Half Wrong on Europe's Doom

Europeans of a nervous disposition should probably avoid going into bookshops on their next visit to the United States. If they venture inside, they might come across an array of titles with a bloodcurdlingly bleak view of their continent's future.

In Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept" -- now in its eighth printing -- the U.S. reader is told that by ignoring the threat from radical Islam, "Europe is steadily committing suicide and perhaps all we can do is look on in horror." Tony Blankley, author of "The West's Last Chance," warns that: "The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s." In "The Cube and the Cathedral," George Weigel, a Catholic conservative, claims that "Western Europe is committing a form of demographic suicide." In this he echoes U.S. arch-conservative Pat Buchanan, who argues in his bestselling "The Death of the West" that Europe's population is set to fall to 30 percent of its current level by 2100, and therefore "the cradle of Western civilization will have become its grave."

I suspect that few Europeans would recognize themselves in this distorting mirror held up from the other side of the Atlantic. And yet -- tempting as it was to toss all these books in the trash and go out for a drink in the midst of my doomed civilization (one might as well enjoy what little time is left) -- it is impossible to dismiss the American prophets of European doom completely. Strip away the hysteria and the hype, and they make two serious points.

First, European fertility rates have fallen well below the rate of 2.1 children per woman needed for a population to remain stable. Across the European Union the average fertility rate is now approximately 1.5. This downward spiral in population is self-reinforcing, since Europe will have fewer and fewer women of reproductive age in the future. The second point is that the Muslim population of Europe is rising sharply at the same time as the white, European population is falling. The U.S. pessimists argue that this is a recipe for social turmoil, or worse.

These trends could, indeed, spell trouble. In fact, European officials are also alarmed. Last week, the European Commission warned that without reform, the aging of the EU's population will see average economic growth rates of a mere 1 percent per year from 2030 to 2050. Meanwhile, a lively, sometimes agonized, debate about the assimilation of Muslim immigrants is taking place across the continent.

The trends the U.S. doom-merchants have latched on to are real enough. The weakness in their arguments is that at every stage they tend to make the most pessimistic assumptions.

Take demography: Buchanan argues that "The Spanish birthrate is the lowest in all Europe and the population is projected to fall by 25 percent in 50 years." Such projections only hold, however, if you assume that Spain will have no net immigration. In fact, over the past three years more than half a million immigrants per year have been arriving in Spain, pushing the population over 44 million. Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, projects that the 25 members of the EU will have a total population of 449.8 million in 2050, compared with 456 million today because falling fertility will be largely offset by rising immigration.

The problem is not that the European population will simply shrink away, but that over the next 50 years, Europe will have to deal with the fact that its population is becoming both much older and much more diverse.

If Europe's welfare states remain unreformed, the aging of the population could lead to a fiscal meltdown as pension and healthcare systems become unaffordable. But, as the saying goes: "Something that cannot go on forever, won't." Demographic pressures are already forcing Europeans to change their welfare systems and career patterns. In some countries, the process will be very difficult. In others, it might be relatively painless.

Similarly, the U.S. pundits' vision of a Muslim takeover of Europe -- creating a new continent called "Eurabia" -- relies on projecting demographic trends to their limit and beyond. Weigel fantasizes about a day when "the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St Peter's in Rome." Given that just 1.7 percent of the Italian population is currently Muslim, that seems a long way off. Of the 456 million people in the EU, just 15 million to 16 million are Muslim.

Of course, rapid immigration from the developing world combined with higher fertility rates among immigrant populations means that the Muslim population of Europe is likely to rise sharply. In some places such as France, where Muslims already make up 7 percent to 10 percent of the population, the changes could be quite dramatic.

Until a few years ago, mainstream European opinion would have shrugged off rising Muslim populations as unworthy of debate but that is no longer the case. Just this week in Britain there has been heated argument over the wearing of veils by schoolteachers and the radicalization of Muslim students. One recent poll found that nearly one-third of young British Muslims agreed that the July 2005 bombings in London were "justified because of British support for the war on terror."

That is a truly alarming picture, but it is also just a snapshot. There is no doubt that tensions between Muslims and other Europeans are at an unprecedented high after Sept. 11, 2001, the Iraq war, riots in Paris and terrorism in London, Madrid and Amsterdam. It is certainly possible that things will just get worse, but it is not inevitable. Zachary Shore, the author of "Breeding Bin Ladens" and the only one of the American authors in question to have taken the trouble to talk to a lot of European Muslims, sees Europe's Muslim population as poised "at a critical fork in the road: One trail leads them to western integration, the other sets a course for alienation and possible extremism."

European governments are acutely aware of this and are changing policies in response. The British are rethinking their "multicultural" approach to immigration; the French are considering positive discrimination; the Danes have cracked down on arranged marriages. Who knows -- some of these policies might even work. If they do not, politics and policies will change again. Of all the many scenarios for the future of Europe, perhaps the least likely is that Europeans will simply sleepwalk off a cliff.

Gideon Rachman is a columnist for the Financial Times, where this comment was published.