Decline & fall?

Tuesday, 5th May 2009

As he's one of the few American conservatives who seems to have a clue about life on this side of the water, I'd been looking forward to getting my hands on Christopher Caldwell's new book on Europe, Islam and immigration. That said, the review by historian Mark Mazower in Caldwell's own paper, the FT, is less than glowing:

His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an “adversary culture”, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat. He fails, however, to deliver the Burkean tour de force implied by his title.
Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and “non-natives” as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam. But the best case of “white flight” he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims.

Mazower concludes:

No question about it: immigration is one of the key issues facing contemporary Europe. But if you want a good guide to the debate, this is not your book: it is too unhinged, too doggedly provocative, for that. Yet the cultural historian of the future may find it valuable nonetheless, for it reveals the beleaguered cast of mind commonplace among some Americans at the moment when the waning of Washington’s power became evident and a new epoch in world history opened up.