Drunken crowds in the middle of the day. Oh joy.
Demography is Destiny
It’s un-PC to say these things, but what the Hell, what’s a blog for? Anyway, it should be no embarrassment to say that political behavior is most frequently dominated by ethnic, cultural and religious factors – identity issues are the main drivers of political life, much more than economic ones. This has been the lesson learned and taught by Michael Barone, Kevin Phillips, Thomas Sowell, Walter Russell Mead, David Hackett Fischer and everyone else who pays attention to the underlying factors in political life without ideological blinders.
I’m not sure quite what to make of this piece by Bat Ye’or, entitled, “European Fears of the Gathering Jihad”. She asserts that the growing Muslim population in Europe is the result of some conscious government policy with the purpose of
establishing permanently in Europe a massive Arab-Muslim presence by the immigration and settlement of millions of Muslims with equal rights for all, native-born and migrants alike. This policy endeavored to integrate Europe and the Arab-Muslim world into one political and economic bloc, by mixing populations (multiculturalism) while weakening the Atlantic solidarity and isolating America.
I’m more inclined to believe that Muslims moved to Europe because it was close by and promised a better material life as well as more safety and freedom than their homelands. That’s simpler, and consistent with thousands of years of immigration behavior, and does not require any conspiracy theory.
Nonetheless, this demographic development has and will continue to have real consequences. The ability of the European nations to act in opposition to any Muslim nation is limited by their huge Muslim populations, who vote and naturally enough are sympathetic to their co-religionists. This will be true even where, as is mostly true, their Muslim populations peacefully assimilate themselves. Unfortunately, there is also the threat of terrorism on their own soil which European governments are trying to appease. Both of these trends will be ongoing. European hostility to Israel, for example, will continue and increase. European sympathy for Islamic terrorism, particularly if it is directed against the United States rather than them, is likely to increase.
This much cited article from the Economist points out that Europe is in a state of decline in terms of population. This review from the Times Literary Supplement makes the same point. Europeans have stopped having babies. Their Muslim neighbors, who are now “Europeans” of several generations standing in many cases, have not. So, the territory we think of as “Europe” is going to increasingly cease to be part of the “West” in cultural and political terms. Whether the Cathedral of Chartres will be a mosque in our lifetime remains to be seen. Whether you think this is a good, bad or neutral development it is certainly one which will have very significant implications in international politics.
On the other hand, as the Economist article points out, the population of the United States is growing and will continue to grow. The relative power of the United States is likely to continue to grow as a result. A large, young, energetic population bodes well for the ongoing dynamism of the American economy. The United States is going to be confronted by a weaker, older, and increasingly hostile Europe in the decades ahead, at the same time that the American population is increasingly one which is not derived from European ancestors. The two “poles ” of the West, Europe and North America, are going to continue to move farther apart.
On a related point, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Yuval Elizur has an essay “Israel Banks on a Fence” (excerpt here) He writes:
A growing number of Israelis now realize that demographic imperatives, and not just basic justice, dictate a two-state solution. The drastic decline in Jewish immigration to Israel in recent years — as well as the very high birthrate among Palestinians — has led population experts to predict that by 2020 or shortly thereafter, there will be an Arab majority in all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. At that point, the land will cease to be “Jewish.”Much as the French were impelled to withdraw from Algeria, marooning and betraying a large and loyal community, the Israelis are going to find themselves doing the same by withdrawing from the West Bank settlements. The Israelis will buy their survival at the cost of handing an apparent victory to their enemies, who will gloat over what has been abandoned to them, or by annihilating those few who refuse to leave. This apparent defeat will embolden Israel’s enemies and encourage further attacks. And the Israelis, like the French will suffer from the presence of a large and embittered refugee community in their midst as a permanent complicating factor in their political life. Nonetheless, as with France’s withdrawal across the Mediterranean, Israel’s withdrawal behind a wall is probably the lesser of two very ugly evils.
Moral Hazard
Former FBI agents are interviewed and defend the Bureau’s longstanding de facto practice of overlooking serious crimes, including murder, that are committed by informants.
Several said they would never protect known killers, but others said it was defensible in some circumstances.The utilitarian logic here is difficult to refute, but it’s not the real point. The point is that tolerating a murder of which you have foreknowledge is not far removed morally from participating in that murder. We don’t allow government agents discretion to commit murder in situations where doing so might prevent more murders. Why then do we allow them to use informants as subcontractors to do, in effect, the same thing?“You have to weigh the odds of whether killing one or two people is better than killing a whole planeload,” said Wesley Swearingen, whose service as an agent from 1959 to 1977 included tours in Los Angeles and Chicago.
For example, he said, agents ignored the murder of a small-time mobster by an FBI informant in Chicago in the 1960s because “the information that the FBI was getting was more important. Somebody in the mob is going to kill that person anyway.”
Clifford Zimmerman, a Northwestern University law professor who studies informant practices, says it is immoral, and perhaps illegal, for agents to shrug off violent crimes.It’s even worse than that, because the government officials who make these decisions aren’t neutral judges. They benefit from the murders but don’t pay any of the costs.“They’re doing their own little cost-benefit analysis and really not taking into account, in my opinion, the damage to society that these people are causing,” he said. “Is a federal official entitled to make that decision — that one person’s life is more valuable than another’s?”
The French Have Always Been Like That
There is an excellent review essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, by Walter Russell Mead. Mead is the man who gave us the term “Jacksonian”, a badge worn proudly by many of the denizens of blogspace, or at least warblogspace. He is among our more astute observers of current events, informed by a profound historical understanding. (See the links here to recent articles and reviews. And, of course, read his book.)
Mead notes that French Anti-Americanism is less about America than it is “a self-referential Franco-French phenomenon largely untroubled by larger questions of fact.” Rather, this animosity is a very old phenomenon, which even precedes the appearance of America:
If there is anything missing in these books, it would be a discussion of the relationship between French Anglophobia and French anti-Americanism. Both in France and beyond, new anti-Americanism is simply old Anglophobia writ large. Anti-Anglo-Saxonism has been a key intellectual and cultural force in European history since the English replaced the Dutch as the leading Protestant, capitalist, liberal, and maritime power in the late seventeenth century. The image of Anglophone “New Carthage” — cruel, treacherous, barbarous, plutocratic — that Jacobin and Napoleonic propaganda assiduously disseminated contains the essential features of anti-Anglo-Saxon portraits so familiar today. The humiliations and setbacks that France suffered at American hands in the twentieth century chafe so badly in part because they rub the old wounds that the British inflicted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British destroyed the empires of the Bourbons and Bonaparte; the rise of the United States established a new superpower league in world politics in which France can never compete. The dog-eat-dog competition of Anglo-Saxon capitalism forces French firms to adjust, and it steadily undermines France’s efforts to maintain its social status quo. The English language has replaced French in science, diplomacy, and letters; the list goes on.In other words, a permanent feature of the Anglosphere is and has been a hostile or at least resentful France. And France is not the only country which is troubled by the success of the Anglo/American political and economic model:
France is not the only country in Europe or the world whose ambitions were frustrated by the British and American hegemonies. France is not the only country which, left to its own devices, would embrace a kinder and gentler, if slower, form of capitalist transformation than the one that the Anglo-Saxon model imposes. France is not the only country in which intellectual and social elites dread the restructuring and decentralization that the Anglo-Saxon model brings in its train. Nor is it the only country where the state fears the loss of authority and power to Anglo-Saxon-driven globalization, with its attendant requirements of low taxes, transparency, and equal treatment for foreign investors and firms.Rather than cutting and pasting more long quotes, I’ll just say: Read it all.
Incidentally, Mead correctly points out here that the “end” of the United Nations is not upon us if the U.S. attacks Iraq without a Security Council resolution.
The plain if slightly sad fact is that from the day the U.N. Security Council first met in 1946, no great power has ever stayed out of a war because the council voted against it, and no great military power ever got into a war because the Security Council ordered it to. So, whether or not Bush gets a second council resolution on Iraq, the outlook for the Security Council is more of the same.That’s right. No matter what happens, the U.N. is too good a boondoggle for too many people from too many crappy little countries, who want to drive recklessly in Manhattan with diplomatic license plates, for it to go away. (Unless, that is, the United States consciously set out to shut it down. But that is a post for another day.)