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• In Brussels in 2004, more than 55 percent of the children born were of immigrant parents
• Half of all female scientists in Germany are childless
• According to a poll in 2005, more than 40 percent of British Muslims said Jews were a legitimate target for terrorist attacks
What happens when a falling birthrate collides with uncontrolled immigration? The Last Days of Europe explores how a massive influx from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East has loaded Europe with a burgeoning population of immigrants, many of whom have no wish to be integrated into European societies but make full use of the host nations' generous free social services.
One of the master historians of twentieth-century Europe, Walter Laqueur is renowned for his "gold standard" studies of fascism, terrorism, and anti-Semitism. Here he describes how unplanned immigration policies and indifference coinciding with internal political and social crises have led to a continent-wide identity crisis. "Self-ghettoization" by immigrant groups has caused serious social and political divisions and intense resentment and xenophobia among native Europeans. Worse, widespread educational failure resulting in massive youth unemployment and religious or ideological disdain for the host country have bred extremist violence, as seen in the London and Madrid bombings and the Paris riots. Laqueur urges European policy makers to maintain strict controls with regard to the abuse of democratic freedoms by preachers of hate and to promote education, productive work, and integration among the new immigrants.
Written with deep concern and cool analysis by a European-born historian with a gift for explaining complex subjects, this lucid, unflinching analysis will be a must-read for anyone interested in international politics and the so-called clash of civilizations.
- Sales Rank: #1255325 in Books
- Brand: Thomas Dunne Books
- Published on: 2007-05-15
- Released on: 2007-05-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.84" h x .96" w x 5.49" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Features
From Booklist
Laqueur, who has four-plus decades of experience writing on Europe's recent and contemporary history, arrives at an essay that seems to be a valediction of his career's geopolitical concern. Viewing Europe's future, he discusses current trends in three areas: the immigration of Muslims, financing of the welfare state, and the European Union. They dominate European political life today, and as Laqueur addresses how these foci of popular and elite attention manifest themselves country by country, the author drives his treatment toward the conclusion that reform is nigh impossible yet unavoidable. Muslim immigrants, he argues, have not been assimilated, don't wish to be, and are profoundly alienated from their host societies. Europe's munificent social-welfare systems don't add up, as Laqueur illustrates with an array of demographic statistics pointing downward and economic numbers pointing sideways. As for the EU, its centralizing aspirations have halted with recent rejections of a constitution and its inability to create a credible military force. Venturing conditional prognostications on these matters, Laqueur delivers a pessimistic assessment. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"In the midst of our own immigration debate, Americans cannot afford to miss The Last Days of Europe. . . . Laqueur has no tolerance whatever for political correctness, and doesn't mince words. . . . Laqueur's tone may be calm, but his substance is explosive. . . . Bold, subtle, hopeful, piercing, and absolutely terrifying dissection of Europe's prospects. . . . The Last Days of Europe's chilling climax is not to be missed." --The National Review Online "One of the more persuasive in a long line of volumes by authors on both sides of the Atlantic chronicling Europe's decline. . . . Mr. Laqueur's short book is measured, even sympathetic. . . . This temperate quality makes the book's theme--that Europe now faces potentially mortal challenges--all the more compelling." --The Wall Street Journal "Succinct and clearly written . . . [Laqueur] says it better and with a greater degree of tolerance of nuance . . . Exemplary clarity. . . . Laqueur is neither apocalyptic nor optimistic but measured and open-minded about the future." --The American Conservative "The Last Days of Europe spotlights an uncomfortable reality. Hopefully it will generate greater awareness, more open dialogue, and the courage to take steps to deal with Europe's problems." --Henry A. Kissinger, former secretary of state and national security adviser
"An eloquent and eye-opening epitaph for a civilization as much as for a continent--all the more impressive for its depth of historical understanding as well as its illuminating transatlantic perspective. The preeminent historian of postwar Europe has become the prophet of its decline and fall."
--Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University, and author of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
"An appraisal of Europe's present and future that reveals Walter Laqueur at his analytical and reflective best. Compelling . . . A marvel of dispassionate analysis."
--James R. Schlesinger, former Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of Energy and of Defense
About the Author
Walter Laqueur has written more than twenty books, translated into as many languages. He was a cofounder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History in London. Concurrently he was chairman of the International Research Council of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He has taught at Georgetown, Chicago, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, and Tel Aviv universities. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Most helpful customer reviews
139 of 150 people found the following review helpful.
The slow suicide of Europe
By Peter Uys
While the European Union is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding as an economic community, The Last Days of Europe joins a long list of books that warns of Europe's decline, like America Alone by Mark Steyn, Menace in Europe by Claire Berlinski, Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer and The Force of Reason by the late Oriana Fallaci.
Laqueur's contribution has a resigned and melancholy feel, unlike some of the aforementioned titles. He analyses the current European identity crisis and the rising xenophobia amongst native Europeans with empathy, observing that the average European family today has fewer than 2 children as opposed to five in the 19th century. This decline of the native birthrate is contemporaneous with massive immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The immigrant populations have high birthrates which increase social tensions since the concept of the melting pot is utterly alien to Europe. Immigrant groups have ghettoized themselves and this hostility to the host countries is breeding violence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Brussels, the seat of the EU bureaucracy.
While the threat of radical Islamism increases, Europeans are in full appeasement mode. Following Theo van Gogh's murder in 2004, certain Dutch politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding. In 2005 there were the riots in France and the Danish cartoon episode, when very few public figures had the guts to defend freedom of speech. The next year the elites declined to defend the Pope's observations on reason and religion. And abroad, Europe has been made a fool of by the Iranian ayatollocracy with its nuclear ambitions.
Laqueur lucidly appraises the continent's 20th century history: how its wars, its murderous collectivist ideologies, and post World War II, its welfare statism and depressing multiculti and relativist cults have drained it of self-confidence. They might stimulate bistro dialogue over decaf lattes, but Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze are no match for the impassioned, expansionist faith of the immigrants.
The author's prescription is nothing new: he recommends stricter controls over the abuse of democratic freedoms by radical preachers and the promotion of integration, meaningful work and better education for the alienated groups. There are signs of these and some ground for hope after the latest German, Swedish and French elections, but these solutions will not work without a spiritual revival.
It is clear that Old Europe especially, is in deep trouble. The most disturbing scenario would be a repeat of the 1930s, by for example the embrace of a charismatic pan-European leader in the face of frightening crises, instead of a return to classical liberal values. Part of the problem is, Europe does not have much of a principled Right, except perhaps the libertarian parties of Scandinavia or the Flemish nationalists.
Oriana Fallaci likened the old Italian Right of the Risorgimento to a noble lady that committed suicide - an apt description of the senescent Christian Democrats that have accepted the tenets of welfarism. Thus the welfare state consensus has never been properly challenged except in the UK where Margaret Thatcher positively transformed the country in the 1980s. That is why British society is in a better state today.
For further information on the recent history and the current state of Europe, I recommend Eurabia by Bat Ye-or, The West's Last Chance by Tony Blankly, The West and the Rest by Roger Scruton, Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple and The Dragons of Expectation by Robert Conquest.
33 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Goodbye, Europe: a gloomy assessment of the near future
By Jerry Saperstein
Walter Laquer has been writing histories of Europe for a long time. He is, in fact, 86 and has written 20 or more books. "The Last Days of Europe" is an assessment of Europe now and through the remainder of the 21st Century.
Essentially Laquer suggests that Europe will become a gigantic museum with Muslims as the ticket takers. Ethnic English, French, Germans, Russians, all Europeans aren't reproducing at a rate sufficient to replenish their stocks while Muslim immigrants are not only outbreeding Europeans, but failing to integrate. The result? A largely Islamicized Europe. He is far from alone in this view. Other authors, notably Mark Steyn (America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), Melanie Phillips (Londonistan), Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within) and Claire Berlinski (Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too) have written of a changing Europe, each from their own perspctive. Most notable is the late Orianna Fallaci's (The Force of Reason), written as she was dying and filled with fiery passion.
Laquer's view is quite interesting because unlike the authors cited above, he does not reflect first-person views, but rather sticks to the statistics and raw facts, which are frankly depressing.
Europe has failed to integrate Muslim immigrants into its societies. While some Muslims have indeed become a part of their adopted nation, most remain apart. They do not attend school. They do not learn the native language. They do not assimilate. They do hate. They do nurse and nurture discontent. They do sop up, with the all too willing help of social workers and multiculturalists, all the financial benefits they can. And they reproduce, all too often with wives brought from their countries of origin.
Increasingly these Muslim immigrants are being radicalized while their children drift off into gangs or a srange counter-culture that rejects their parent's values but doesn't adopt the values of their host nation.
Europe's economic stagnation, globlization, aging populations and the native's failure to reproduce will, according to Laquer, reduce Europe to a largely Muslim society by 2050.
This is not an optimistic book. Nor is it particularly dystopian as others have been. Rather it is a sober and fully explained assessment by a competent historian who has seen Europe's fall into the abyss of evil in the 1930s and 40s, its recovery and its missteps toward its preseent dangerous position. Laquer does not forsee the survival of Europe as we know it.
Required reading for anyone concerned with political stability in Europe and the world.
Jerry
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Pessimism is justified
By A. Fonteyne
This book could not be discussed in the mainstream European media. Because it would act as an eye-opener to all of those who are not already seeing what lies ahead of us: the end of our civilization in its very birthplace, if no reaction or opposite trend appear ( do not hesitate to compare this with the fate of the Roman Empire). And political correctness does not allow that.
Walter Laqueur manages to give a sober, dispassionate and erudite account of the continent's very gloomy future. And with his track-record as a professor and author of numerous books, he cannot be suspected of right-wing sympathies.
The birthrate amongst native Europeans is desperately low and below reproduction rate; it has been low since 1900 but is now reaching pathetic levels. Europe is shrinking, Europe is dying.
Meanwhile, an alien population of Muslims, introduced to Europe from the 1960s without consulting its local population, is growing fast. In its majority, even amongst the second or third generation, it seems to be unable to integrate into Western European society and is even rejecting its values with increasing force. For years, focused on other issues, Europeans did not see how much of a problem these opposing demographic evolutions would cause.
Even now, politicians and the media are focusing on the problems that the aging population is bringing; who will pay for pensions and health care? Nobody seems to realize that at some point, in 20 to 30 years' time, when the baby-boom generation will have rejoined its ancestors, Muslims in Europe will most probably represent 25% if not more of Europe's population, an even bigger proportion of its younger age groups, those that represent the future, and a clear majority in a number of large cities and their surrounding regions.
That would happen even if immigration should stop today. But it is not stopping but accelerating, with all those poor and illiterate people attracted by the magnet of European prosperity, seeing the " hen with the golden eggs".
Muslims in Europe are optimistic. They know all they have to do is to wait, because Europeans are either not realizing what is happening, or refusing to admit it, and therefore are not reacting. Why? Because European civilization lost its vigor on the battlefields of WWI and WWII, lost its self-confidence and pride, does not believe in its own fundamental values enough to defend them, because the process of European integration (that has largely ground to a halt) cannot replace that emptiness.
There might be a radical yet acceptable approach and Laqueur does not speak of it. Europe should seal its borders as much as possible, introduce managed immigration, keep Muslims out, favor migrants from other parts of the world, and above all that, set up natalist policies that reverse the trend. But I repeat: all that is not compatible with the political correctness prevailing today and natalist policies remind Europe of fascism.
But who knows, if we try dreaming a bit, Europe's problems might also contain within themselves the welcome germs of change. Aging will cause the final collapse of the welfare state as we know it, reducing the attractiveness of Europe to fascinated outsiders, and it will no longer be affordable (sadly)to keep people alive beyond a certain age. There will also be less unemployment as this was largely created by the arrival of the baby-boomers on the job market. The renewed job opportunities as well as the capital left behind by these same baby-boomers will encourage their less numerous children to reproduce with more enthusiasm...
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