Obama’s European constituency

By EDWARD ALEXANDER •

Sen. Barack Obama may be the first candidate for the American presidency to run a European campaign as – to quote his own words before a huge German crowd of 200,000 people on July 24 – a “citizen of the world” (though also, he hastened to add, “a proud citizen of the United States”) and an ardent advocate of “global citizenship.” He even told the Germans that his father had been inspired by the “dream” of freedom and opportunity in “the West” (as if he had aspired to Germany, rather than America). What are we to make of Obama’s tremendous popularity on a continent where, unless we make an exception for one undersecretary in France, not a single high government position is held by a black person? What shall we make of the fact that Obama’s European popularity is being held up by his supporters as an important reason why Americans should vote for him in November? Why should the United States, a nation that was built up by immigrants, many of whom had fled from Europe’s religious and political persecution, grinding poverty and fiercely competitive nationalisms, now look to Europe as a model of wisdom in facing up to the major crises of our time? Why should we emulate the values of a continent whose current rate of emigration among its native population is at an all-time high?

European civilization has bequeathed to Americans Homer and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Milton, Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel, but also Hitler and Stalin, Nazism and communism, Auschwitz and the gulag. At its pinnacle a mere century ago, by 1942–’44, European civilization itself seemed to have reached its end in the ashes of Auschwitz and Maidanek. But now, or so we are told by our enlightened classes, the Europeans have [gotten rid] of their old nationalism and joined together in the European Union, a kind of United States of Europe to provide an exemplary model of multiculturalism, the welfare state, and (to quote Obama again) “global citizenship.”

American Europhiles conveniently overlook several crucial facts. Europe could not rescue herself from either Nazism or Communism without massive help from (and sacrifice by) Americans. If America had not taken over from the hapless Europeans their defense against the Soviet Union, they would not have been able to afford the luxury of building up their welfare states. More recently, it was America, not the European Union, that stepped in to prevent genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Far from being a continent worthy of emulation, Europe is in steep decline. If “to be or not to be” is indeed the compelling question, then Europe has chosen not to be. Its fertility rate of 1.37 is the lowest in the world; in such traditionally Catholic countries as Italy and Spain, it is lower still. If, as the French philosopher Auguste Comte said, “demography is fate,” then Europe has lost the will to live. Its depleted work force has had to be replaced by immigrants, most of them Muslims, who now number 20 million in west and central Europe (and another 20 million in Russia). Such cities as Rotterdam, Lille, Bradford and Antwerp are on the verge of having Muslim majorities. It is this pattern that led the Egyptian-born writer Bat Ye’or to coin the term “Eurabia” for the new Europe. The same alarm bells have been sounded by a number of writers, among them Mark Steyn (“America Alone”), Walter Laqueur (“Last Days of Europe”) and Bruce Bawer (“While Europe Slept”). But these have apparently gone unheard by Senator Obama and his acolytes.

He has also ignored Europeans’ desperate measures to appease forces they (once again) feel helpless to repel. Several European churchmen (among them the Dutch Catholic Bishop of Breda) have urged Christians to replace the word “G-d” with “Allah,” and an Anglican bishop has urged adoption of Islamic sharia law in several areas of jurisprudence. In Scotland, the arrest of several Muslim doctors who were planning to blow up Glasgow Airport led to the banning of pork products in the hospital where they worked. In Holland, a Somali-born Liberal member of parliament who wrote the screenplay for a film about the plight of Muslim women called “Submission” (whose director was murdered by an Islamist fanatic), was forced out of parliament – and then out of Holland. In deference to the violence of Israel-hatred among Muslims, numerous Europeans (especially among the “progressive” classes) have reverted to their “default” ideology of anti-Semitism, so virulent in England that it has been the subject of parliamentary investigation. Contrived Muslim “outrage” over – to name but a few examples – the Danish cartoons, the knighting of Salman Rushdie, the pope’s condemnation of religious fanaticism, the teddy-bear episode, has brought widespread European condemnation, not of Muslim rioters, but of those who offended them.

European acclaim is not an endorsement that a candidate pledged to protect American democracy against its newest enemies should relish.

Edward Alexander is professor emeritus, University of Washington.