| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Europe | |
| WILL EURABIA MODERNIZE ISLAM? | |
| 2004-04-27 | |
| I find this article so weird,on so many levels. In Australia 80% of "refugees" are still on welfare 10 years after they arrive here. So how are they a lifeline to rescue the locals? Why will they be able to turn things around and do what the natives can’t? If anything, they will accelerate the downfall of Western Civilisation, so keep them out. Europe has gone through many increases and decreases in population over the last five hundred years, and they have never needed Islam to rescue them. For an article on why the doomsayers are wrong, see this The forecast isn’t all grim. There’s little doubt that Europe, including Britain, will fundamentally change during the next 50 years. But if it turns into what some commentators are calling "Eurabia," the change won’t necessarily mean the end of Western civilization. It need not mean regression to the Dark Ages, the theocratization of secular democracy, or the Islamicization of Christianity. On the contrary, it might bring about the much-needed modernization of Islam.
Nativist politicians such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, the late Pim Fortuyn in Holland, or commentators like Oriana Fallaci in Italy, may continue to be in the news, increase their following and even score valid points, but they’ll be butting their heads against a demographic stone wall. Even with continuing immigration, Europe’s taxpayers can only look forward to their steeply increasing taxes buying them steeply decreasing services. Without immigration, one EU taxpayer would soon have to support four or five EU pensioners -- or watch his parents build their last igloo, European-style. Continuing immigration, though, will likely lead to Eurabia. Immigrants tend to respond to their own demographic pressures, and Europe’s fastest growing neighbours today are -- to quote Niall Ferguson again -- "predominantly if not wholly Muslim." The question is, what will Eurabia lead to? The past is a good (though not infallible) guide to the future. European nations turned their essentially homogenous countries to U.S.-style immigrant societies after the Second World War for several reasons, one being the aftermath of empire. The law of unintended consequences caught up with Britain, France, Holland and Belgium. Their face-saving fictions -- such as "commonwealth" or "metropolitan France" -- obliged these ex-colonial powers to accommodate a reverse population flow from troubled or depressed regions of their former possessions. The trickle became a flood in the early 1960s as immigrants from North Africa, the Caribbean or the Spice Islands inundated the home countries, giving politicians like Enoch Powell grey hair. Another reason applied especially to countries like Germany that needed guest workers as their booming post-war economies quickly outpaced their decimated post-war labour forces. The guest workers’ own reason was that European societies -- even East European societies, after the Soviet collapse --were more attractive in terms of economic opportunities and social benefits, to say nothing of human securities and freedoms, than the prospective immigrants’ native societies. A final reason, no less important than the others, had to do with changing attitudes. Europeans started accepting immigrants for they had been dazzled by the American melting pot. In the euphoria that followed post-war prosperity, the seeming triumph of rationality and liberal ideals, people in Europe momentarily lost their fear of demographic realities along with many older concerns of the human condition, from scarcity to salvation. Many felt that such ancient quandaries were left buried under the rubble of empire, leaving them free to concentrate on individual self-realization, or new preoccupations from gender-equality to the environment. In practical terms, in addition to welcoming (or at least permitting) newcomers from such unfashionable addresses as Turkey or Algiers, Europeans expressed their new-found spirit of self-confidence by a) going to church less often; and b) having fewer babies. Both activities were replaced by driving more BMWs for longer distances on wider highways and (contradictory as this may seem) organizing more ecological conferences in stylish resorts. Nature is said to abhor a vacuum. It’s hardly surprising that the vacuum left by Europeans in fecundity as well as in religiosity was filled by the Muslim immigrants within four to five decades. In another 50 years mosques may outnumber churches in what by then will be Eurabia -- and, more importantly, believers may outnumber unbelievers. While there are more Christians than Muslims in the world -- about two billion as opposed to 1.3 billion -- nominal Christians far outnumber nominal Muslims. When only luxury cars increase and multiply in a region, the demographic outcome isn’t in doubt. What remains in doubt is what the demographic outcome might mean. Europe Islamicized may resemble the four young British Muslims in David Cohen’s Terror on the Dole, a news story recently published in the Evening Standard. The four eat chips with brown sauce while hoping that "Sheikh bin Laden" will bomb London ("I pray for it, I look forward to the day.") Other British Muslims in the same story dismiss such talk as "verbal diarrhea." Influences work both ways. China was never conquered because it Sinofied immigrants as well as invaders. Will Eurabia be the crucible of Islam’s progression from the Middle Ages to the 21st century? I don’t know, but just asking the question makes me feel better. | |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #4 The comparisons with US emigration show how uninformed this fellow is. Until recently the US made a pretty strong effort to assimilate our immigrants. As each wave came in the wave before it disappeared into the collective American culture. In Europe they had guest worker programs and other dodges to keep the immigrants seperate hoping I suppose that they would eventually leave when they earned enough money and the host country no longer needed them. So Germany has third generation immigrant Turks and Kurds who are not German citizens. In France the Algerians-French are all French citizens but they stay in enclaves away from the population. This is the worst-case scenerio and nothing like the US experience. If Europe wanted to revitalize themselves because of the aging crisis they should be forcing immigrants to become European, not changing European ways to accomidate immigrants. |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2004-04-27 3:41:48 PM |
| #3 The dangers of this are many, the benefits few. I think one of the problems with Islam is that you don't necessarily have to be more religious, you just have to do what the book tells you. Christianity and Judiasm have both gotten past that point, but Islam is still more about the letter than the spirit - and the letter is what's going to take us down unless we smash its world-covering ideals here and now. We allow them, but - well, Bernard Lewis said it best in The Crisis of Islam: "The democrats are of course at a disadvantage. Their ideology requires them, even when in power, to give freedom and rights to the Islamist opposition. The Islamists, when in power, are under no such obligation. On the contrary, their principles require them to supress what they see as impious and subversive activities. For Islamists, democracy . . . is a one-way road, on which there is no return, no rejection of the sovereignty of God, as exercised through His chosen representatives. Their electoral policy has been classically summarized as 'One man (men only), one vote, once.'" And that's what Europe gets to face. |
| Posted by: The Doctor 2004-04-27 3:24:56 PM |
| #2 well there's an optimist for ya! Talk about finding a silver lining in a dark cloud. Of course, I suppose it all depends on which side you look at it. If you look at it as a European who enjoyed the fruits of a free and modern society of the year 2000, perhaps reverting back to ...oh say the 17th Century...in order to pull your Muslim commrades up from the 13th Century - isn't such a great deal. but hey! Like this says, no need to see the glass half-empty. |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-27 1:21:32 PM |
| #1 Is this guy nuts? Islam will be the death of Europe, as it has been for every other civilization it has overrun. These people don't want to progress from the Middle Ages. In fact, they probably think the Middle Ages are a bit too complex. |
| Posted by: Infidel Bob 2004-04-27 12:12:04 PM |