodore Dalrymple: Is "Old Eu
March 16th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
[…] I was quite impressed by most of Murray’s arguments, but I think the feasibility question is the most problematic. Murray thought that while the plan won’t be implemented anytime soon, it was somewhat “inevitable” that reform of the welfare state would move in his direction, because more and more people would recognize that it is “not in government’s inherent capability to solve complex problems” and that mutual assistance works far better. While one might wish this to be true, the experience in Western Europe suggests that voters may stick to the well-trod path of handouts even when all events around them suggests that their social model is on the verge of collapse without reform. How long will entitlement spending explode before Americans come to their senses? Then again, Murray has shown results in the past. […]
March 21st, 2006 at 12:58 pm
[…] Old Europe is dying. For 200 years philosophers and thinkers have predicted the failure of Democracy. Not from the slow creeping encroachment of civil liberties, but because of the steady natural drift of progress socialism. Once a people learn that democracy can be use as a vehicle for wealth redistribution; the unstoppable decline of freedom will have already begun. While civil liberties are often taken away and returned based on the ebb and flow of a counties appetite for conflict; economic liberties (arguably the more important of the two freedoms), once taken away, are almost never returned. […]
March 21st, 2006 at 6:17 pm
[…] “Combined with this is the fact that most European populations experience a profound feeling of impotence in the face of their own immovable political elites…This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out”. –Theodore Dalrymple, Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute who lives in France, writting on, Is “Old Europe” Doomed? at Cato Unbound Filed under: General, Economics, Europe by HispanicPundit | […]
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:32 pm
credit bureau
odorously argues:magnificent!disassemble perpetrations Orientalization.antisera free credit http://free-credit.credit-report-support.com/
May 26th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
[…] When I saw this I was ready to write a long post of rant. I was ready to discuss the danger to the way we are thinking enforcing political correctness newspeak . I was also looking for references about the decline and the loss of confidence in the western culture. I joined Ron’s wonder if the education system in Michigan is in such good condition that nothing left to solve but the use of the words “America” and “Americans”. But then I decided to check the actual decision and found that such decision doesn’t exist : “In an opinion piece crafted by Michael Warren in today’s Detroit News, the former State Board of Education member incorrectly states that the Michigan Department of Education has “ordered that our hard-working teachers not utter the words.” No such edict has gone out to school teachers across Michigan, nor will one, said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan. He explained that an independent association of Social Studies educators has discussed the issue of official U.S. documents or titles, but that any recommendations regarding changes in school curriculum have not even made it to his desk for review.” Oh well, it could have been such a good rant… Culture, Education, freedom of speech, Politicaly Correct […]
June 17th, 2006 at 11:42 am
[…] In an essay entitled Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?, Theodore Dalrymple accurately describes current British government and society: Since coming to power, the current British government has increased public expenditure enormously, such that the British tax burden now exceeds that of Germany, which itself is a very heavily taxed economy. The ostensible purpose of this expenditure has been to improve public services while serving the cause of social justice, a rhetoric that the public has hitherto believed; the hidden purpose, or at least effect, has been to create administrative jobs on an unprecedented scale, whose principle function consists of obstruction of other people as they try to create wealth, and to bring into being a political clientele dependent upon government ‘largesse’ (half the British population is now in receipt of government subventions as part or the whole of their incomes). Not only will this lead to economic disaster, but it naturally results in the psychology succinctly described by Hilaire Belloc in the moral of his cautionary tale about Albert who was eaten by a lion at the zoo when he strayed from the nurse who took him there: And always keep a-hold of nurse, For fear of finding something worse. […]
August 30th, 2006 at 9:57 am
[…] It is the same weakening of the spirit that Dalrymple pointed to discussing Europe internal situation that also server the Iranian regional and gloabl strategy. […]
September 21st, 2006 at 9:53 am
[…] Slightly o/t, but it’s another idea the press is missing: Theodore Dalrymple’s examination on whether Old Europe is in extremis […]
October 11th, 2006 at 7:30 am
[…] Brit toffs unashamedly display amazing ignorance of North America. I supposes it is harmless if it helps them forget their own massive societal failures. […]
July 6th, 2007 at 3:55 am
[…] That poor, backward, traditional place called Europe has been a popular topic in the last couple of days, in the official media as well as in several blogs. Dan Drezner’s blog and Crooked Timber both have a post on this issue, mainly responding to Cato Unbound (Is Old Europe Doomed?) and Fareed Zakaria’s piece in the Washington Post (The Decline And Fall Of Europe). Friday, the International Herald Tribune contributed to the discussion, claiming that Europe’s economies are in the doldrums. […]
September 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Is “Old Europe” Doomed?
Another excellent essay from Theodore Dalrymple….