Europe’s Challenge: Evolve or Die

The European Parliament in Strasbourg, France           Wikimedia Commons/Diliff

With the three recent jihadist attacks on Brussels and Paris, Europe has been given a wake-up notice that what they have been doing is not conducive for survival. 

The multiculturalism Europeans have practiced, when coupled with their low economic growth polices, has only guaranteed the rapid growth of hostile Muslim communities in their midst.

In the latest attacks in Brussels, Belgium, at least 31 people were killed and 270 wounded in suicide bombings at the Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station. ISIS soon claimed responsibility for the attack in a posting from its Amaq news agency. In an updated communique, they threatened other countries participating in the anti-ISIS coalition, promised “dark days” for the coalition, and promised that “what is coming is worse and more bitter.”

The Europeans may have thought the Americans would catch the brunt of jihadist attacks, because the United States is the “Great Satan” for both Shiite and Sunni jihadists. However, being a part of Western Civilization is enough to make Europe a mortal enemy of the jihadists, and propinquity to both North Africa and the Middle East makes them much more accessible targets. The violence Europe has experienced at the hands of jihadists appears to be a “new normal” for them.

The Failed Multiculturalism

Thirty years ago many Europeans saw multiculturalism as an answer to European social problems, particularly because it permits a source of cheap labor from North Africa and the Middle East. By “multiculturalism” is meant a society accepting multiple cultural traditions with multiple languages. In encouraging immigration, European nations did not require immigrants to do anything to assimilate within the host culture. As a result a very large number of immigrant Muslims located their homes in segregated communities, which often became “no-go” areas for police, fire-fighters, and other representatives of the government.

Simultaneously, the economies of European nations evolved in a direction that caused them to have slower growth. As a result it became increasingly hard for the immigrants to advance economically. Denied opportunity and despairing of finding any reasons for hope, the Muslim expatriate communities became natural recruiting grounds for the jihadists.

European Recruiting Grounds for Terrorists

Ever since the Russians committed troops, military aircraft, and naval assets to Syria, a large number of Muslim refugees have been flowing into Europe. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR),  as of January 1, 46% of Mediterranean sea refugee arrivals are from the Syrian Arab Republic, 24% are from Afghanistan, 15% from Iraq, 3% from Pakistan, 3% from Iran, and the remainder are almost entirely from Africa. According to UNHCR there were a total of 1,015,078 arrivals by sea in 2015, and so far in the first quarter of 2016 there have been 163,588 arrivals.

A friend of mine, whose knowledge and judgment I trust, wrote to me that “it is my belief that the Russian objective in Syria was precisely to create the flow of refugees into Europe in order to destabilize NATO.” This would seem to be a relatively easy way to weaken NATO – not only by creating a huge economic burden on Europe to support the refugees, but by creating an obscuring flow of people in which ISIS agents could hide to infiltrate Europe. The infiltration by ISIS may or may not have been intended by Russia, but it is certainly advantageous to them.

The Muslim no-go zones of Europe then provide ISIS operatives a chance, hidden from the eyes of European authorities, to set up support organizations and safe houses, and to recruit indigenous Muslims. The Islamic State claimed last December to have sent sleeper agents posing as refugees throughout Europe and Turkey. This is the major reason Europeans can expect jihadist attacks as the new normal.

The Economic Factors

ISIS would not find European Muslims so easy to recruit if those Muslims could find good-paying jobs. Instead, economic growth is so slow it is almost nonexistent. In the first quarter of 2015, Eurozone growth was 0.5%, 0.4% in the second quarter, and an average quarterly rate of 0.3% for the second half of 2015.

As you can see from the bar graph, annualized quarterly GDP growth has not exceeded 1.6% since January 2013. With such low growth, the economic environment is even worse than in the United States and must seem almost like a permanent recession. In such an environment new jobs would not be readily found for anyone, let alone for Muslims with limited skills and perhaps not speaking the local language, even if they were indigenous. The Muslim no-go zones then become areas of economic desperation from which ISIS can draw recruits.

There has been some controversy on whether or not such no-go zones actually exist, probably because European governments find their existence so embarrassing.  However, there is a cornucopia of witnesses to their existence on the internet. It becomes a fact very hard to hide when in the words of Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum,

I call the bad parts of Europe’s cities partial no-go zones because ordinary people in ordinary clothing at ordinary times can enter and leave them without trouble. But they are no-go zones in the sense that representatives of the state – police especially but also firefighters, meter-readers, ambulance attendants, and social workers – can only enter with massed power for temporary periods of time. If they disobey this basic rule (as I learned first-hand in Marseille), they are likely to be swarmed, insulted, threatened, and even attacked.

There are independent witnesses for no-go zones in Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium,  and the Netherlands.

The Russian Challenge

Internal jihadist attacks and almost non-existent economic growth are not the only challenges to the existence of European states. In addition there is the existential threat from an imperial-minded Russia. Over the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western European states have allowed their military strength to severely decay in order to finance their welfare states.

Another reason for this European military decline is their virtually nonexistent economic growth. At the same time military forces are desperately needed to counter Russia, particularly in the Baltic Sea. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has been probing NATO, particularly in the Ukraine, the Baltic Sea, Georgia, and Syria on Turkey’s and NATO’s eastern flank. Yet economies that do not grow can not support a military necessary to defend Europe from the twin threats of Islamic jihadism and Russian imperialism.

The Existential Threats to Western European Countries

The misery of Western European states is insured by three inescapable existential threats. In descending order of their severity, they are:

1. Stagnant Economic Growth: The means for countering either Islamic jihadist threats or the threat of imperial Russia is provided by a healthy growing economy, which the European Union lacks. Dominated by Keynesian and other leftist economic thought and doctrine, the European economy is stagnating. See the posts Echoes of the Great Depression: Europe, The Bad Examples of the ECB and BOJ, and Europe’s Monetary Experiment Not Working! for more on this subject.
2. The Islamic Jihadist Threat: This is a threat Western Europe can not possibly evade. The jihadists, no matter whether they are the Sunni ISIS or the Shiite forces of Iran, want to destroy Western Civilization, beyond any other reason because Allah wills it.
3. The Military Threat from Russia: Russia has been greatly embarrassed by the loss of empire in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. In maneuvering  to regain these imperial possessions, Russia is aiming at the destruction or the great weakening of NATO.

Any one of these threats is separately an existential threat to Western Europe. All three of them occurring at once is nothing short of catastrophic. Europe must evolve to something more survivable, or have evolution select them for extinction.

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