Postwar Europe’s new challenges
A book called “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,’’ in its quite conscious echoes of Burke’s famous 1790 title on France, foreshadows a conservative’s lament on what the author imagines to be a contemporary upheaval similar to one whose consequences - political, social, intellectual - all of us live with over two centuries later. This “revolution’’ is postwar Muslim immigration to Europe, in the families and societies these Muslims have created within a once homogenous, recently Christian continent that never planned for so many foreigners to arrive and even now has almost no idea what to do with them, except to fear the worst for their native culture and security. For behind the backdrop is the specter of Islamic terrorism where, as the author points out, “proving that Islamism is not the same thing as Islam will not make it less dangerous.’’
That author is Christopher Caldwell, a cerebral American journalist who writes attractive prose and who, sharing Burke’s pessimism without Burke’s splashes of rhetoric or heat, is an assiduous reporter who has interviewed many scholars and public figures over many years (often in predecessor articles for The New York Times Magazine or his own Weekly Standard) and read widely and deeply in numerous languages. His book is the best place for any interested, unbiased reader to start on this subject, free as it is of hostility to Islam or immigrants, or the stridency of recent books.
What makes Islam, and Islamic immigration, particularly worrisome to Caldwell isn’t so much its numbers (perhaps 20 million in a continent of 375 million), or the dangerousness of its most violent adherents but its “confidence’’ next to Europe’s lack thereof. The implacable confidence of Islam is the bedrock of its power, Caldwell suggests from his first pages (“immigration enhances strong countries and cultures, but it can overwhelm weak ones’’) to its last page, which declares that “when an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, [it] is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.’’
All Caldwell’s meticulous presentation of evidence and construction of claims come from this basic presumption that not everyone who knows Europe will share. It is not at all clear that “Europe’’ should be considered the insecure or weak culture, and “Islam’’ the anchored, confident one; and the daily news from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and other Muslim countries will not often suggest otherwise.
For perhaps there is, to contradict Caldwell, a “consensus’’ about “what European values are.’’ When he observes that postwar “European societies were set up to allow residents - and, increasingly, citizens - to lead their entire lives in a foreign culture’’ he touches on the most pronounced European value of all, and one shared by Americans: a preference to leave people alone, which partly explains the clumsiness of Europeans when forced into laws restricting families, or people’s public dress, that clearly they would rather have avoided.
Caldwell rightly suggests that postwar Europe may have been shocked into tolerance and laissez-faire social attitudes by the catastrophe of the World War II Holocaust, but at least there was that victory and it will take much worse than what has happened to reduce it. For most civilizations, including our American one, muddling through is the order of the day, and the long success of postwar European society suggests this can be muddled through, too. For a European, a decade is a shorter time than for an American, and so perhaps, just as Zhou Enlai famously said of the French Revolution, it is still too soon to know the outcome of this latest “revolution in Europe.’’
Eric Weinberger has reviewed books for the Globe since 2000. 
