Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West
By Christopher Caldwell
Allen Lane £14.99, 376 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Between 1850 and 1930 more than 50m emigrants left Europe in what was easily the most intensive movement of peoples ever recorded – another 50m left China in the same period. After a pause for the depression and the second world war, the outflow continued before being reversed from the mid-1950s as a buoyant Europe sucked in workers. Today, there are roughly 15m migrants among the 370m inhabitants of the 15 west European members of the European Union and far more descendants of earlier immigrants as well.

Such figures never speak for themselves and what they signify depends on whom you ask. Sober-minded demographers (there are a few) point out that Europe’s foreign-born population is probably no higher as a proportion of the total than it was in the early 20th century while the immigrant inflow that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s appears to have slowed down.

But who wants to read sober-minded scholars? As EU population growth grinds to a halt, the continent is still over-represented in global terms as a destination for migrants, many of whom, unlike in the past, come from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And a lot of them are Muslims. The prospect of demographic apocalypse has always attracted Cassandras; about the only subject that is scarier is Islam. Put the two together, especially after 9/11, and you have a combustible mix.

Caldwell is an American journalist, an editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for this newspaper. He knows the banlieues and has talked to more than his fair share of extremists of all persuasions. But Reflections on the Revolution in Europe provides less an analysis than a call to arms to a continent supposedly already capitulating to the new enemy in its midst.

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.

Does Islam threaten European traditions of free speech? It is not fear of offending Muslim sensibilities that lies behind recent unprecedented efforts to criminalise scholarly interpretation. As Caldwell admits, Holocaust denial and debates about slavery, the legacy of empire and the Armenian genocide have been far more important catalysts for European legislators than anything to do with Islam. By contrast, the efforts he mentions by anti-racist or Muslim groups to get expressions of prejudice prosecuted have generally ended in judicial or legislative failure.

Nietzsche’s observation that all philosophy is disguised psychology is useful to bear in mind when seeking to understand why commentators such as Caldwell talk about Europe in such alarmist tones. They would say they have to because Europeans have been cowed into submission. Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls “beachheads” – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse “colonisation” of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a “project to seize territory”, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam. But this sinister fantasy has less to do with reality than with neo-conservative anxieties about the decline of the west.

As a concept the idea of the west has always had its expansively confident side. Yet for decades it also conveyed the fear of its own cultural and racial demise, a fear reflecting Europe’s massively weakened position in the world after 1945 and uncertainty whether the US possessed the self-confidence and political will to step in and take over.

The collapse of the USSR made people wonder what would happen with no shared enemy to keep the transatlantic partnership of the west intact. Then came 9/11 and the sharp divisions over Iraq and the war on terror that split the western alliance in its aftermath. One could trace these divisions back to profound disagreements that emerged between Europeans and Americans about the nature of international institutions, the rule of law and the path to peace in the Middle East. Preferring moral and cultural explanations to political ones, however, neo-cons attribute European dissension to a softening of the continent’s moral fibre, to burgeoning anti-Americanism and, as the ultimate cause of both, to the growing importance of Islam on the continent.

Of course in many ways, Islam ought to attract them – for at least in the stereotypical version presented here, Muslims believe in family, in honour, in fighting for one’s beliefs. Above all, they are united. Caldwell insists that talk of Islam’s diversity is beside the point. Behind the critique, one therefore detects a profound ambivalence: for all their primitivism, Muslims are, in fact, almost what Europeans should aspire to be. The truth, of course, is that generalities of this kind are not much use either in understanding Islam or in finding answers to complex social problems.

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.

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University. His ‘Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe’ (Allen Lane) won the LA Times Book Prize for History