Bidding Europe Adieu

About a month ago I wrote that if France rejected the EU constitution, it would throw the continent into political turmoil and uncertainty. Well, lo and behold, it looks like I was right. The aftermath of the constitution's resounding defeat at the hands of French and Dutch voters has all but killed the project, and not a moment too soon.

The EU constitution was so large and cumbersome that it virtually guaranteed its own demise. Any document that long is bound to contain something to offend everyone, which explains why the French feared it would impose "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" (i.e., free market reforms) on them, while the British regard the constitution as the embodiment of socialistic French statism. The Dutch, who are deeply fearful of their growing Muslim population, overwhelmingly rejected the constitution, largely due to concerns that it would remove what little immigration barriers remain in place. The British have suspended their referendum, although polls show that they still want to get in on the fun of destroying the dreams of the Europhiles.

And so the constitution is all but dead. Three cheers for that. But Europe still faces monumental challenges: stagnated economic growth, aging populations, soaring unemployment, unsustainable entitlement spending, cultural drift, and out-of-control immigration. If any of this sounds familiar, it should; it is the Democratic blueprint for the future of America.

Oh, sure, they don't put it that way. Rather, they talk of the need for a European-style "social safety net" that all "enlightened countries" already have, as if committing civilizational suicide is the very definition of "enlightened." But as the New York Times' David Brooks notes, much of what currently ails Europe is a direct result of decades of the same policies that Democrats want to implement here at home:

Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism.

Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline.

Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon.

Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance, but those arguments look more and more strained, in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable. Europe's population is aging and shrinking. By 2040, the European median age will be around 50. Nearly a third of the population will be over 65. Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third, sending Europe into a vicious spiral of higher taxes and less growth.

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

This is the chief problem with the welfare state, which has nothing to do with the success or efficiency of any individual program. The liberal project of the postwar era has bred a stultifying conservatism, a fear of dynamic flexibility, a greater concern for guarding what exists than for creating what doesn't.

That's a truth that applies just as much on this side of the pond.

I would add only one other contributing factor to Europe's drastic and seemingly unstoppable decline: extreme secular humanism (not surprisingly, another trademark of modern leftist thinking). Europe is now a post-Christian society, beholden to an anti-belief system that defines itself not by what it is for, but by what it is against. As a basis for social order, secular humanism is unsustainable, because it is fundamentally empty. This nebulous ideology cannot provide any meaning beyond this current world, and I expect that disillusioned Europeans will increasingly turn away from secular humanism, and turn toward Islam instead. This trend will take decades to fully develop, but by mid-century, Europe as it has been historically known will be no more.