The New Old Europe

Several days ago I came across this post on the Economist’s “Certain ideas of Europe” blog: “Bye, bye, Europe?” The title and topic called to mind “It’s the demography, stupid,” a New Criterion article by Mark Steyn (later expanded into a bestseller called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It) which, when I was an editor at the magazine, generated so much traffic in one afternoon that it put the website out of commission for a week. Where The New Criterion’s readership seemed anxious—sometimes almost to the point of a fatalistic impatience—for forecasts about the shrinking of the European birthrate and consequent aging of Europe’s population, Economist subscribers are curiously blasé, if not outright pleased. Here’s a sampling of reactions to the news that “there are now more elderly Europeans than European children”: 

• Why the glum tone? Shrinking populations are good news for environments. Ultimately every environmental problem stems from an excess of people. Unfortunately, growing populations elsewhere in the world will probably obliterate all of the quixotic measures Europeans are making now to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions. But regionally, a long-term fall in population will help overcrowded European countries reclaim space for wilderness and wildlife in lands that have been chopped, ploughed, and engineered into oblivion over the past several centuries.

• [T]he link between population and economic strength can perhaps be overstated. Sweden is doing very well with only 9 million people, and tiny Iceland (pop. 300,000) is one of the world’s richest countries per capita.

• Clearly, the values one attaches to traditional economic growth, nature and environment and power on the international scene determine one’s valuation of the maturing of populations. Since I value the environment and a comfortable way of life, my choice would be to work a bit longer, invest in my education and hope for a gradually shrinking population. Say, a fertility rate of 2 or just below.

• The Russians will be growing people in laboratories by the middle of the century. It’s really not as hard as it sounds. It will be one of those technologies only the Russians could pioneer—like laser eye surgery. I really don’t think I’m a lunatic for making this claim.

Though that last bit does have some intriguing Invasion of the Body Snatchers elements to it—not to mention some intimations of a Philip K. Dick-style derangement—the responses generally show a surprising lack of imagination. The environment? The economy? Is that really all there is to worry us about a people and, more to the point, a culture in decline? Unfortunately not, as the latest from the Netherlands reminds us. Both Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum report that the Dutch have revoked Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s security funding—as in security from murderous Islamists offended by her criticisms. (For more on Hirsi Ali, this interview is recommended.) Applebaum writes:

[I]n 2006, the Dutch government tried to revoke Hirsi Ali’s citizenship over an old immigration controversy, and why her neighbors went to court that year to have her evicted from her home (they claimed the security threat posed by her presence impinged upon their human rights). But although she did finally move to the United States, the argument continued in her absence. Last week, the Dutch government abruptly cut off her security funding, forcing her to return briefly to Holland.

The reasons given were financial, but there was clearly more to it. To put it bluntly, many in Holland find her too loud, too public in her condemnation of radical Islam. She doesn’t sound conciliatory, in the modern continental fashion. Compare her description of Islam as “brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women” with the German judge who, citing the Koran, in January told a Muslim woman trying to obtain a divorce from her violent husband that she should have “expected” her husband to deploy the corporal punishment his religion approves. Hirsi Ali herself says she is often told, in so many words, that she’s “brought her problems on herself.” Now the Dutch prime minister openly says he wants her to deal with them alone.

It’s difficult to discuss European demography and immigration without inviting accusations of racism, but this situation makes it clear that the issue isn’t where you’re from but what you believe. If more newcomers to Europe were like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, full of genuinely courageous enthusiasm for thought and change, we wouldn’t need books like Mark Steyn’s. But, as it stands, she’s a rarity, and one we’ll have to protect at any cost if we’re to have any hope of showing her enemies that we’re serious about defeating them.