After the Fall

October 24, 2011
A feckless, economically stagnant, ethnically fractious mess is the verdict rendered in this gloomy critique of European social democracy. Framing Europe’s debt crisis, austerity, and rioting as a vindication of his forecasts in The Last Days of Europe, historian Laqueur blames them on intractable long-term pathologies. Europe’s economic union, he argues, will fail without a stronger political union that nationalist loyalties make unlikely. Rising costs will undermine its lavish welfare states. Militarily weak and dependent on foreign energy supplies, Europe will be politically marginalized in world affairs. Underlying all these problems, the author contends, are the twin demographic crises of falling birthrates and—his most insistent concern—a swelling Muslim immigrant minority that, he contends, refuses to assimilate to Europe’s liberal mainstream and would rather join street gangs than get an education. Laqueur harps on these themes in a series of rambling disquisitions interspersed with ruminations on the fall of civilizations. (He believes that cohesive, authoritarian Asian cultures will supersede a continent mired in a slack, permissive liberal relativism.) Laqueur’s Euro-pessimism is ideologically charged and sometimes overstated, but it has enough nuance and realism to pose a bracing challenge to social democratic orthodoxies.

November 1, 2011
Laqueur (Harvest of a Decade: Disraelia and Other Essays, 2011, etc.), the chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, draws on past history and current insight to present a profile of the current European crisis. The author is more concerned with broader questions of demography and culture, assimilation of immigrants and new approaches to education and social policy than to questions of political and economic integration. Noting that the continent is at a turning point, he writes that an aging population is not reproducing in sufficient numbers to secure its future and has not been for most of the past century. The second- and third-generation immigrants are not sufficiently qualified to maintain the technical and scientific levels of expertise have characterized European production and living standards. Laqueur emphasizes the importance of finding new methods of assimilating immigrant populations, and he does not agree with the view that Islam is one of the principal problems. He specifies the circumstances of their immigration and provides detailed observations of current social activities to show the particular problems that immigrants bring with them from their countries of origin, and how current policies in education and religion have succeeded or failed. Given the reality that Russia is facing the same kinds of problems and that immigration is a concern in the U.S., whatever solutions are found will be globally significant. A clear guide to understanding and solving a profound set of problems.

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September 1, 2011

Director of London's Institute of Contemporary History, Laqueur foreshadowed Europe's current difficulties six years ago with the publication of The Last Days of Europe. Here he shows what's roiling the waters now, from dependence on imported oil and gas to the absence of a common foreign policy. Definitely consider for high-end readers.

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