The Long View

Citing National Review Online just encourages it, but I did see these items on The Corner yesterday that seemed worth following up:

Le Pen Flips? [Post by Stanley Kurtz]

Arnaud De Borchgrave has a remarkable report on France’s civil war [see below]. The big news here is that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far right National Front has given up its opposition to Muslim immigration and has instead allied with Muslims, taking America and the Jews as its primary targets. This shift has provoked a split in the movement, with conservative Christians refusing to go along. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents are at epidemic proportions in France.

[From a later post]

On a related matter, here's a supposed rebuttal by Gideon Rachman [see below] of the many "doom-mongering" American books about Europe's demographic crisis. So far from disproving American predictions, Rachman instead confirms them.

A little later there was this reply in the same venue:

A French Civil War? [Post by Andrew Stuttaford]

Le Pen's tilt towards Arab nationalism *outside* France is, alas, nothing new. It's dog-whistle politics designed to appeal to the anti-semitism that lurks within certain strands of French political thought, nothing more, disgraceful certainly, but a phenomenon as old as the Dreyfus case, and with roots deep in the dislocations that followed the French revolution.

Stuttaford also thinks that the term "civil war" does not apply to the urban disorders in France. That is probably true. However, the French government, indeed the French political establishment, has to contend with an increasingly unhappy police force as well as the disorders themselves. Maybe in France these things work differently, but in the US the police are uniquely well-positioned to leak embarrassing stories to the press about the incompetence of public officials.

* * *

We need not say "Civil War." Like Arnaud de Borchgrave, we can write columns with titles like Analysis: Gallic intifada:

In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's far right National Front appears to have opted for a can't-lick-'em-join-'em strategy, a rapprochement with France's large immigrant Muslim community -- with undertones of anti-Semitism. Le Pen's reasoning appears to be the recognition that Islamicization is in France to stay with 25 percent of France's under 20 population Muslim (40 percent in some cities), 2nd and 3rd generation North Africans. FN's tough stance on immigration is tempered by support for Arab and Islamist causes in the Middle East (Hamas and Hezbollah are two favorites). There are an estimated 6 to 8 million Muslims among France's 62 million and Islam is now France's second religion. Mosques are well attended on Fridays; churches aren't on Sundays. France's prison inmates are over 50 percent Muslim

Le Pen's strategic advisers argue the FN must drop its founding mythology and forget about the once popular image of a modern Joan of Arc resisting the invasion of Muslim hordes. Americans and Jews are the new targets. But the party's Christian right-wingers do not agree and are defecting in large numbers. The Islamist threat is their main concern and they are finding a new political home in MPF, Mouvement Pour la France, which is anti-European Union and anti-Muslim, and given only 7 percent of registered voters in a recent poll. Le Pen's followers have dropped back from 11 percent to 9 percent.

This does not mean that French fascism is about to take the turban (convert to Islam). It does mean that the fascists have despaired of a Catholic alliance. I find this something of a relief.

Incidentally, the website of the Mouvement pour la France is here. It's leader, Phillipe de Villiers, is preferable to Jean-Marie Le Pen in that he does not appear to be trying to imitate L. Ron Hubbard. That is not necessarily reason to vote for him. however.

US prophets of Europe's doom are half wrong, Gideon Rachman assures readers in this piece in The Financial Times:

[It] is impossible completely to dismiss the American prophets of European doom. Strip away the hysteria and the hype and they make two serious points.... First, European fertility rates have fallen well below the rate of 2.1 children per woman needed for a population to remain stable. ...The second point is that the Muslim population of Europe is rising sharply at the same time as the white, European population is falling....These trends could, indeed, spell trouble...The weakness in their arguments is that – at every stage – they tend to make the most pessimistic assumptions....Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, projects that the 25 members of the EU will have a total population of 449.8m in 2050, compared with 456m today – because falling fertility will be largely offset by rising immigration....The problem is not that the European population will simply shrink away. It is that over the next 50 years, Europe will have to deal with the fact that its population is becoming both much older and much more diverse....[A]s the saying goes: “Something that cannot go on forever, won’t.” Demographic pressure is already forcing Europeans to change their welfare systems and career patterns. In some countries, the process will be very difficult. In others, it may be relatively painless..Similarly, the American vision of a Muslim takeover of Europe – creating a new continent called “Eurabia” – relies on projecting demographic trends to their limit and beyond...Until a few years ago, mainstream European opinion would have shrugged off rising Muslim populations as unworthy of debate. But that is no longer the case...It is certainly possible that things will just get worse. But it is not inevitable.

European governments are acutely aware of this and are changing policies in response. The British are rethinking their “multicultural” approach to immigration; the French are considering positive discrimination; the Danes have cracked down on arranged marriages. Who knows – some of these policies may even work. If they do not, politics and policies will change again. Of all the many scenarios for the future of Europe, perhaps the least likely is that Europeans simply sleep-walk off a cliff.

We should note that not all the Eurodoomsayers are American. Their queen was the late Oriana Fallaci, and the British Melanie Phillips is the author of Londonistan. For that matter the author of what may turn out to be the most influential Eurodoom polemic, America Alone, is the quasi Canadian Mark Steyn. Even Tony Blankley is an immigrant.

In any case, Rachman is no doubt correct that "politics and policies will change again." I am an optimist, too: eventually, a mix of policies will be found that work. However, that will take 10 to 20 years of disruption, and the result will be appreciably different from the Europe of the 1990s.

Spengler remains in the good graces of Asia Times, if we may judge from this posting of an editorial explanation in the Spengler forum:

Asia Times Online did not decline to publish Spengler's essay. The essay was returned to him because certain problems needed to be addressed. Those problems have been addressed and a revised version of the essay is published in this edition of Asia Times Online. The original text is no longer on the forum, in fact the entire forum is offline for the time being at least as it is in breach of its host's policy.

The forum itself is back, as we see. My discussion of the essay that caused the problem (at any rate, of the version of the essay that Asia Times was prepared to publish) is here.