Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Not with a Bang But a Whimper

Most of our readers will be familiar with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. One of these days we plan to do an extensive review/critique of this classic for it has much to teach us, whilst having some fatal flaws.

Christopher Caldwell, no doubt inspired by Burke, has written Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. It appears to be a must-read book. What follows are excerpts from a review of Caldwell's new book by Daniel Johnson, published in Commentary Magazine (September, 2009)

Edmund Burke, Meet Tariq Ramadan

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam, and the West
By Christopher Caldwell
Doubleday, 422 pages.
Amazon link: here.

In June 2009, an incident took place at Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square, the hallowed venue of secular leftist gatherings since the 1930s. Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim preacher and leader of the Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun, was ejected after his followers attempted to segregate male and female members of the audience for a public debate. Choudary told the assembled media in the street outside: “This country is rife with social and economic problems and only Islam has the answer. Muslims are multiplying at a rate eight times faster than the kaffir. In a couple of generations this will be a Muslim country, inshallah. We will dominate this country, my brothers, and implement the beauty and perfection of Islam.” Al--Muhajiroun members greeted the speech with cheers and cries of “God is great” and “Sharia for the UK.” The crowd included Simon Keeler, the first white British Muslim convert convicted of inciting terrorism.

Such incidents are now commonplace not only in Britain but also across Europe. Yet the rise of European Islamism has occurred over only a few years’ time, without any of the Continent’s political elites even noticing what was happening. As Christopher Caldwell argues in his spirited tract Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.” Now that the rest of the population has woken up to the change, many are angry. The result is a political upheaval that is still being played out.

The institutional structures of Europe are creaking because it is no longer possible to accommodate both the increasingly extravagant demands of the Islamist minority and the resentment of a no-longer-silent majority. The multicultural model, based on pure relativism, is widely regarded as bankrupt. But it is too late to prevent or reverse the demographic transformation of virtually every major city on the Continent.

What is striking is that nobody even bothers to challenge Choudary and other demagogues. Instead, Europeans roll their eyes and move on. But who will have the last laugh? Choudary’s prophecy may be outlandish, but it is an accurate description of the urban districts from which he and his like draw their support. It is certainly far less unreal than the cloud-cuckoo-land where European leaders have been living for the past generation.

Britain a Muslim country in a couple of decades? By 2050 a third of the population of Britain and most European countries will be immigrants. The proportion of Muslims may well be even higher because of birthrates and conversion. Sharia for the United Kingdom? England already has 85 functioning sharia courts, and the president of the UK’s new Supreme Court, Lord Phillips, has said that “there is no reason why principles of sharia law should not be used as the basis for mediation or other forms of dispute resolution” as long as the sanctions imposed comply with English law.

Does this transformation—demographic, political, social, legal, and religious—amount to a revolution? Caldwell believes that it does. Hence his Burkean title. But Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France had at its heart the conviction that the triumph of the revolutionary ideology was not inevitable—that the overthrow of the French monarchy could be made “the parent of settlement, and not the nursery of future revolutions.” Burke’s hopes for France and much of Continental Europe were to be disappointed, for the Jacobin Terror proved to be only the first of many totalitarian episodes over the next two centuries. But he was right about England and, indeed, America, whose revolution followed the pattern of 1688 rather than that of 1789, leading quickly to a settled form of government and society.

Caldwell’s revolution, on the other hand, does not look like the parent of a new settlement—unless it be the caliphate. He himself doubts whether Europe has the moral courage to win over its new immigrant populations in the contest for allegiance. He concludes on a pessimistic note: “For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. Words like ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ mean little when an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines. It is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

The key word here is relativistic. For the story that Caldwell sets out to tell is one of relativism applied across the board in every realm of public policy. Instead of helping the waves of immigrants who came to Europe to escape the ghetto and assimilate into the broader society, the new postwar welfare states enshrined in law the new doctrine of cultural relativism, rendering integration impossible. The universal declarations of human rights that were a legacy of the Holocaust ought to have created a new sense of the world and their place in it for these immigrants, who mostly came from countries where such rights did not exist. Instead, the language of human rights was turned against Israel in the name of antiracism, while the Muslim practitioners of wife-beating, forced marriage, polygamy, female mutilation, and terrorism were able to claim the protection afforded by the Left’s political correctness and anticolonialism. . . .

Caldwell is at his best in chronicling the deceptions and self-deceptions of the intellectuals. Take the serpentine insinuations of Tariq Ramadan, for example, the poster boy of the Muslim Brotherhood, who claims that jihad means -“resistance” and only in a “spiritual” sense and who, months after 9/11, claimed that there was merely “a very strong possibility” that Muslim terrorists were responsible. Caldwell gives Ramadan plenty of rope to hang himself with, quoting such obiter dicta as this: “Islam stands for the liberation of women—but not at the expense of children.” The massacre of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, he dismisses coolly: “We need to consider the situation objectively and bring a critical view as much to the causes—global homogenization and a sometimes savage Westernization—as to the consequences—ethnic and religious tension.” In Caldwell’s view, Ramadan is not in favor of any Western freedoms unless they advance the cause of -Islam. To ask what Islam will contribute is impertinent, for “what Islam will contribute to the West is Islam.” . . . .

The most striking single consequence of Caldwell’s European revolution has been the return of the oldest hatred of all: anti-Semitism. Other writers, such as Gabriel Schoenfeld, have already written about the explosion of jihadist Judeophobia, legitimized by the Left, that has accompanied the terrorist assault on the West. Caldwell’s contribution is to explain how the Muslim-immigrant communities of Europe were the true beneficiaries of the post-Holocaust taboo against anti-Semitism among European elites. What has only recently become clear, especially since -Israel’s counterattacks against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2009, is that this taboo is now a thing of the past. The European elites have given themselves permission to express virulent hostility not only toward Israel but also toward “the Israel lobby” (by which is meant the minority of European Jews who publicly defend the Jewish state). The big lie, that the Palestinians are the new victims and the Israelis are the new Nazis, is now fully established in mainstream European discourse. “Far from forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust,” Caldwell notes, “anti-Semites and anti-Zionists were obsessed with them. They were a rhetorical toolkit.”

And just as in the 1930s, it is in the universities that the new anti-Semitism is most ubiquitous. The clamor for boycotts and other sanctions against Israel has gone far beyond mere gesture politics. The atmosphere at Britain’s traditional centers of expertise on the Middle East (such as Oxford University; the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University; and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House) is becoming intolerable for scholars who try to discuss Israel with any degree of objectivity. This academic atrophy inevitably has a long-term impact on the quality of public debate. The same process is being replicated across Europe, and it is by no means limited to the Left.

The underlying problem is the collective amnesia that has afflicted Europe concerning its origins, values, and traditions. . . . There are as many views in between these two positions as there are Europeans. But the fact that Europeans no longer agree about what their core values are suggests that they no longer have core values. The vacuum is being filled by a faith that knows precisely what its values are and, funded by the revenues of the oil-rich Orient, is proclaiming those values from the rooftops.

The heart of Europe has been transplanted from Mecca. If you want to know how this happened, and what became of the European civilization that Americans used to know and love, you must read Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.