I’ve just finished reading America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Canadian-British-American writer Mark Steyn, whom the blurb of the book identifies as the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world. Steyn argues that, based on current demographic and political trends, the next century will see western decline and Islamic ascendancy, and a twilight of western liberal, democratic and secular values. The argument is nothing new, having been made in some form or another in books like Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia: The Europe-Arab Axis, Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilisations?. But it has probably attracted the broadest interest, probably through Steyn’s already-high profile and his sardonic and entertaining writing style.
I have a great many criticisms of the book, but I’ve always been interested in macro-history and I find the basic argument interesting even if not entirely persuasive. Surprising things can and do happen – for example, would someone living in 1910 have thought that the next decade would have seen the collapse of the Turkish, Austrian, German and Russian Empires and the establishment of a massive communist state in Eurasia? So let’s look at the scenario.
Steyn basis his argument on three claims – Muslim populations in Europe are increasing much faster than non-Muslim ones through immigration and high birthrates, political Islam (Islamism) is spreading around the world’s Mosques and Madrassas courtesy of projects funded by Saudi oil money and groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, and comatose western nations suffer from a lack of ‘civilisational will’ and cannot integrate rapidly-growing cultural minorities for lack of anything to integrate into. This final point is too overlaid with the usual right-wing talking points for my liking (eg. “The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood - healthcare, childcare, care of the elderly - the point that it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct […] The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one.”) but the first two more or less make the argument on their own.
Here’s a lengthy excerpt from the book from Maclean’s Magazine around the time of its release.
Steyn begins his demographic argument with a discussion of fertility rates. It takes about 2.1 births per woman for a society to have a stable or increasing population (ie. one for the mother, one for the father, and 0.1 for accidents, disease and other factors). With the exception of the United States (which has about 2.1 births per woman depending on whose figures you use) every western democracy has a fertility rate below replacement rate. Some (Greece, Spain, Italy) have fertility rates below 1.3, which Steyn says is the ‘lowest-low’ fertility rate from which no society has recovered (I’d like to find more out about this – I haven’t read it in other sources).
This causes an aging population, and places a strain on government revenue – one taxpayer has to take on an increasing pension and healthcare burden for the elderly. Therefore, the solution that European countries have adopted according to Steyn is to bring in immigrants from countries with high birthrates. These tend to be in North Africa and the Middle East, and so the resulting immigrants are often Muslim. And they tend to have high birthrates even in Europe – Steyn cites the figure that the average fertility rate for non-Muslims in the E.U. is 1.4, while for Muslims it is 3.5. That, combined with continuing immigration and conversion, sees Europe becoming increasingly Muslim. Steyn suggests it will do so very quickly – within one or two generations.
His critics are not so sure. From Johann Hari:
There have been various demographic projections done, many of which are summarized on Wikipedia here.To fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 200 million European Muslims - in just 13 years. Only Fallacci's rats could reproduce so rapidly. Steyn even admits that the history of demographic predictions is hysterically inept, noting that "most twenty-year projections... are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too" - before offering his own.
Europe's real demographics are described in a similar book by a slightly more scupulous author. Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and DC grande dame, last year wrote 'The West's Last Chance' predicting an enfeebled Europe would collapse before the Muslim hoardes. But after studying the figures, he admitted: “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025... In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.” So for Steyn's predictions to hold true, the current Muslim birthrate needs to hold steady through five decades of life in the West, all Muslims have to become communitarian Islamists bent on sharia law, and there must be no natalist policies from European governments in the meanwhile.
Perhaps sensing this groaning crack in the foundation of his argument, Steyn adds hastily: "It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim." But they were - a fairly obvious difference - not electoral democracies, where any group has to command a majority to rule.
The second aspect of Steyn’s argument concerns the spread of Islamism among Western Muslims. In particular, he points the finger at Saudi Arabia, which is using its oil money to fund extreme mosques and madrassas throughout the world. Without it, Steyn argues, the militant Wahabist interpretation of Islam behind Al-Qaeda and its affiliates would be nothing more than a fringe movement in the Arabian desert. Islam is being reformed, but in a more conservative rather than progressive direction. He uses the Abaya, or traditional Saudi women’s costume, as an example. He cites cases of western Muslim women of non-Arab backgrounds adopting the garment, claiming it is a demonstration of the strict Saudi interpretation of Islam winning out over traditional South Asian, African or Indonesian/Malay practices. While he does not deny that moderate Muslims exist, he says that they lack any sort of institutional support. He cites The Trouble With Islam by Canadian-Muslim feminist Irshad Manji in support of his argument – I’ve read her book myself some years ago and found it very interesting.
Still, the views of Western Muslims are almost impossible to quantify. To cite another critical review, by Rayyan Al-Shawaf:
In general, Steyn does well to take Islamists' threats seriously. Unfortunately, he also seems to believe their propaganda. The author intersperses informative discussion of European demographic changes with alarmist predictions, often quoting swaggering Islamist provocateurs, who routinely inflate their communities' figures and clumsily depict all Muslims as united against a common infidel enemy. The facts differ. Muslims make up all of 2.8 percent of the population of the United Kingdom, 6 percent in The Netherlands, 6 percent to 7 percent in France and 4 percent in Germany. Half of the Muslims in France and an even greater percentage in Germany do not even enjoy citizenship and cannot directly influence the political process. France — the unfortunate butt of many of Steyn's gibes — actually takes the continental lead in insisting on Muslim assimilation; this is, after all, the nation that banned the Islamic headscarf from public schools. In Germany, any attempt by Islamists at fashioning a monolithic Islam would be undercut by the fact that a significant minority of Turks — the largest component of Muslims in Germany — are Alevis, a heterodox sect with no outward religious manifestations.
So I’m not convinced either way. Naturally, the decline of birthrates in the west must have significant demographic consequences for the entire world, as a larger and larger proportion of the world’s people are African, Arab, Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. And Europe will certainly be more racially diverse as a result. But will we live to see the banner of the Caliphate flying over Paris, Madrid, Rome and London? What about Warsaw? Poland has a very small Muslim population, a higher-than-average-for-Europe birth rate and is doing fairly well, and isn’t mentioned in the book. And what about the changes in other parts of the world? By 2050, India will be, if not a superpower, a wealthy and powerful country with some 300 million or more educated and westernized people – a powerful counterweight to any putative Caliphate.
As a final note, here’s a very in-depth interview with Mark Steyn by two professors of UC Berkeley (of all places!): Conversations with History: Mark Steyn
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Or put differently, allowing people to use the education funding they get for whatever educational system they choose.
. I'd say it took about a millennium to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire. 