Mark Steyn has had a number of downbeatarticles recently about the fate of Europe which have interested a number of American bloggers and journalists. In his response on Austin Bay's Blog, Mark elaborates as follows:
First, it’s true that the Central and Eastern European nations are markedly more America-friendly than the western ones. However, their long-term prognosis is not significantly different: they face the same deathbed demographics - right now, the only European country breeding at replacement rate is Muslim Albania.
Declining population isn’t necessarily a problem - my own New Hampshire town, for example, survived a 130-year population decline from 1820 to 1950, caused by the opening up of the west, the collapse of the sheep industry and the big mill towns down south. But New Hampshire’s entire social structure wasn’t founded on a welfarist model dependent on continuous population growth to sustain state benefits. For the states of Eastern Europe, one of the consequences of joining the EU, adopting the Euro and ratifying the European Constitution is that they’re also assuming collective responsibility for the cost of the unsustainable welfare burdens of Greece, France, etc.
There are two ways you could deal with this - either reform of the welfare states or massive immigration higher than America at its pre-World War One immigration peak. No European politicians have the courage to address the former (openly), so they’ve signed on to the latter (silently). In the end, the idea of using the Third World as your surrogate mother isn’t a long-term solution either: in 2020, a skilled educated Indian, Chilean, Chinaman, Singaporean will be able to write his own emigration ticket anywhere on the planet. Is it likely he’ll want to choose a part of the world where the basic tax rate will be 60%?
That means Europe will be almost wholly dependent on the Muslim world for immigration - and one of the features of super-tolerant anything-goes post-Christian Europe is that it radicalises hitherto moderate Muslims.
Now I disagree with a couple of things here.
Firstly I don't think that European nations will in fact take up the borden of other nations' social security committments. In fact I believe that the opposite will happen and that, as Steyn notes in other columns, the EU as a unified whole will collapse in a heap sooner rather than later. In many ways I think that the EU Constitution may be the straw that breaks the camel's back as nation after nation is forced to have a look and see what exactly they are signing up to and decides to pass. So all this BS about a unified EU foreign policy etc is IMO doomed. I don't know how long it will take but I am positive that we will see significant restructuring and scaling back of the various European welfare states. I hesitate to place definitive bets on which country will blink first but it wuld not surprise me if it turns out to be France. I'm sure that while Chirac remains in control nothing substantive will happen, but I'm also fairly sure that after the next election Nicolas Sarkozy will be the president. Sarkozy is good at explaining why what sounds like a good idea (e.g. the 35hr week) is in fact bad and he is frequently able to come up with sufficient fast talk and action to placate the majority of protestors while not actually bowing ot their demands. It will also be fascinating to see how the Vlaams not-Blok does in the next elections. I do believe that they will benefit - in Flanders - from the heavy handed attempts to shut them out and economically they are small government libertarians which could be very very interesting if they manage to get enough votes to be a part of the government.
Secondly I think the Muslimization will be patchy. Perhaps the Netherlands will become a majority Islamic country, perhaps Sweden will. I doubt that everywhere will be the same and in fact I rather question whether Sweden or Holland will. This Gnxp posts indicates that, contrary to reports of doom, it is not exclusively the white middle-class dutch who are emigrating: Indeed it would seem that half of the emigrants are recent immigrants or their families. Zacht Ei has a report from the streets. While it is anecdotal it need not be completely dismissed for that reason. I suspect that the idea that "Muslim immigrants" are uniformly radicalized and anti-integration is overstated - certainly I know a number of English Muslims (or Muslim origin) who are well integrated and who are taking advantage of their opportunity to become better off - even though Gordon Brown does his best to tax them back to poverty.
I suspect that reform of social security will in fact help in removing the requirement for immigrants and to keeping those immigrants in their ghettoes