After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent

A feckless, economically stagnant, ethnically fractious mess is the verdict rendered in this gloomy critique of European social democracy. Framing Europe’s debt crisis, austerity, and rioting as a vindication of his forecasts in The Last Days of Europe, historian Laqueur blames them on intractable long-term pathologies. Europe’s economic union, he argues, will fail without a stronger political union that nationalist loyalties make unlikely. Rising costs will undermine its lavish welfare states. Militarily weak and dependent on foreign energy supplies, Europe will be politically marginalized in world affairs. Underlying all these problems, the author contends, are the twin demographic crises of falling birthrates and—his most insistent concern—a swelling Muslim immigrant minority that, he contends, refuses to assimilate to Europe’s liberal mainstream and would rather join street gangs than get an education. Laqueur harps on these themes in a series of rambling disquisitions interspersed with ruminations on the fall of civilizations. (He believes that cohesive, authoritarian Asian cultures will supersede a continent mired in a slack, permissive liberal relativism.) Laqueur’s Euro-pessimism is ideologically charged and sometimes overstated, but it has enough nuance and realism to pose a bracing challenge to social democratic orthodoxies. (Jan.)