Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West

by Christopher Caldwell

Book Overview

In light of cultural crises such as the Danish cartoon controversy and the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, Christopher Caldwell's incisive perspective has never been more timely or indispensible. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is destined to become the classic work on how Muslim immigration permanently reshaped the West. This provocative and unflinching analysis of Europe's unexpected influx of immigrants investigates...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307276759
• ISBN13: 9780307276759
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Don't Be Put Off by the Title!

This book is required reading for the European Diaspora, and it's an absolutely riveting page-turner. "A little light reading?" asked my librarian, an eyebrow raised, but all of the little niggling thoughts we caucasians are trying unsuccessfully to ignore are cogently and considerately addressed here. If your roots are in Europe, and you want to see them, you have to go now, because in ten years Europe will not be Europe, but the Ottoman Empire as they tried and failed to create it in the 1400s.Oddly, I feel better for knowing this, because I have suspected it for some time, and decided I must be insane. There is consolation in being disabused of that!

Calm, unbiased look at the catastrophe that will end Europe

Europe may well be about to fall. As Caldwell points out, "For 1,400 years, the Islamic and the Christian worlds have been opposed to one another, violently at times" (p 11) and yet Europe has now brought over vast numbers of Islamic immigrants, all of whom seem to be having children in large numbers. This might not have upended Europe, except that it happened at exactly the moment when the native populations of Europe decided to stop reproducing. Not in small amounts, but in numbers so vast as to rival the time of the Black Death in missing people. There is a tipping point in population at which "a country falls into a 'low-fertility trap' from which it is unlikely to emerge...Below that, population tends to collapse rather than decline" (p 16). And this appears to be the situation in Europe. And it happened at a time when, as the Danish cartoons fiasco proved, Europeans are running scared. Even the slightest denigration of Islam is treated as hate speech. Yet when "Rocco Buttiglione, a devout and scholarly Catholic nominated as European minister of justice was rejected not for his political stances...but for answers he gave when interrogated on his personal views of Catholic religious doctrine" (p 197). A small but growing numbers of young European adults are converting to Islam, such as Muriel Degauque, who "blew herself up in the middle of an American military patrol" (p 191). Christianity, which might have provided a natural defense against such conversions, has been all but demolished in Europe. A recent poll, for example, "found that 45% of self-described Catholics in France are unable to say what Easter celebrates" (p 181). Truly, a scary and fascinating book.

An important analysis of Europe's malaise

In this important volume a number of important issues are explored concerning the present state of Europe, chief of which is how fifty years of mass immigration - especially by Muslims - has forever changed the continent. In the first third of this book Caldwell examines the history and rationale for mass immigration into Europe since the end of WWII. There was certainly a labour shortage back then, and bringing in guest workers on a temporary basis seemed like a good idea at the time. But the temporary usually became permanent, contrary to common expectations. For example, foreign workers demanded - and got, in most cases - the right to have their families come and join them. Since a large percentage of these workers were Muslims, major demographic and religious shifts ensued. While native Europeans were going through a birth dearth, the new arrivals were having rather large families. Thus Europe changed dramatically, even simply in terms of the numbers. For the first time in its recent history, Europe is now "a continent of migrants. Of the 375 million people in Western Europe, 40 million are living outside their countries of birth." But since postwar Europe was "built on an intolerance of intolerance," very few Europeans actually said these folks should return home when they had finished their work. They were also at this time losing all commitment to their own core beliefs and values, and "behaved as if no one's culture was better than anyone else's." Caldwell examines the economic value of an immigration culture. Just who has benefitted? While Europe made some gains, it may be that the sending countries benefitted the most. No model of development aid comes close to competing with what we find in Europe, says Caldwell. Europe allowed "migrants to set up a beachhead in an advanced economy and ship money home in the form of so-called `remittances'." Then there is the whole question of the welfare state and how it can fare in quite multicultural climates. Caldwell notes that they were originally set up in Europe under conditions of ethnic homogeneity. But the massive wave of migrants is heavily testing both the welfare state, and the ability of host nations to remain cohesive. The second part of the books focuses on Islam, and how well - or otherwise - it is fitting into post-Christian Europe. The non-judgmentalism of so many Europeans - especially the ruling elites - along with the decline of Christian values and beliefs meant that Islam became not just an accepted part of Europe, but a politically protected part. Fear of "Islamophobioa" and being politically incorrect resulted in numerous policies and practices which basically lead to Continental suicide. Even after September 11, EU bureaucrats debated whether it was even right to use such terms as jihad and terrorism. Indeed, there really was a clash of civilisations which emerged. On the one hand, a civilisation which was exhausted, no longer believed in itself, no longer seemed

Intellectually powerful

Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" is an important and surprising book. In essence, Caldwell's Reflections is a Brimelovian vindication of Enoch Powell, the brilliant Tory who warned against immigration in a prescient (and thus notorious) 1968 speech that began "The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils". Caldwell points out in his opening pages: "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 a 1968 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.)" Readers who get their views from the MainStream Media, though, will be startled by how gracefully--yet bluntly--Caldwell delivers an intellectually cohesive assault on the conventional wisdom of the diversity dogma. Reflections is also a model for how a working journalist can transform years of old articles researched on scores of trips to Europe into a stylish book. Caldwell's solution is to enhance his prose style with aphorisms worthy of G.K. Chesterton. For example, in Caldwell's original February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard article on Nicolas Sarkozy, The Man Who Would Be le Président, he discussed Sarkozy's call for affirmative action in France to appease riotous Muslims: "It can be argued that France needs such measures desperately, ... but, ... Sarkozy shows a bit of the naiveté of, say, Hubert Humphrey in 1964 when he implies the program would be only temporary. ... How long would the program last, then? Twenty years? 'No, twenty years is too long.'" In his book, however, Caldwell adds this memorable dictum in reply to Sarkozy's Continental innocence about America's experience: "One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." Unexpectedly, Caldwell takes the arrogant bluster of European intellectuals and patiently and quietly extracts the simple silly-mindedness at its heart: "Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about restaurants." He points out the endless contradictions of the cult of tolerance: "The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was 'ethnic pride' a virtue and 'nationalism' a sickness? Why was an identity like 'Sinti/Roma' legitimate but an identity like 'white' out of bounds? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it

Charles Martel- Eat your heart out

There is now a growing literature on the subject of the threat presented to Christian or perhaps secular- post- Christian Europe by its post- War immigration from Islamic countries. As Christopher Caldwell points out in this book, a prospering Europe hungering for workers, and perhaps overestimating its need for them opened the gates to what it thought would be a temporary immigration of foreign workers from Islamic lands. But today Europe has between fifteen and twenty-million adherents of Islam, whose continued growth is promised even if the gates of immigration be shut. The Islamic minorities have far higher rates of population - growth than do the native populations of the host - countries. There is even in Caldwell's book a study of the psychological and sexual implications of the virile East over against the zero- population- growth West. The demographic component is then one real element in the threat Caldwell sees to Europe's future. But an even more major element in the threat is as Caldwell sees it the failure of the Europeans to truly integrate the new immigrants. Instead of being encouraged to assimilate to the host cultures the new immigrants were given a kind of laissez- faire treatment. This was one of the reasons they persisted in holding on to their Islamic loyalty as first element of their identity. So instead of there being a Europe in which Islamic populations in some way enter a kind of melting pot, there is a Europe in which whether in East London or the suburbs of Paris in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in various other European areas, Islamic population concentrates and remains in a world of its own. There are many consequences of the European failure to present their own respective national identities or even a collective European Western identity as appealing. One has been outbursts of terrorist violence . Another has been the development of a hostile minority attitude towards the general culture. There are too the economic sides of this with the immigrants suffering from higher unemployment rates as they swell the welfare rolls. There is a vast culture of the unemployed, living off the social services and network of the host countries. Caldwell analyses brilliantly the collapse of moral will and identity on the part of the host countries. When one no longer believes in oneself it is apparently easy to be manipulated by others. He also points out how the Islamic element has revived anti- Semitism in Europe. Like all those who have written on this problem including Ba'at Yeor, Bruce Bawer, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not provide a very hopeful picture of the European future. For even if the Islamic groups fall far short of ever really 'taking over' in any country they represent they promise to be a continual source of economic and social disturbance for the future. Caldwell is far more sanguine about the United States, in which he believes there has been better integration of minorities. Yet an Islamicized Eur