![](\"https:\/\/www.altmuslim.com\/ee_images\/europe_mosque.jpg\")
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/p><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n
In his classic 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy<\/i>, the American historian, political theorist and anti-immigration activist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard warned of the coming collapse of white civilization under a \u2018swarm\u2019 of \u2018colored\u2019 people. Whites had already been driven out of their ancestral homeland in the Caucasus. The land \u2018which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man\u2019s country, is today racially brown man\u2019s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance.\u2019 And \u2018If this portion of Asia, the former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character\u2019, Stoddard asked, \u2018what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?\u2019<\/p>\n
Stoddard was worried, too, by the prospect of a resurgent Islam. \u2018In so far as he is Christianized, the negro\u2019s savage instincts will be restrained and he will be predisposed to acquiesce in white tutelage\u2019, he wrote. \u2018In so far as he is Islamized, the negro\u2019s warlike propensities will be inflamed, and he will be used as the tool of Arab Pan-Islamism seeking to drive the white man from Africa and make the continent its very own.\u2019 To protect Europe and America from a similar fate, Western nations had to ensure that \u2018the rising tide of color finds itself walled in by white dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain deluge with its dusky waves.\u2019<\/p>\n
A century on, Stoddard\u2019s talk of \u2018dusky waves\u2019, \u2018brown man\u2019s land\u2019 and \u2018white blood\u2019 would seem to most people to be insufferably racist. His underlying theme, however \u2013 the danger of Europe being overwhelmed by waves of immigration \u2013 has come to be seen these days as an expression almost of common sense. But whereas Stoddard saw his book as a rallying cry to build the dikes necessary to keep out the dusky waves, today\u2019s Cassandras fear it is already too late. The tide of color has already come in. \u2018In no country in Europe\u2019, Christopher Caldwell writes, \u2018does 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\u2019s actively choosing it, turned into such bazaars.\u2019<\/p>\n
Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times and an editor of the conservative American magazine the Weekly Standard. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe<\/i> is the latest in a succession of books by authors such as Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci, Bruce Bawer and Melanie Phillips warning of how immigration, and in particular Muslim immigration, is threatening the very foundations of European civilization. The melodramatic title of Caldwell\u2019s book is a nod to Edmund Burke and reflects his belief that the impact on European of postwar immigration has been as dramatic as the fall of the ancien regime in 1789.<\/p>\n
What is different about Caldwell is the high praise garnered by his book not simply from right-wing critics of immigration but from many liberals too \u2013 there were laudatory reviews in both the Guardian and the Observer. Caldwell, as Prospect editor David Goodhart has put it, \u2018is a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties\u2019.<\/p>\n
But is he? Three basic arguments underlie Caldwell\u2019s thesis. First, postwar immigration to Europe has, he believes, been fundamentally different to previous waves of immigration. Prior to the Second World War, immigrants came almost exclusively from other European nations, and so were easily assimilable. Indeed, \u2018using the word immigration to describe intra-European movements makes only slightly more sense than describing a New Yorker as an \u201cimmigrant\u201d to California\u2019. The cultural apartness of postwar immigrants, on the other hand, has not just posed problems of assimilation but also undermined the very fabric of European societies. Take away colonial guilt, Caldwell suggests, and \u2018the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious\u2019.<\/p>\n
Second, Caldwell argues that Muslim migration in particularly has been akin to a form of colonization. \u2018Since its arrival half a century ago\u2019, Caldwell observes, \u2018Islam has broken \u2013 or required adjustments to, or rearguard defences of \u2013 a good many of the European customs, received ideas and state structures with which it has come in contact.\u2019 Islam \u2018is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it.\u2019<\/p>\n
And third, Caldwell suggests that Islam\u2019s success has been made easier by a crisis of identity of identity in the West. Europeans, in particular, \u2018are coming to despise their own cultures, much as the bigots among their forebears had despised the cultures of other peoples.\u2019 Immigration, Caldwell points out, \u2018enhances strong countries and cultures but it can overwhelm weak ones\u2019 \u2013 and that is what is happening to Europe.<\/p>\n
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is trenchantly written and robustly argued. It is complex and often subtle. It is also fundamentally wrong in both premise and conclusion.<\/p>\n
According to Caldwell, prewar immigration between European nations was different from postwar immigration from outside Europe because \u2018immigration from neighboring countries does not provoke the most worrisome immigration questions, such as \u201cHow well will they fit in?\u201d \u201cIs assimilation what they want?\u201d and, most of all, \u201cWhere are their true loyalties?\u201d.\u2019 In fact, those were the very questions asked of European migrants in the prewar years.<\/p>\n
In the 1930s, nearly a third of the French population were immigrants, mostly from Southern Europe. Today we think of Italian or Portuguese migrants as culturally similar to their French hosts. Seventy years ago they were viewed as aliens, given to crime and violence, and unlikely to assimilate into French society. \u2018The notion of the easy assimilation of past European immigrants\u2019, the historian of French immigration Max Silverman has written, \u2018is a myth\u2019.<\/p>\n
In Britain, the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration expressed fears that newcomers were inclined to live \u2018according to their traditions, usages and customs\u2019 and newspapers worried that there might be \u2018grafted onto the English stock\u2026 the debilitated sickly and vicious products of Europe\u2019. Britain\u2019s first immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, was designed primarily to bar European Jews, who were seen as unBritish. The Prime Minister, Arthus Balfour, observed during the second reading of the Bill that without such a law, \u2018though the Briton of the future may have the same laws, the same institutions and constitution\u2026 nationality would not be the same and would not be the nationality we would desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come.\u2019 One of the consequences of postwar migration has been to create historical amnesia about prewar attitudes.<\/p>\n
What of the claim that Islam poses a fundamental threat to Western values? Caldwell draws here on the \u2018clash of civilizations\u2019 thesis developed by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. The conflicts that have convulsed Europe over the past centuries, Huntington wrote in a famous 1993 essay, from the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics to the Cold War, were all \u2018conflicts within Western civilization\u2019. The \u2018battle lines of the future\u2019, on the other hand, would be between civilizations. And the most deep-set of these would be between the Christian West and the Islamic East, a \u2018far more fundamental\u2019 struggle than any war unleashed by \u2018differences among political ideologies and political regimes\u2019.<\/p>\n
Yet, even as he goes along with this idea, Caldwell reveals its inadequacies. \u2018What secular Europeans call \u201cIslam\u201d\u2019, he points out, \u2018is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognize as theirs\u2019. On the other hand, the modern, secular rights that now constitute \u2018core European values\u2019 would \u2018leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered.\u2019 There is, in other words, no single set of \u2018European values\u2019 that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values.<\/p>\n
Moreover, contemporary Islamism is not simply a throwback to the past but draws on some modern themes. \u2018Islam may be quantifiably backward\u2019, Caldwell writes, \u2018but it is backward at a times when progress has acquired a bad name\u2019. One does not have to be a \u2018fundamentalist or a fanatic\u2019, he points out, \u2018to worry that it is in the West\u2019s nature to advance too far, too fast. The Greens and anti-globalist movements share such worries. So do an increasing number of thinkers and statesmen.\u2019 Including Caldwell himself. The current encounter with Islam may be \u2018painful and violent\u2019, but it has also been, he acknowledges, \u2018an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West\u2019, for which we need to express our \u2018gratitude\u2019.<\/p>\n
If many of those hostile to Islam are nevertheless often drawn to Islamic criticism of secular humanism, many of those who identify with Islam paradoxically do so for secular reasons. The rioters who set French cities ablaze in the autumn of 2005, Caldwell points out, \u2018did not believe in Islam\u2019 but had an attachment to \u2018Team Islam\u2019. Support for Islam today is best understood, in other words, not in terms of theology or a clash of civilizations but as part of the rise of identity politics.<\/p>\n
All of which brings us to the third part of Caldwell\u2019s thesis: that Europe is undergoing a crisis of identity that undermines its ability to deal with Islam. He writes perceptively about the self-loathing that infects many in the West today and details the myriad ways in which basic freedoms and liberties have been constrained in the name of multiculturalism.<\/p>\n
\u2018A central problem in welcoming people from poor countries\u2019, Caldwell notes, \u2018is that Europeans have lost faith in parts of the civilization to which migrants were drawn in the first place\u2019, adding that \u2018It is hard to follow Europe\u2019s rules and embrace Europe\u2019s values, as newcomers are sometimes told they must, when Europeans themselves are rewriting those rules and reassessing those values.\u2019 He is right. But it is an argument that sits uneasily with claims about the inherent cultural apartness of Third World and Muslim immigrants. Many immigrants want to join the club, Caldwell seems to be saying, but they can\u2019t because the club has lost its rulebook.<\/p>\n
That is why the question with which Caldwell begins the book \u2013 \u2018Can Europe be the same with different people in it?\u2019 \u2013 is so misguided. Caldwell clearly thinks that Europe cannot be the same with different people in it. But in asking the question Caldwell confuses the diversity of peoples and the diversity of values. People of North African or South Asian parentage, he seems to believe, will inevitably cleave to a different set of values than those of European ancestry. Why? Being born to European parents is no passport to Enlightenment beliefs. So why should we imagine that having Bangladeshi or Moroccan ancestry makes one automatically believe in sharia?<\/p>\n
Caldwell is no racist, but it is this confusion of peoples and values that connects his argument to that of Stoddard. For both, the presence of too many non-Europeans in Europe is a threat to European values. The confusion of peoples and values also reveals how Caldwell himself has imbibed the contemporary European uncertainty about its values, an uncertainty of which he is so critical. There are no such things as \u2018European values\u2019, of course. What has eroded is faith in the idea that it is possible to win peoples of different backgrounds to a common set of secular, humanist, Enlightened values. And that is the real problem: not immigration, nor Muslim immigration, but the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project.<\/p>\n
(Photo: David Pham<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n