When the West found itself lacking for serious rivals after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an era of optimism dawned on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., political scientist Francis Fukuyama dreamed about the “end of history,” an inexorable convergence toward liberal democracy. Meanwhile, in Europe, a few philosophers and Eurocrats entertained a similar dream of their own: the comforting idea that their continent was a natural blueprint for the rest of humanity. Going even further than Mr. Fukuyama, they predicted that the world wouldn’t just converge on some generic form of liberal democracy—but rather on its European incarnation, complete with an aversion to military force, a generous welfare state and the post-national form of sovereignty embodied by the European Union.
But as Walter Laqueur argues in “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent,” this dream was delusional from the start. Mr. Laqueur’s case seems easy to make in these times. We have all become well-acquainted with Europe’s woes, from the sovereign-debt crisis to the danger that disagreements about how to handle it might tear the political institutions of the EU apart.
In this loosely linked series of thematic essays on Europe’s troubles, Mr. Laqueur paints an even starker portrait. For him, the current crisis is but the most visible manifestation of a deeper malaise. Economically, he argues, many European countries had been faring badly even before 2008, with provisions for health care and pensions having become unsustainable. Militarily, Europe has long been virtually irrelevant on the global stage. And politically, far-right insurgents such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark had uprooted traditional party structures, even as the idea of a continent-wide super-state—which had once enjoyed the enthusiastic support of European elites—has grown deeply unpopular.
Most important of all are two intertwined worries about immigration and depopulation. Because of low birth rates, Europe is shrinking precipitously. If current trends continue, Mr. Laqueur says, 100 years from now Europe’s population “will be only a fraction of what it is today, and in two hundred, some countries may have disappeared.”
There is only one way out: immigration. But, according to Mr. Laqueur, this isn’t a viable solution. With anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties ever more popular, few countries are likely to open themselves up to further foreigners. What is more, Mr. Laqueur believes that the immigrants already in Europe are so poorly integrated and so unskilled that the most likely newcomers—relatives of those already there—would do more harm than good.
Many prophets of decline build a case for pessimism only to show, in a soaring finale, how to bring about redemption. But Mr. Laqueur’s gloom is not sweetened by easy fixes. Though he moots various possible responses—less Muslim immigration, less welfare, more nationalism—he does not seem to think any of them will avert the “decline of a continent” or the “end of the European Dream.”
Much of Mr. Laqueur’s diagnosis is convincing, and he can be deft, erudite and persuasive. And yet his book has serious shortcomings, from inflammatory descriptions of Europe’s immigrants (young Turks in Germany supposedly speak a language consisting of only “three hundred words, a third of fecal or sexual origin”) to a meandering prose style at times reminiscent of a hastily prepared undergraduate lecture course (two chapters on depopulation are largely identical).
Most important, Mr. Laqueur overstates both how steep Europe’s decline is likely to be and how thoroughly it will dash the dreams of ordinary Europeans. Most Europeans, even among the elite, are hardly holding their breath for Djibouti to turn into Denmark. Indeed, if ordinary Europeans cherish a European dream at all, it is a much more modest one: that Europe’s next five decades may yet turn out to be as peaceful and affluent as as Western Europe has been for the past five decades. Is this hope equally delusional?
According to a spate of fashionable writers, in America as well as in Europe, it is. If the years following the end of the Cold War now seem an era of dreams, then our current moment may one day be known as the era of nightmares. Just as Mr. Fukuyama and others once predicted that the West’s ideas would soon be ascendant the world over, so commentators like Niall Ferguson are now fretting about the West’s descent into irrelevance.
Worse still, they point out something that Mr. Laqueur strangely neglects to mention—namely, that the U.S. faces many of the same challenges as Europe: political dysfunction, high debt, broken pension and health-care systems, large-scale immigration, dependence on foreign energy, and, of course, competition from India and China.
Like Mr. Laqueur, our current doomsayers are very good at portraying the scale of the threats we face. They may be vindicated sooner than we’d like. Even so, none of them have made a definitive case for all-encompassing pessimism. If the West does experience a steep loss of status, the resultant adjustments will be painful. But so long as we retain enough defensive capability to thwart outside meddling and enough economic productivity to take advantage of living and trading in a richer world, we might be able to weather our decline rather better than expected. After all, the law of comparative advantage reminds us that, because free trade allows us to profit from increased productivity elsewhere, a relative loss of standing need not mean an absolute decline of living standards.
In that sense, the embattled dream that most Europeans truly care about might not be such a bad model for Europe’s—and indeed America’s—future after all. Even if, one day, we will no longer be able to impress faraway nations with the might of our armies, hope remains that we can still provide our citizens a decent life.