The Century Ahead-predictions ?

THE CENTURY AHEAD

It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.

BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as
baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will
not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear
within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European
countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map
marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul
there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a
cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate.
Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for
real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is
on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save
at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in
your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least
one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest
of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary
impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which
Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which
Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse
over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic
of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you
don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues,
like cradle-to-grave welfare.

Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of
the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most
Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious
politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the
health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a
promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.





The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it
requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to
ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century
variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from
reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.
The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their
weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why
they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and
significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't
accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war
against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its
merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us.
There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule,
it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims
vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs.
Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs.
Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali.
Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about.
Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the
HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too
weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military,
they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World
War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over
some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the
smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the
battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag
things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam
inherits by default.





That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As
a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide,
not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world"
right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion,
secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb.
Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that
it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital
of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires
is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I
would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to
the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but
an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to
learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead
of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your
holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American
spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to
live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential
piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about
every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush
did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom
did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario
didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce
him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe
there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in
gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the
Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he
couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship
minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great
insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games.
So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved
imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's
reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial
government does not see them as the enemy."

Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set
the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light
changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new
definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release
from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In
most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to
deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a
purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of
Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic
of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia
summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim
Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist
Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along.
In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister
Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness
Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic
fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist
ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."


Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal
fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist
upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is
something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure
that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance
is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is
intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the
highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays
and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that,
but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of
pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS
pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so
9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects
of the multicultural agenda.

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to
Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son
and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was
the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al
Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the
Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror.
Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being
judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of
things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after
killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at
Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in
Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani
forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in
this war!

In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was
paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital
in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could
enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian,
and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm
demanding my rights."





As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the
circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he
providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in
fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light
Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been
participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the
Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side.
Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on
the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate
his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the
Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a
Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to
disagree."
That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which
side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just
tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime
minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have
said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are
disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health
care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of
convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to
tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his
reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of
the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western
leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on
his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and
conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups
persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets:
The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the
capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that
while they could never win militarily, they also could never be
defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is
that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first
truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and
they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see
them off.

We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and
we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just
a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob could
rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not unlikely in
certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the
ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key
responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly
parents--has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen
and the state. At some point--I would say socialized health care is a
good marker--you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade a
citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In
National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford
always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A
government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to
take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long
before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you
want still isn't big enough to get you to give anything back. That's
what the French and German political classes are discovering.





Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held
out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about
taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the Nigerians,
why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and
New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a
prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk,"
it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the
clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy
worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's
bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,"
you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going
belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's
why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with
the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of
"societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society
collapses because it chops down its trees.

Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the
trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One
way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry
about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to
more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in
return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics
of the gen In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb,"
the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world
will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to
starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to
Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of
gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum
by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.





None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out
of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of
the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest
country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's
dying--its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from
terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the
perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote,
"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and
does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30 years
on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated
time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the United Nations
Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70 percent
of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species. . . .
More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95
percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems . . . 25
percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be
extinct . . ."

Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian
headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."

Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the
world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn
good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the
Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of
their natural habitat.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions,
deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's
worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that
aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we
should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls
for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real,
remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our
future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right
now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in
the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down
the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese
enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about
First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral,
primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a
threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the
peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World.
Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and
next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in
Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at
Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big
globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was
80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam
practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to
the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .





What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and
pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its
culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the
nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in
2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026
(or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger
Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies
around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than
the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for
merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any
smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that:
the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan
6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and
you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement
rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79,
Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below
replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the
death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half
replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every
generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%,
Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends
suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of
the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest
birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.
By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more
Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of
Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever
been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going
out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is
that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election
results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that,
while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're
unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their
government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a
generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously
reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a
proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's
presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the
average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The
average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his
American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain
electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and
the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to
allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S.
military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated
European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could
concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's
problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose
fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created
NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the
Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been
absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly
surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them.
In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent
are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening
of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a
primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are
declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may
decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the
age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups
that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage.
Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their
so-called population explosion was really a massive population
adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000,
the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim
world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world
declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over
20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of
the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants
are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but
the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your
car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff
in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet
and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty
much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald
statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of
the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they
were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then
and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having
taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or
the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries
(Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing
religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend
religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having
consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent
after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but
the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world.





What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the
one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will
find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M.
Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track
record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the
real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal
pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America.
But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their
demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim
lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings
for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years.
The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows
a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You
don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually
there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly,
self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all
our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr.
Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from
the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the
West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children
has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the
Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half
a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as
an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet
Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that
East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987
there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin
Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents,
so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official
described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional
societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature.
Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future,
as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great
majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is
that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not,
they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than
it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the
permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now
know that it's suicidally so.

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at
a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the
EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much
everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a
shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook
is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is
rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next
couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the
EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be
watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American
network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a
childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is
laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans,
and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan
faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline,
the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to
climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by
Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by
Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax
rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and
we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked: "As
Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but,
in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?"





Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled
power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance
endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players
in the world today--Australia, India, South Africa--and in dozens of
island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes
its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People's
Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from
the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time
derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who
took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing
to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history
triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent
than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the
West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If
European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the
populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc.,
then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU
will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle
East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As
things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population
growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in
its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its
political character?





This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely
on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites
and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with
Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or
abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance
will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully
intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the
West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic
view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of
Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim
world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to
choose," in any sense.
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley
Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush
off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White
Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose,"
Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows
far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women
marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might
like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be
unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations
in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"

Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron
Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.
But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised
Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."

Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost
all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to
France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum on
the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy
that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book
"The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of
the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are
at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive
human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist
course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by
fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."

Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft
out there.

Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western
liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there
will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a
generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what
proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate.
But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population
believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70%
of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population
believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it
becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90%
of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.

Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives"
have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty
and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true,
it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day
after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British
Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a
population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding
group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more
fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims
within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in
more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the
survival of the "modern world"?

Not good.

"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very
few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint
of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen
to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the
dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is
whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are
reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography,
stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What
do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.

Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for The New
Criterion, in whose January issue this article appears.