Ed West Ed West

Is more multiculturalism really the cure for the EU’s problems?

Germany is on its feet again; the country’s answer to Ukip, Alternative Für Deutschland, made huge gains at the polls, winning a presence in three state assemblies. The shadow of Auschwitz looms over all European politics on the subject of immigration and race, but obviously more so in Germany, and many people are worried.

Their growth in popularity may have something to do with the chancellor’s decision to invite one million and counting people from the wider Middle East, in an gesture historians will probably see as the grandest act of folly of early 21st century history.

Some people are worried that, along with FN, Ukip and Trump, AfD are extremists who represent a threat to the established order. I was at a Brexit debate last night where one of the arguments made by the Remain side was that we needed to work more closely together to stop the likes of the AfD. By leaving the EU, it was argued, we would be flaming the forces of nationalism, and so instead we must do even more to support an internationalist, multicultural, liberal values-based project that breaks down borders.

In his book The Uses of Pessimism, Roger Scruton suggests that the modern universalism of the left comes from an older tradition of utopianism in which all the problems of the system can only be solved with more of the system.

The European Union, like Soviet Communism, is ‘an unachievable goal chosen for its abstract purity, in which differences are reconciled, conflict overcome and mankind soldered together in a metaphysical unity, can never be questioned, since in the nature of the case it can never be put to the proof. All the crimes committed on the way to it are deviations, perversions or betrayals, things that the ideal was designed to prevent.’

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