'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe'
by Christopher CaldwellIn Europe, the author argues, the clash between Western civilization and
the Muslim world has already been lost -- in the latter's favor.By Tim Rutten August 19, 2009 LA TIMES
When an author with Christopher Caldwell's impeccable conservative
credentials glosses Edmund Burke in his book's title, it's a safe bet
that he's engaged a question whose implications he believes are
absolutely fundamental.Burke's great 18th century masterpiece of political criticism -- "Reflections on the
Revolution in France" -- is, after all, both the foundational text of
contemporary conservatism and a continuing inspiration to classical
liberals. Caldwell's closely argued thesis in "Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" is that the
massive migration of Muslim immigrants into Western Europe now
represents as much of a consequential break with Europe's cultural
traditions as the utopian rationalism of revolutionary France did for
Burke.Wherever a reader may fall on the political spectrum, those familiar
with Caldwell's work as a senior editor for the Weekly Standard and,
particularly, as a columnist for the Financial Times, know him as an
opinionated but fair-minded writer of impressive range and bracing
clarity. "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" does not disappoint,
though many may find its essentially despairing conclusion debatable, if
sobering.Those familiar with Western Europe's current social tensions won't find
much new information here, but the author's synthesis and analysis are
hard-eyed and bracing. A relatively weak, self-doubting Europe, he
argues, has allowed mass immigration from a fundamentally alien,
basically antagonistic culture on such a scale that the continent's
future is no longer its to decide. Caldwell's Cassandra is the brilliant
anti-immigrant Tory parliamentarian Enoch Powell, who sacrificed a
promising career to this issue. In fact, this book can be read as an
extended apologia for Powell's views, which became more extreme over
time.Unsurprisingly, therefore, Caldwell accepts Samuel P. Huntington's
concept of the "clash of civilizations" and puts Western Europe on what
the Harvard scholar characterized as Islam's perpetually "bloody
borders." Caldwell's assessment of what's at stake can also be adduced
from his approving citation of philosopher J?rgen Habermas, an atheist,
who after a dialogue with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope
Benedict XVI) declared: "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate
foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy.... To
this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves
from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."For his part, Caldwell does a particularly deft job of sorting through
the ways that fumbling accommodation of Europe's assertive new Muslim
minorities has accelerated the transmutation of an intellectually
fashionable anti-Zionism into a virulent new form of anti-Semitism that,
according to French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, "will be for the
21st century what communism was for the 20th century: a source of
violence."Though he's at pains to point out that most Americans oppose continued
large-scale immigration into this country, Caldwell also argues that the
issues raised by the mass movement of Muslims into Europe are nothing
like those connected to mostly Latino migration into the United States.
Latinos, he writes, simply speak another European language and bring
with them a culture "that is like the American working-class white
culture of 40 years ago. It is perfectly intelligible to any American
who has ever had a conversation about the past with their parents....
[I]t requires no fundamental reform of American cultural practices or
institutions. On balance, it may strengthen them."The U.S. experience
On the other hand, he argues, even America's past experience with
immigration has been more dislocating: "[T]he arrival of the Irish in
Boston destroyed the Protestant culture of one of the most important
cities in the history of Protestantism. The destruction occurred not
only because the Irish arrived but also because New England Yankees
chose not to live in an Irish-run city that was increasingly violent and
corrupt." Caldwell cites historian Oscar Handlin's conclusion that "only
half the descendants of the Bostonians of 1820 still lived in the city
30 years later." Caldwell is fond of that sort of epic -- and
iconoclastic -- generalization. The problem is that history -- like God
-- is in the details, and their accumulation seems to undercut the
author's intention. One can bemoan the passing of Massachusetts'
Protestant culture, but for all their turbulence, it wasn't New
England's Irish immigrants who executed "witches," nor did the Puritan
stock surrender without a fight and simply slink away. Boston was a
center of violent mid-19th century nativism -- the place where "no Irish
need apply" ubiquitously accompanied announcements of vacant situations.More to the point, despite the fact that Boston's eligible voters of
Irish descent increased by 197% over the period Caldwell describes, the
city didn't elect its first Irish Catholic mayor, Hugh O'Brien, until
1885 -- a quarter of a century later. O'Brien was a pillar of the city's
business establishment, enjoyed the support of Catholic and Protestant
constituents and would serve four terms over a city government renowned
for honesty in an era of endemic civic corruption.While these may seem like quibbles beside the larger, urgently
contemporary points Caldwell makes, the fact is that the past is
complicated but knowable -- while the future is complex and
unforeseeable as often as it's predictable.Moreover, while authors are entitled to their arguments, it's slightly
disappointing that a commentator of Caldwell's breadth and
fair-mindedness neglects one of the inconsistencies in the "clash of
civilizations" argument to which he subscribes. Caldwell is rightly hard
on what he calls "the mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide," the
violent malice of contemporary political Islam and the dissembling of
its covert apologists like the dubious Tariq Ramadan. The fact remains,
however, that as deadly as the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and
2005 were, Europe's worst post-World War II violence was visited on the
European Muslims of Bosnia by the Orthodox European Christians of
Serbia. Similarly, the body counts involved in the London bus and Madrid
rail outrages pale beside those accumulated by the utterly indigenous,
deeply traditional European fanatics of the IRA or the Basque ETA.
Somehow, that all needs to be taken into account by a writer of
Caldwell's breadth and seriousness.Unspoken authority
As a good Burkean, Caldwell believes in what the great man called
"prejudices," which is to say the unspoken authority of tradition,
habit, family and shared cultural predilections. In that sense, he
believes the clash of civilizations already has been lost in Europe. He
also believes that its native peoples must now choose between what
Powell called "the tragedy" of American-style cultural pluralism or a
kind of quasi-Ottoman order in which religious communities essentially
are self-governing within national borders.History, though, has a way of confounding both Western historical
determinism and its not-so-distant intellectual cousin, the resignation
of Islamic fatalism.timothy.rutten@latimes.com
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