Ralf wrote a thoughtful post where he states that Anglosphere claims of a future domination in Europe by Muslims is simply not supported by any evidence. In fact he thinks that it’s nothing but nonsense. The numbers of non-Muslims are so great that there’s no chance they will be overwhelmed, and a glance at German population statistics bears this out.
In other words, people under 20 in this country alone outnumber the 15 million Muslims (and that’s the very high end of the estimate) in all of Europe, of all ages, by a considerable margin. Immigrants’ birthrates in the first generation are higher than the ‘native’ birthrate, but the difference narrows by the second, and disappears by the third generation.
Ralf doesn’t link to any sources which back up his claims on the total number of Muslims in Europe, or that the birth rate of Muslim immigrants decline by the 3rd generation. That doesn’t surprise me, but only because there seems to be some disagreement as to the numbers involved and sources are hard to come by.
This page at The Islam Project states that there are “35 to 50 million Muslims” which lived in Western Europe in 2000, numbers which are significantly higher than what Ralf asserts to be the “very high end of the estimate”. The figures found at IP should be taken with a grain of salt for two reasons, though. The first is that they themselves admit that “no reliable statistics are available”. The second is that IP is devoted to promoting Islam in a positive light, so they have a strong incentive to inflate the numbers.
Daniel Pipes wrote an article where he asserted that “5% of the E.U., or nearly 20 million persons” identified themselves as Muslim. He didn’t link to any source for his numbers either, but he did link to this article which discusses Europe’s declining population.
An article at The Times Online places the number of European Muslims at 13 million. Where did they get that number? The author doesn’t say.
An op-ed which originally appeared on the United Press International wire also states that Europe has no more than 13 million Muslims, but that they comprise 10% of France’s population.
And so it goes, on and on. No hard data, the numbers cited are conflicting, and it’s extremely difficult to separate an example of biased agenda-driven reports from thoughtful analysis. The problem is made worse by the fact that professional journalism rewards those who publish alarmist fare while ignoring boring articles that claim there’s really nothing much going on. The bottom line is that the claims of an Islam dominated Europe might be hogwash, but so might the claims that there’s no problem at all.
I notice two glaring blind spots in Ralf’s post.
The first is the assumption that Muslims are only created through childbirth. Islam aggressively recruits, and the number of European Musilms appears to be growing while the number of Christians seems to be shrinking. (This presupposes that a citizen will be one or the other instead of being neither, of course, so it isn’t wholly compelling to me.)
The other problem with his argument is that he seems to be ignoring the fact that France has real potential crises. 10% of the population is simply too large a segment to ignore, and there’s no reason to think that the numbers won’t continue to grow.
Most of the democratic governments in Europe are based on the parliamentary system. A party that controls about 35% of the vote can muster enough support to defeat their opponents. We already know that 10% of France’s population is Muslim. Is there a chance that it could approach 35%? If so, how long is it going to be before it reaches that number? Even if the rest of Europe manages to marginalize or assimilate their Islamic citizens, a nuclear armed France with a ruling government formed from a fundamental Islamic political party isn’t a reassuring picture to contemplate.
But so far no major political party has emerged in France that claims to speak for the Muslims. Why this is so is beyond me, but I’m sure there are reasons. It’s not clear that it will never happen because it hasn’t yet, though.
It’s important to define your own position when discussing a contentious subject such as this one. I’ve never said that we will see a Europe with an Islamic majority, but I’ve always maintained that the numbers of muttering malcontents presently there are large enough to become a very serious problem unless they are assimilated into the general population. That, I think, is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint.
But, of course, I could be wrong.
“Most of the democratic governments in Europe are based on the parliamentary system. A party that controls about 35% of the vote can muster enough support to defeat their opponents.”
Do they all use first-past-the-post though? In proportional representation system you usually need 50% of the vote to form a ruling coalition (although in Germany it’s 48.5% for some reason).
The only observation I would make is that it is always dangerous to draw straight lines in matters of demography and other social prediction. Just as Muslims seem to be recruiting now, it is entirely possible that that trend will reverse itself. A resurgent Catholic church under a new Pope might well be the catalyst, or other considerations that we cannot imagine today.
Also, Europeans of, er, European descent might well become more fertile. Children might come back into vogue. That, in turn, might make Europeans more likely to engage militarily with the world, itself a very problematic idea.
Most of Europe uses proportional representation. France and a few other countries use two-ballot system, in which a candidate has to win 50%+1 vote to win the first round. Otherwise, there is a runoff between the two candidates with most votes. Under this system, a fundamentalist Islamic party could win all districts in which they are supported by 50+% of population but would lose everywhere else. So, 35% would still be not good for them, unless they found some allies in non-Islamic parties.
The only system in which a party could win a majority with 35% is first-past-the-post without a runoff, as in UK and Canada. Italy is the only major country in continental Europe using that system.
Yes, there will be problems, but can and will handle them.
An article from the Christian Science Monitor refers to numbers from the US State Department. CS Monitor Article If you add up the current EU plus Switzerland you get app. 16 Mio.
What is left out of the Mislim hysteria equation is the level of ineptitude of this population. Yes they are very good at acts of terrorism and wanton destruction but constructive anything – forget it.
They offer an example of a Hobbesian hell where life is nasty, brutish and short more or less through choice.
The reason these immigrant communities have trouble integrating is the fault of their cultural infrastructure.
Racism has nothing to do with it. Simply look at the non-Muslim non-white immigrant communities in the UK and the rest of Europe and compare their ways of life with those of the Muslims.
If you want to see the future of Islam in Europe simply look at the hellholes these immigrants come from.