Chapter 1

Rivers of Blood

The rights and wrongs of Enoch Powell—How much immigration is there?—Muslim immigration—Europe’s population problem—Civilization and decadence—Diversity is overrated—Can you have the same Europe with different people?

Western Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind. Mass immigration began—with little public debate, it would later be stressed—in the decade after the Second World War. Industries and government in Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia set up programs to recruit manpower to their booming postwar economies. They invited immigrants. Some of the newcomers took positions, particularly in heavy industry, that now look enviably secure and well-paid. But others worked in the hardest, most thankless, and most dangerous occupations that European industry had to offer. Many had been loyal colonial subjects, and had even borne arms for European powers.

Europe became a destination for immigration as a result of consensus among its political and commercial elites. Those elites, to the extent they thought about the long-term consequences at all, made certain assumptions: Immigrants would be few in number. Since they were coming to fill short-term gaps in the labor force, most would stay in Europe only temporarily. Some might stay longer. No one assumed they would ever be eligible for welfare. That they would retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, marketplaces, and mosques was a thought too bizarre to entertain.

Almost all of the assumptions with which mass immigration began proved false. As soon as they did, Europe’s welcome to the world’s poor was withdrawn—at first ambiguously, through the oratory of a few firebrand politicians in the 1960s, then explicitly through hard-line legislation against immigration in the 1970s. Decade in, decade out, the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end of our story. The revocation of Europe’s invitation to immigrants, no matter how explicit it became, did little to stem their arrival. As the years passed, immigration to Europe accelerated. At no point were Europeans invited to assess its long-term costs and benefits.

The rights and wrongs of Enoch Powell

On April 20, 1968, two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race riots that it sparked in Washington and other U.S. cities, the British Tory parliamentarian Enoch Powell made a speech at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham that has haunted the European political imagination ever since. Powell was talking about the arrival, modest up to that point, of “coloured” former colonial subjects, primarily from the Indian subcontinent but also from the Caribbean. At the time, this migration had changed the face of only a very limited number of urban neighborhoods. Powell implied that the long-term consequence would be ghettoes like the ones in America that were burning as he spoke. “We must be mad,” he said, “literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Citing the poet Virgil, Powell warned, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

Half a year later, in the course of an even more ominous speech to the Rotary Club of London, he warned that, should immigration proceed at the current pace,

the urban part of whole towns and cities in Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Home Counties would be preponderantly or exclusively Afro-Asian in population. There would be several Washingtons in England. From those whole areas the indigenous population, the people of England, who fondly imagine that this is their country and these are their home-towns, would have been dislodged—I have deliberately chosen the most neutral word I could find. And here for the first time this morning I offer a subjective judgement…The people of England will not endure it.

All British discussion of immigration since then has been, essentially, an argument over whether Enoch Powell was right. It has been a sterile argument because those who engage in it tend to mix up two senses of the word right—the moral sense and the factual sense. To say the Emancipation Proclamation is right means something different than to say the Pythagorean theorem is right. Powell’s remarks revealed a class-based split over which of these two kinds of rightness is the real business of politics. This split is a feature of all discussions of modern immigration in all countries.

Political elites focused on whether Powell was right morally. Even if most of the fears Powell appealed to were legitimate ones, and even if plenty of evidence can be mustered (such as his passion for India and for Indian languages) to show that Powell was not himself a racist, his speech can be defended against charges of bigotry only by splitting hairs. News coverage ran against him. Tory leader Ted Heath, Powell’s archrival within the party, forced Powell to resign his position as shadow defense minister. Morally, Powell was not right.

Popular opinion, though, focused on whether he was right factually. And in this sense, right he was, beyond any shadow of a doubt. Although at the time Powell’s demographic projections were much snickered at, they have turned out not just roughly accurate but as close to perfectly accurate as it is possible for any such projections to be: In his Rotary Club speech, Powell shocked his audience by stating that the nonwhite population of Britain, barely over a million at the time, would rise to 4.5 million by 2002. (According to the national census, the actual “ethnic minority” population of Britain in 2001 was 4,635,296.) At a speech during the 1970 election campaign, he told voters in Wolverhampton that between a fifth and a quarter of their city, of Birmingham, and of Inner London would consist of Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. (According to the 2001 census, Wolverhampton is 22.2 percent, Birmingham 29.6 percent, and Inner London 34.4 percent nonwhite.)

Ordinary Britons loved Powell’s Birmingham speech. He received literally vanloads of mail—100,000 letters in the ten days that followed, of which only 800 expressed disagreement. Yet if Powell was right that immigration would increase far beyond what an Englishman of 1968 would have considered tolerable, he was wrong to predict that Englishmen of the next generation would not tolerate it. Although blood has indeed flowed at times—a spate of racist murders of South Asians in the East End of London in the 1970s, a dozen major riots over the decades, and numerous terrorist plots, including the 7/7 transport bombings carried out by Islamist Englishmen of Pakistani descent in 2005—it has not made the rivers foam. What did Powell miss?

One thing he missed was shame. The dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was one of repentance for two historic misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism. It is true that Britain, uniquely among Western European countries, had no cause to feel penitence for having perpetrated, encouraged, or watched passively the outrages of fascism two and three decades before. Britain had, however, recently dissolved, or been chased from, the largest empire in the history of the world, which left most of its citizens feeling embarrassed and diffident. Powell was an exception. A lover of the old Empire, swept up in the romance of it, he had no ear for this dirge of repentance, and no sense that his contemporaries were hearing a different music.

When addressing Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants, postwar Europeans felt a sense of moral illegitimacy that deepened as the decades passed. The dominant mood was summed up in The March, a fictional movie that BBC 1 aired for “One World Week” in 1990. In it, a charismatic political leader called El-Mahdi leads a quarter of a million people out of a Sudanese refugee camp on a 3,000-mile march to Europe under the slogan “We are poor because you are rich”—a message the movie made little effort to contradict.

Even those who felt that such shame was misplaced were forced to admit its power. In The Camp of the Saints, the dark 1973 novel of the Frenchman Jean Raspail, a collection of philanthropists and activists incite a million underfed Indians to board a flotilla of rusty ships for Europe, with dire consequences, including the trampling to death of the well-wishers who rush to welcome the disembarking hordes. Raspail’s vision captures more of the complexity of the modern world than does The March. Political clashes are provoked not just by simple inequalities but by accidents, the vanity of intellectual elites, and the snowball effect of the mass media. What the BBC’s filmmakers saw as conscience, Raspail saw as a mix of cowardice and unintended consequences.

For Powell as for Raspail, mass migration into Europe was not a matter of individual migrants “looking for a better life,” as the familiar phrase goes. It was a matter of organized masses demanding a better life, a desire with radically different political consequences. “It is much nearer to the truth,” Powell said, “to think in terms of detachments from communities in the West Indies or India or Pakistan encamped in certain areas of England.” Detachments, encampments—these are military metaphors. Powell is wrong to use them. But even if immigrants are not acting collectively, individual decisions to migrate can, in an age of globalization, produce massive collective effects. As the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in 1992:

The free movement of capital brings the free movement of labor in its wake. With the globalization of the world economy, which has been fully achieved only in the very recent past, migratory movements will take on a new quality, too. Government-organized colonial wars, campaigns of conquest, and expulsions will most likely be replaced by molecular mass migrations.

If one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious.

How much immigration is there?

Europe is now, for the first time in its modern history, a continent of migrants. Of the 375 million people in Western Europe, 40 million are living outside their countries of birth. In almost all Western European countries, the population of immigrants and their children approaches or surpasses 10 percent. Even the historically poor and backward countries of peripheral Catholic Europe, such as Ireland (14.1 percent immigrant) and Spain (11.1 percent), have become crossroads. Between 2000 and 2005, Ireland’s foreign-born population was increasing at an average annual rate of 8.4 percent and Spain’s at (what follows is not a typographical error) 21.6 percent a year.

But we must make a sharp distinction. Much of this movement—the part that involves Europeans moving to other European countries—is not really immigration at all. It is a program of increased labor and residential mobility explicitly agreed to, through treaties, by the more than two dozen states that are part of the European Union. The EU’s members have pledged themselves to an “ever closer union.” The so-called “Schengen agreements,” ratified in the decade after 1985, permit free movement of residents across most of Europe’s internal borders, with no checks or passport controls.

It is not such a big deal that a third (37 percent) of Luxembourg’s residents were born abroad. Virtually all of them were born in the EU: Portugal, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy are the most important sending countries. Luxembourg is a charter member of the European Union and one of the most loyal. And a Pole who moves to Ireland—as about 63,000 have done since the turn of the century, to the point where 2 percent of the island’s population is Polish born—isn’t just moving out of one country and into another. He is moving around within a federation.

The EU is not unanimously loved in Europe, and movement between EU countries is not popular—78 percent of Irish people, for instance, want to reimpose restrictions on Eastern European immigration. Such mobility erodes national cultures that have shaped and comforted people for centuries and it does so no matter who is doing the moving. For instance, the Swedish sociologist Åke Daun has often written about how Swedes “like being like each other.” Most peoples do, and they have a harder time being so when their countries fill up with people from elsewhere. Preferences for cultural sameness are often about seemingly small matters—say, the pea soup that Swedes traditionally eat on Thursday or a national taciturnity so extreme that, in Sweden, according to Daun, “signaling in traffic is often considered an undesirable expression of aggression.” If you are among those Swedes who feel a warm glow when eating pea soup on Thursday or a slight unease when signaling on turns, then immigration can make your life a little bit crummier, because it disrupts those patterns. And this is so even if the immigrants are perfectly upstanding citizens from a neighboring country.

But immigration from neighboring countries does not provoke the most worrisome immigration questions, such as “How well will they fit in?” “Is assimilation what they want?” and, most of all, “Where are their true loyalties?”—culminating in a troubled “Where is this all heading?” Describing intra-European movements as “immigration” can be a useful debating trick for those who wish to short-circuit discussion of the problems of non-European immigration. (“Why are Moroccan slums in Amsterdam a problem, but not German retirement communities in Ibiza?”) In this sense, using the word immigration to describe intra-European movements makes only slightly more sense than describing a New Yorker as an “immigrant” to California. Movement between European countries does count as immigration for statistical purposes. But it is not what this book is about.

Muslim immigration

This book concerns a second type of immigration: immigration from non-European countries and cultures. To be more precise, it is about certain problems created by the desire of non-Europeans to settle in Europe for good: the problems of multiethnic and multicultural societies. There have always been Western European countries that contain multiple European peoples with distinct linguistic and cultural identities—Belgium, Britain, Finland, France, Spain, and Switzerland in particular. Intercontinental immigration on the present scale, however, is unheard of. And it is unpopular. In no country in Europe does the bulk of the population aspire to live in a bazaar of world cultures. Yet all European countries are coming to the wrenching realization that they have somehow, without anyone’s actively choosing it, turned into such bazaars.

In theory, any profoundly different culture could prove difficult to assimilate into European life. In practice, it is Islam that is posing the most acute problems. For 1,400 years, the Islamic and the Christian worlds have opposed one another, violently at times. We are living through one of those times. And yet, if immigration is somehow structurally or economically necessary to Europe—a proposition that will be examined more closely in the next chapter—it is from the overcrowded Muslim countries of Europe’s southern and southeastern perimeter that it is likely to come. Of course, such immigration already has come and is continuing to come.

Net migration into Europe from elsewhere is at record levels, at around 1.7 million new arrivals a year. Europe’s future peace and prosperity depend on how easily these newcomers (and their children and grandchildren) assimilate into European life. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe. At the turn of the twenty-first, there were between 15 and 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain.

The demographic “weight” of immigration in Europe is roughly what it is in the United States, making it tempting to compare Muslim immigration in Europe with Latin American immigration in the United States. Such a comparison obscures more than it illuminates. The cultural peculiarities of Latin American immigrants—aside from a different (European) first language, which they inevitably abandon for English by the second generation—are generally antiquated versions of American ones. Latinos have less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates, more frequent church attendance (still primarily Catholic, although with an impressive penetration of evangelical Protestantism), lousier diets, and higher rates of military enlistment than native-born Americans. In other words, Latino culture, in its broad outlines, is like the American working-class white culture of forty years ago. It is perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents. Mass Hispanic immigration can disrupt a few local habits, and the volume of the influx can cause logistical headaches for schools, hospitals, and local governments. But it requires no fundamental reform of American cultural practices or institutions. On balance, it may strengthen them.

Islam in Europe is different. Since its arrival half a century ago, Islam has broken—or required adjustments to or rearguard defenses of—a good many of the European customs, received ideas, and state structures with which it has come in contact. Sometimes the adjustments are minor accommodations to Muslim tradition—businesses eliminating the tradition of drinks after work, women-only hours at swimming pools, or prayer rooms in office buildings, factories, and department stores. Sometimes new laws are felt necessary, such as the French one that has the effect of banning the veil in schools.

Occasionally what needs adjustment is the essence of Europe. A theme that runs through the later chapters of this book is that, on top of its economic costs, immigration exacts a steep price in freedom. The multiculturalism that has been Europe’s main way of managing mass immigration requires the sacrifice of liberties that natives once thought of as rights. For instance, in most Western countries the surveillance of radical imams and mosques has been stepped up in the last decade. Such practices are easily (and sometimes cynically) criticized as putting people under surveillance just because they are Muslim. A regime of enhanced eavesdropping on everyone may become the path of least constitutional resistance. In countries where immigrant customs are held to repress women, intrusions into the domestic arrangements of all families have become more common. To take an example that we will return to in chapter 8, a Swedish cabinet minister has proposed national genital examinations of small girls as a means of combating the female circumcision common among a small minority of immigrants—the predominantly Muslim Somalis and other East Africans who began arriving in the 1990s.

European natives have become steadily less forthright, or more frightened, about expressing their opposition to immigration in public. But they express it in private, including to pollsters. It appears to be an objection not just to the arrival of new citizens but to multicultural society more generally. Only 19 percent of Europeans think immigration has been good for their countries. More than half (57 percent) say their countries have “too many foreigners.” The more immigration a country has had, the higher the antipathy to immigration grows: 73 percent of French people think their country has too many immigrants, as do 69 percent of the British. The argument is not over how much immigration Europeans desire but over how much they will tolerate.

Misgivings about immigration in the abstract are as nothing next to the misgivings about Islam in particular. Since September 11, 2001, worries about immigrants and their children as a fifth column have percolated to the surface in all European countries. Even before September 11, though, the polls mentioned above showed that the French are three times as likely to complain of “too many Arabs” in the country than of too many of anyone else. Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón of Madrid said in 2006, with reference to Islam, that his city “is not—and does not wish to be—multicultural.” The late Oriana Fallaci’s tirade against European Islam (The Rage and the Pride) became the bestselling nonfiction book in the history of Italy in 2002, selling over a million copies. In 2004 the Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis scoffed when he was asked by a German newspaper to predict whether Europe would be a superpower by the end of this century. “Europe,” he said, “will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb.”

Denmark has tightened immigration laws over the last decade largely because of alarming projections in the late 1990s that by 2020, 13.7 percent of Danes would have their roots in “authoritarian” countries and cultures. Since none of the countries in the EU is authoritarian, the word can be taken as a euphemism for non-European. That Europeans are most worried about immigrants of different races does not necessarily mean that racism is what motivates their worry. Their unease may come from a sense that ancestral grievances are easily reactivated, and nostalgia for clannish identities easily stoked. Such unease marks Europeans’ views of the Basques, the Irish, and other European peoples, and there is no reason it should not mark their views of recent immigrants. Muslim residents of Denmark traveled the world in an effort to inflame hatred against their country during the Cartoon Crisis of 2006, and Muslim British citizens have now plotted and carried out attacks on civilians, not just in their own country but in Israel as well. Islam may prove assimilable within Europe over the long term, but there is nothing inevitable about it.

Europe’s population problem

Whatever the mix in any individual country of European and non-European immigration, the second kind is growing, and is going to predominate. That is because Europeans are not having enough children. Whether due to prosperity, decadence, or some other factor of national morale, the birthrate of native Europeans has been plummeting for years, and is now at the lowest levels ever recorded in any major region of the world. The native-born population is dropping in virtually all of the EU states. In some of them, it is dropping precipitously.

Europeans commonly soft-pedal this difficulty. They say that demographers have been wrong in the past, and that one can know only roughly what the population of Europe is going to be twenty or thirty years from now. They are wrong. Europe could certainly experience a baby boom sooner or later, but in the short run, demography is about as exact as a social science can be. There is not necessarily any end to this process of demographic shrinkage, particularly now that small families have become a cultural norm. In Austria and Germany, for instance, women aged twenty to thirty-four believe the “ideal” family has 1.7 children. As Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues have pointed out, this is very close to the level at which a country falls into a “low-fertility trap” from which it is unlikely to emerge. For a society to remain the same size, the average woman has to have 2.1 children in a lifetime (the so-called “total-fertility rate”). All European countries except Muslim Albania are well below it. There is a “safe zone” above 1.6 children per woman, where population declines are gradual and easily reversed. Below that, population tends to collapse rather than decline. A society that maintains a 1.8 total-fertility rate will be 80 percent as large at the end of a century; a society with total fertility of 1.3 (Italy, Spain, Eastern Germany, and the Baltic nations are such societies) will fall to a quarter of its size. At current rates of decline, Italy’s native population will be half its current size by the middle of this century, little more than a generation from now.

On top of not having children, Europeans are old. Already a quarter of them are over sixty. In the heavily North African Paris suburb of Montfermeil, the children from the housing projects refer to the zone of detached houses occupied mostly by French natives, which they cross every day on their way to school, as la ville des vieux—the old people’s city. In many parts of Europe, young people tend to be of foreign descent. In Paris, when someone refers to a mugging by une bande des jeunes, a North African origin is often implied. Housing vacancies open up in places heavily populated with old people, and immigrants fill them, recapitulating at the level of European neighborhoods what is happening at the level of European civilization.

Since there is no European source of population growth, Europe can maintain its size and dynamism only by importing non-Europeans. In some European countries, the percentage of people who are either immigrants or the children of immigrants is bumping up toward a quarter. Of the 9 million people in Sweden, 1.5 million are either immigrants or their children. The same is true of 3 million of the 16 million Dutch—including two-thirds of the students in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. Projections are that by 2050, 29 percent of Dutch people will have at least one foreign parent. Some of these will be from other European countries, but most—about 2.7 million, or close to a fifth of the Dutch population—will be of non-Western background. These figures may underestimate the number of people of non-European descent, because some will be the children of Dutch-born Dutch citizens.

In 2050, Britain will have 7 million “nonwhites” even if migration comes to an absolute halt, according to the Oxford demographer David Coleman, and 16 million if migration continues at a “high” level of 108,000 per year. (But even this high level may underestimate immigration pressures. In the middle of the first decade of the century, Britain was receiving about 500,000 new immigrants—equivalent to 1 percent of its population—every year.) By midcentury in most of the major European countries, foreign-origin populations will be between 20 and 32 percent.

Some of this increase has to do with new arrivals, but much has to do with the wide gap in birthrates between European natives and non-European immigrants, which can take generations to close. In Turin, the northern Italian city that has suddenly, since the 1990s, become about 10 percent immigrant, immigrants account for 0.2 percent of the deaths and 25 percent of the births. A fifth of the children in Copenhagen, a third of the children in Paris, and half of the children in London are born to foreign mothers. French-born women have 1.7 children apiece, but foreign-born women in France have 2.8 children. Tunisians, Turks, and Moroccans average between 3.3 and 3.4, more than their counterparts in their home countries.

Europeans assume the rapid population growth among immigrant groups will stop. They have tended to place an almost religious faith in theories of “demographic transition,” which predict falling birthrates as people become more prosperous. According to such theories, when modern medicine, hygiene, and diet start arriving in a society, old people live longer and more young people survive to mating age—but long-standing habits of family formation are slower to change. The result is a massive surge in population for a generation or two. As modernity makes these societies more prosperous and better educated, however, and as a consumer society creates satisfactions that vie with those of child-rearing, a precipitous drop in fertility follows.

Sometimes this actually happens among immigrant groups. The “African Indians” who arrived in Britain from Kenya and Uganda in the late 1960s and early 1970s now have roughly the same birthrate as native-born Britons. But sometimes there is no such convergence. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, groups that have been in Britain even longer than the African Indians, still have birthrates far above the national average.

There are reasons Europe’s Third World immigrants, and particularly its Muslims, might not go through the same demographic transition that their Western hosts did. Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation. As the hadith saying has it: “Marry, for I will outnumber peoples by you” (Ibn Majah, 1:599). The late Yassir Arafat, considering the sevenfold increase in Palestinian population over one generation (from 450,000 in 1967 to 3.3 million in 2002), called the wombs of Palestinian women the “secret weapon” of his cause. Now, Arafat’s hostility to Israel is not matched by European Muslims’ hostility to Europe. But immigrants need not be the slightest bit hostile to the West, or its values, to question its squeamishness about child-bearing and -rearing. Along the road of European modernization (literacy, empowerment, individualism, and so on) lie the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and a high rate of anomie and self-loathing. What makes us so certain that that Europeanization is a road that immigrants will want to travel?

Civilization and decadence

Much European discussion of immigration, reasonable and unreasonable, reveals a bottled-up panic over the state of native European civilization. Whether Europe can, for the first time in its history, successfully accommodate non-European minorities will depend on whether natives and newcomers perceive Europe as a thriving civilization or a decadent one.

For optimists, the availability of tortillas, Korans, and saris in the continent’s major cities is evidence that Europe is thriving. It is a beacon to the world’s poor. Newcomers bring exciting products and folkways because Europe is strong and self-confident enough to welcome such things. There are seven Polish-language newspapers in Dublin and six Chinese dailies in Hungary. Eggplant, mangoes, and baklava are easier to come by than they were. Even the record-setting traffic jams—which stretch for tens of kilometers every summer along highways in southern Spain, as North African workers from every country in Europe load their families into old cars and converge on the ferry crossings to Morocco—have their bright side. They show that immigrant Europe is on the move, active, vibrant, diverse, life loving.

But “advanced” cultures have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to “primitive” ones. Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury, and crime. Turkish immigrants have been responsible for shootouts in schools in France and the Netherlands. Italy has Balkan “squeegee men” who shake down motorists the way panhandlers did in the Manhattan of the 1970s and ’80s. And most countries in Europe have seen immigrant unrest, if not outright riots.

For pessimists, the vibrancy and energy of immigrant and ethnic communities come at the expense of European communities. Europeans know more about Arabic calligraphy and kente cloth because they know less about Montaigne and Goethe. If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour. Immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it. Europe is not welcoming its newest residents but making way for them.

Both optimism and pessimism exist simultaneously in most Europeans’ heads. Immigration is indeed an exhilarating, revivifying cultural opportunity. But it is also a test of strength between two cultures. The paltry mass immigrations between European countries in recent centuries—Jewish and Huguenot refugees, a few factory hands from Poland or Ireland or Italy—were big enough to enrich the lands of settlement but not so big as to threaten them. They are unlikely to be the template that the present wave follows. There are many other models for immigration, and not all of them end with the “absorption” of the newcomers into the host country: The arrival of a few hundred British adventurers in India in the eighteenth century was an immigration, and so was the settlement of ambitious ranchers in the early nineteenth century in New Spain (now Texas). Immigration enhances strong countries and cultures, but it can overwhelm weak ones.

Diversity is overrated

Journalists and government commentators often present immigrant Europe as a diverse phenomenon. It is hard to generalize about Europe, they say. In France, book after book presents the problems of immigration as a result of the problems of colonialism, or even as a continuation of colonialism by other means. But in Germany, one frequently hears that the problem in integrating Turkish newcomers is a lack of the sort of colonial experience that, whatever damage it did, at least allowed countries such as France or England to greet their newest citizens as old acquaintances, with certain common cultural references to use as a starting point. Many French are skeptical about the assimilability of Arabs and more optimistic about the proud and independent Berber Kabyles of Algeria; the Dutch, however, try to explain away the high crime rates of their Moroccan population by saying that they are Berbers from the Rif, after all, and you can’t expect them to assimilate as well as Arabs.

Another explanation that one hears from social scientists is that immigration problems are a clash between the “countryside” and the “big cities.” As the Dutch historian Geert Mak wrote:

Around the 1970s, there was a great policy error made in the Netherlands, as elsewhere in Western Europe. Without sufficient selectivity, without good leadership, without programs to welcome all newcomers into Dutch society, a great wave of migration got under way from the Turkish and Moroccan countryside to big cities of the Netherlands.

What Europe confronts, in this view, is not a reenactment of, say, the Umayyad conquest of Spain but a reenactment of milkmaids and shepherds moving from villages in Normandy to factories in Boulogne-Billancourt. Mak, who considers himself a great defender of immigrants and has launched some of the most ferocious attacks on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch feminist thinker and critic of Islam, sees that the Dutch project to integrate immigrants (at least its Muslim ones) has thus far failed. But he cannot admit the possibility that it may have failed because it is not a project with a high prospect of success in the first place.

Mak’s reading of his country’s woes is replicated by intellectuals in countries across Europe. Writers, academics, and politicians act as if it is only some quirk or accident or epiphenomenon—and never immigration itself—that has left their country with such intractable problems. Some political blunder or bit of red tape, or an unremarked peculiarity of its immigrant population, must be to blame—something that can be put right with some new program.

This is misguided. Europe’s immigration situation is not particularly diverse, even if the peoples involved in it are. Leaving aside the economic crisis that began in 2008, coping with the fallout from immigration is the main problem in every country in Western Europe, and it is the same problem in all of them. If you understand how immigration, Islam, and native European culture interact in any Western European country, you can predict roughly how they will interact in any other—no matter what its national character, no matter whether it conquered an empire, no matter what its role in World War II, and no matter what the provenance of its Muslim immigrants.

All countries have the same shrinking populations. All countries make the same diagnoses of their immigration challenges, and put forward the same economic policies. When the Christian Democratic politician Rita Süßmuth published the conclusions of an independent immigration commission in 2001, saying that Germany would need 500,000 immigrants a year to maintain its age balance, the demographer Gunnar Heinsohn wrote sarcastically but correctly, “Now all the OECD states, and even the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe have their own Süßmuth reports. And all of them courageously declare, in ignorance of the others, their willingness to receive qualified and easily assimilable high-tech geniuses in ever greater numbers.” All countries pursue roughly the same strategy for assimilating Islam, elevating Muslim pressure groups to pseudo-governmental status and declaring that doing so will produce an Islam that reflects the values of Europe rather than vice versa. This is the driving idea behind the Conseil français du culte musulman, the Italian Consulta, and the German Islamkonferenz (albeit to a lesser degree), and behind Britain’s unnamed and unsuccessful attempt to win over the leadership of the Muslim Council of Britain to more moderate pronouncements. A reporter traveling from country to country can even hear the same immigration jokes and puns. French people are as impressed by their own wit in lamenting the import of radical imams from “Londonistan” as Italians are when they complain about disorder in their own city of “Cremonistan” (Cremona).

Why do European opinion leaders insist that there is a diversity of immigrations, a diversity of Islams? Perhaps to stave off discussing the possibility that the various, similar-looking immigrant problems in all Western European countries might merely be facets of a single larger clash. The “clash of civilizations” is associated with the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s book of that name. But the fear that globalization might exacerbate the tensions among peoples rather than allaying them is not just an idea that Huntington dreamed up in the 1990s.

In 1961 the French political philosopher Raymond Aron delivered a lecture in London called “The Dawn of Universal History.” In it, he argued that “with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes on the significance that inequality between classes once had. The condition of the masses differs more, from one continent to the next, and from one country to the next, than it ever has. Consciousness of inequality spreads, and resignation to poverty and fate disappears.” Aron’s remark remains mostly true in the age of the Internet. European countries are shrinking, aging, and short of workers. Their only obvious supply of rejuvenation and labor is in the Muslim cultures to the south and southeast, which have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings. Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.

Can you have the same Europe with different people?

This is a book about Europe, and about how and why immigration and the multiethnic societies that result from it mark a rupture in its history. It is written with an eye to the difficulties immigration poses to European society. It is not a book about the difficulties faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities, about the injustices of the global economy, or about the imperatives of human rights, although these are all worthy subjects that will be touched on where necessary. This book aims to describe a particular European predicament, not to lecture Europeans about what their wishes and aims ought to be, or how their societies ought to work.

The predicament actually consists of two different problems that, because they overlap, are often mistaken for a single problem. There is the problem of Europe’s ability to assimilate immigrants, and there is the problem of Europe’s difficulties with Islam. Which of these problems is being addressed at any given time should be clear in context. The reader should be warned that, without a certain amount of shorthand and bluntness, nothing serious can be said. To hedge every point with granteds and notwithstandings would have made this book a pain to write and a chore to read. Words are used in their vernacular, not their social-scientific or political sense. So for instance, the adjective native may be used to refer to the non-Muslim part of a European country. This does not mean the writer is unaware that Europe now has Muslim natives. The statement that European Muslims took a dim view of the decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish caricatures of Muhammad in September 2005 is to be understood generally. The author does not claim to have interviewed every last Muslim on the continent and found complete unanimity. Economy of expression, not stereotyping or exclusion, is the aim. This book will avoid alarmism and pointless provocation, but it will also avoid euphemism and the kind of preemptive groveling that characterizes most writing about matters touching on ethnicity.

There is no precedent for the mass immigration that Europe has seen over the last five decades and may see for years to come. Some of the moderate-sized migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ended well: the movement of Polish farm workers into Germany, for instance, or of Italian industrial workers into France. One ended catastrophically: the westward migration of Jews into Western European cities. The present immigration is many times larger than those, and involves far wider cultural differences. Its outcome is unclear.

Mass immigration may spur economies slowed by old habits, and breathe new life into societies demoralized by their twentieth-century mistakes and sins. But this doesn’t look too likely. Europeans, as we will discuss in the next chapter, overestimated their need for immigrant labor. The economic benefits immigration brought were marginal and temporary. They now belong to the past. The social changes immigration brought, however, were massive and enduring. Accommodating more ethnic groups does not mean adding to what Europe already has. It means altering what Europe already has. Immigration is a poor fit with the welfare states that have been a cornerstone of European identity since the Second World War. It complicates efforts to build a European Union. The Islam professed by roughly half of Europe’s new arrivals sits uneasily with European traditions of secularism. In the struggle between the two, it would be arrogant to assume secularism has the stronger hand. The spiritual tawdriness Islamic immigrants perceive in the modern West is not imaginary. It may be Europe’s biggest liability in preserving its culture.

The rest of this book will ask whether you can have the same Europe with different people. The answer is no.