A few thoughts on western multiculturalism

With the country having a bit of slow news week, I thought I might give my two cents worth on the modern western penchant for multiculturalism.

While a number of European conservatives, such as Fjordman, have argued that western enthusiasm for multiculturalism is based on secularized Christian ideas of universal compassion and support for the underdog, few seem to consider the possibility that support for multiculturalism may be based on overconfidence due to early success, rather than ideology.

The Christianity theory assumes ideology is the driving factor behind multiculturalism, rather than actual events and conditions experienced by westerners, which in my view is putting too much emphasis on ideas at the expense of concrete factors like history and evolution.

Ideology, such as liberal autonomy theory, is very influential, but it is also heavily influenced by material and historical factors, which are ultimately the main influences on human behaviour. The dogmatically ideological Soviet Union collapsed in part, because it's leaders could not point to successful working examples of Marxist states which would help lend empirical support to their ideological claims (intellectuals often forget that most people are more impressed by concrete achievement that elegant rational argument).

Looking at the racial and cultural history of Continental Europe, it's noticeable that while Europeans are essentially all of the same race, they are made up of numerous sub-races that to a certain extent, look and act quite differently.

Thanks to the Continent's varied topography and wide range of climates, there is considerable variety in the builds, appearances and temperaments of the various people's of Europe. Added to this is the fact that Europe has developed a large number of distinctive cultures, each with its own language. But despite all this potentially divisive diversity, the continent has become, to a certain extent, a showpiece for the potential of liberal multiculturalism.

Over the last 500 years Europe may have had its fair share of bloody wars, and even the occasional genocide, but overall, the benefits of inter-cultural competition and rivalry have played a vital part in helping Europe overtake the less dynamic civilisations of China and India, and lay the template for North American growth and development. Intense competition between states and city states has meant European countries have had to maximise their national advantages, such as French flair and German efficiency, and this in turn has speeded up the economic and cultural development of the continent as a whole.

Arguably this growth-through-competition experience has helped give rise to the liberal idea that the tension in ethnic diversity provides stimulus for economic and cultural development. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, America is, in many respects, what the contemporary EU wants to be, a large pan- European superstate with enormous economies-of-scale advantages, and a political system that is a greatest hits package of European enlightenment thinking.

Add to the mix Australia, and you suddenly have three successful examples of pan-European cultures operating on a continental scale.

However, while modern Europe, North America, and Australasia are now successful pan-European continents, they are still mono-continental cultural entities, and this is what contemporary multiculturalism fails to take into account.

Buoyed up by their success in developing not one, but three economically successful continents that have provided a model for global economic development westerners have fallen into the trap of believing that peoples from non-European backgrounds can be successfully assimilated into western countries in the same way that non-English speaking Europeans from Eastern and Southern Europe have been integrated into the United States and Australia over the last century.

Liberal diversity theory also fails to take into account that it was only after Europe was freed of non-European powers like the Mongols and the Ottoman Empire that it really begin to take-off culturally and economically - a point probably taken into account by Al-Qaeda in its scheduling of the 9-11 attack to coincide with the 12th of September 1683, the date the Ottomans were repulsed during the Battle of Vienna, which marked the high-water mark of Muslim incursions into Europe.

So far, phase one of the West's audacious multi-cultural experiment hasn't gone to badly, The immigrants from the 1950s to 1970s have, on the whole, been successfully integrated without too many difficulties, and western economies are still keeping most middle-class westerners in the material affluence to which they have become accustomed. Crime rates and economic inequality have increased, but the economies and infrastructure of most western countries have so far survived remarkably well.

The West as a civilisation may be suffering a serious crisis of confidence, but among the managerial class, multiculturalism, like deindustrialisation, is regarded as just another challenge that can be overcome by reason and creativity. Even the increasingly worrying pattern of different races voting according to ethnic interest does not seem to be raising much concern among western elites.

Meanwhile a different set of attitudes has developed in the Far East.

The relatively monocultural Chinese and Japanese civilisations, have maintained a suspicion of foreigners throughout their long histories, but at the same time have had a relatively open to many foreign ideas.

Being more concrete and pragmatic thinkers, the East Asians have felt less threatened by imported religions and philosophies than more idelogically minded westerners and this can be seen with the arrival of Buddhism and Communism in China. However, the example of communism shows that although orientals do have a penchant for imported ideas, their enthusiasm for such imports rapidly fades if the idea or ideology in question proves to be impractical. Nor are East Asians very interested in ideas like globalism and open borders, since these threaten to undermine the blood and soil foundations of their civilisation itself.

Given enough time, the West might swing against multiculturalism through ideological change bought about by intellectuals as part of the wider reaction against liberal ideology. However, the speed with which immigration and divergent reproduction rates are transforming the ethnic composition of most western countries, suggests that it's pragmatic necessity and political agitation which are most likely to lead to a swing against multiculturalism, and towards some kind of post-liberal amalgam of conservatism and nationalism.

This process is already beginning in France, Britain and the United States, where the sheer number of immigrants is putting pressure on politicians to start introducing measures to significantly curtail immigration and take account of majority opinion.

Islamic Immigration in Europe

Reading through Christchurch’s Press last Saturday it was pleasing to come across a relatively right-wing review of Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept: How radical Islam is destroying the West from within.

The reviewer, an Anglican vicar from Christchurch called Ron Hay, points out that Bawer says he left America partly in reaction to the Christian right. However, setting in Europe with his gay partner, he discovered that Islamic fundamentalism made its US counterpart look benign:

"Falwell was an unsavoury creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas. James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn’t telling people to murder their daughters. Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imans wanted to drop a wall on me."

Bawer acknowledges both the rapid growth of aggressive Islam in Europe and Europe’s present policy could well end in disaster. Like many US critics though, he criticizes the Europeans for failing to integrate Muslim immigrants, without recognising that Europe is not the United States, or that the US has no experience of dealing with large numbers of Muslim immigrants.

In contrast to Europe, life is much cheaper in the United States, where recent immigrants can afford to buy cars to get around in, and the economy revolves around flexible labour laws and economies of scale production. Since the cost of living is cheap, people have more disposal income and there is a greater demand for domestic services. Subsequently the US is a great place for someone with limited skills to find work (or a least it was until it became swamped by central American immigrants).

By contrast, life in Europe is crowded, bureaucratic and expensive. Fewer people can afford cars and even if you have a car, the roads are crowded and difficult to navigate. Since life is more expensive, there is also much less need for hired hands like nannies and gardeners. Manufacturing firms have to be smart and innovative to compete with larger US and Japanese competitors, so they need skilled workers who can work with minimum supervision.

Furthermore, since every country has its own language and customs it is difficult to move around and seek out opportunities in other parts of the EU. Europeans countries also tend to have generous and intricate welfare systems, which are largely paid for in advance, and many people feel they should not be extended to recent arrivals.

All this means Europe does not have the ability to accommodate large numbers of immigrants, particularly if they are unskilled and do not understand local laws and customs.

Perhaps the biggest concern though is reproduction differences. In some European countries Muslim immigrants are having three times are many children as indigenous Europeans. As the problems in Palestine show, major differences in reproduction rates between ethnic groups will eventually lead to serious conflict, and the only solution is to keep the different groups apart.

The Europeans do have a right to demand that immigrants adhere to local values, but while you can make it compulsory to learn the local language in schools, its not really possible to force people to integrate if they don’t want to. Just because non-English speaking European immigrants responded to aggressive assimilation policies in the United States during the first half of the 20th Century, does not mean non-European Muslim immigrants will respond in the same way.

Since many Muslim immigrants appear unwilling or unable to integrate, the only options are to curtail further Muslim immigration, introduce voluntary repatriation schemes, and increase incentives for indigenous Europeans to have more children.

A major reason why European birth rates have fallen so low, is the high cost of housing in western Europe, and the dire shortage of housing in Eastern Europe (a legacy of Soviet-era mismanagement). Economic libertarians may loathe to admit it, but subsidised housing was a major factor in the demographic growth that occurred in Europe and Australasia after the end of WWII. (It’s an interesting irony that many baby-boomer libertarians might not have existed if it wasn’t for state subsidised housing!).

If the EU started an ambitious programme to provide more subsidised housing in Eastern Europe, it would help to ease the overcrowding in parts of Western Europe, while providing housing and work opportunities for young Eastern Europeans who are presently flooding west and competing for the limited number of low-skilled jobs with low-income Europeans and recent Muslim immigrants.