Gathering storm.(The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent)(Book review)

The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, by Walter Laqueur (Thomas Dunne, 256 pp., $25.95)

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'The Last Days of Europe" is a title with a drum-beat to it. Can the implicit doom really be true? A mere hundred years ago, the Continent commanded most of Asia and Africa, and was the universal model of law, learning, and invention. The fathering of Communism and Nazism shattered this preeminence, of course; its ally and rival, the United States, took over the lead. But isn't the European Union that has been taking shape these last 50 years a complete recovery, an exciting new start? Proclaimed in triumphalist treaties and speeches, the intention in the EU capital of Brussels is to make the United States of Europe into the world power of the coming century. A whole range of politicians and the academics at their heels behave and write as if this intention corresponded to reality.

Walter Laqueur is not among them. Born in Breslau, a city disputed between Germans and Poles, he has lived through the period of Nazism and Communism, and is one of the last representatives of European intellectual life as it once was, but is no longer. Judicious skepticism has long been his hallmark as a historian of contemporary issues. Analyzing Europe today, he finds a cluster of interlinked factors that lead him to conclude that, at best, there will be slow, gradual decline; at worst, a rapid collapse.

Laqueur takes as his starting point the lapidary judgment of Auguste Comte that demography is fate. To maintain population, Europe needs a total fertility rate of 2.1 or above, but at present it is a miserable 1.37, and declining. People can afford to have children more easily than in the past, but are choosing not to do so, presumably out of selfishness or lack of confidence in the future. In Italy and Spain, for instance, about half as many children are now being born as around 1960. Yemen is projected by the middle of the century to have a larger population than Russia. If trends continue, by the end of this century the population of Europe will be only a fraction of what it is today.

The effects even now are alarming. In major European countries, for the first time in history, there are more people over 60 years old than under twenty. The median ages of the populations of Europe and the United States are now more or less the same, but by 2050 the median age is projected to be 36 in the U.S.--and 53 in Europe. The welfare state is considered a European glory, and a politician who advocates even small diminutions of it has no chance of being elected. By 2050, if not before, who will be paying for the social benefits, in particular the pensions?

Initially, at least, immigration from the Third World, and Muslim countries in particular, seems to have been welcomed as a means of recruiting the missing workforce. Statistics in this field are invariably more indicative than final, but the given figures are astonishing enough, and may well be understated on account of illegal immigration. In Germany, for instance, the 6,800 Muslim inhabitants of 1961 have risen to 3.6 million today; in Denmark, the 25,000 of 1982 are 300,000; in France and Holland, the totals have doubled since 1980. All told, there are probably somewhere near 20 million Muslim immigrants in western and central Europe, and perhaps almost as many again in Russia.