Europe's absent-minded revolution

Christopher Caldwell's 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe', 15 years on

This year has marked a decisive turning point in our continent’s politics. With gains for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the European elections and the AfD in several German regional votes, right-wing populists now in government in Italy and the Netherlands, Reform’s breakthrough in Britain, and the most recent victory for the Freedom Party in Austria, the continent has decisively shifted right.

Europe is in a state of high anxiety, alarmed by conflict on its eastern and southern edges, with many of its largest economies in flatline mode and the entire continent facing an energy crisis. Its post-war political settlement appears to be unravelling, with the populists seemingly unstoppable.

Fifteen years ago, Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe was published, a chronicle of how a war-shattered continent became an immigration society, drawing labourers from beyond Europe for the first time. It was a ground-breaking book by perhaps the greatest political commentator of our age, and a decade and a half later, it explains how European politics reached this crisis point.

Caldwell has a historian’s understanding of the human condition and human folly; I was first put onto the book by a friend who compared him to Gibbon. He appreciates the immigrants’ desire to better themselves and the native’s conflicting hopes that things might change and yet stay the same, and writes with sympathy for both. He also understands the conflict inherent in human society when two cultures collide, and that grand schemes and noble intentions have unforeseen consequences.

The story begins in a continent wracked by destruction and desperate for hands to rebuild it. What transpired was unplanned, unforeseen, and largely unwelcome.

‘Europe became a destination for immigration as a result of consensus among its political and commercial elites,’ Caldwell wrote. Those elites ‘made certain assumptions: Immigrants would be few in number. Since they were coming to fill short-term gaps in the labour force, most would stay in Europe only temporarily… No one assumed they would ever be eligible for welfare. That they would retain the habits and culture of southern villages, clans, marketplaces, and mosques was a thought too bizarre to entertain.’

Yet ‘almost all the assumptions with which mass immigration began proved false. As soon as they did, Europe’s welcome to the world’s poor was withdrawn – at first ambiguously, through the oratory of a few firebrand politicians in the 1960s, then explicitly through hard-line legislation against immigration in the 1970s. Decades in, decades out, the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end of our story. The revocation of Europe’s invitation to immigrants, no matter how explicit it became, did little to stem their arrival. As the years passed, immigration to Europe accelerated. At no point were Europeans invited to assess its long-term costs and benefits.’

This transformation had its roots in the post-war era, and the first migration of non-Europeans, often from former colonies. In Britain it began with vague and sloppy law-making, with the 1948 British Nationality Act allowing entry for those ‘who hold a UK passport or a passport issued by the Government of the United Kingdom’. This was in large part to reassure the people of Australia, Canada and New Zealand; it was never intended to apply to subjects outside those settler nations, and no one imagined that they could, or would, want to move to a cold, shell-shocked country whose non-European population was in the low five figures.

While labour needs drove the first migrations, the original intention had been to recruit other Europeans. Many governments tried to attract labour from neighbouring countries, and France even considered bringing in German guest workers - but public opinion was understandably too hostile.

Germany’s own Gastarbeiter programme began in 1955, with the aim of bringing in a modest amount of Italian farm labour. As this source dried up with Italy’s growing prosperity, it would expand its recruiting across the Mediterranean, a demand that would only grow after the Berlin Wall cut off migration from the East in 1961 (the DDR also had its own guest worker programme, mostly from Vietnam and Mozambique).

So Germany looked to Turkey, the government of which aggressively petitioned for the programme, providing as it did desperately needed hard currency. These Turks came to the Rhine and Ruhr where they slept in hostels and worked in mines and steel plants: ‘They were diligent, upstanding, and a bargain, and were supposed to be rotated’ every two years. Indeed, three-quarters of the 18.5 million who came to Germany between 1960 and 1973 did indeed go home.

Yet recruiting, vetting and medically approving fresh migrants was expensive and laborious, and so corporations lobbied the government to make these contracts renewable - and to let them bring their families. Long-term family separation is emotionally agonising, and enforcing it entails a hardness that western governments no longer possess (unlike the migrant-dependent Gulf Arab states, for example).

Path dependency took its inevitable turn, and the number of Turks in Germany rose from 329,000 in 1960 to one million in 1964, and 2.6 million in 1973. As Caldwell quotes a British government report later, there is nothing more permanent than temporary migrants, and so in Germany, as elsewhere, a process had begun that would be hard to stop.

‘The most important factor in migration is migration,’ Caldwell wrote: ‘It takes courage to be the first to strike out on your own and submit to the laws, customs, and whims of a society that doesn’t care about you. But once your compatriots have set up a beachhead, migration becomes simple and routine. Networks reduce fear. They cure homesickness as reliably as penicillin cures strep.’

The economic rationale was often short-term, and many of the industries in which immigrants came to work were on their last legs, unable to compete with cheaper competition in the developing world. Algerians were brought to France's linen looms and Pakistanis into the mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and when these factories inevitably closed down, the same migrants and their sons would suffer the worst effects of unemployment.

Despite the mass lay-offs, Europe’s labour needs grew more intense as it switched to a service economy, and the population grew older: fertility rates fell below replacement levels in France, West Germany, Britain, Italy and the Netherlands in the late 1960s and 70s, meaning that new workers would be needed to maintain a youthful labour force.

Immigration was also linked to the new social model Europe was building, and the belief – naïve as it turned out – that recruiting overseas would allow natives to benefit from their new cradle-to-grave welfare states. Germany’s social model came to involve ‘workweeks as short as thirty-two hours; seven-week vacations, full health coverage; free lunches; a compensation package that rose, in the case of unionized metal workers, to just under $50 an hour and - most fatefully of all - retirement in one's fifties at just under peak career earnings.’

Immigrants would be the ‘deus ex machina of European luxury. They would emerge from the desiccated and starving hamlets of the Third World and ride to the rescue of the retirement checks and second homes, the wine tasting and snorkelling vacations, of the most pampered workforce in the history of the planet.’ This turned out to be wrong, but in the short-term European economies came to grow dependant on, or addicted to, immigrants, in order to maintain the lifestyle to which people had become accustomed.

There was an implicit bargain at work, one which European leaders did not dwell on, and their voters were not explicitly asked about. Caldwell noted how European settlers in the early days of British colonisation often came as indentured servants; in return for years of gruelling labour they were promised eventual freedom and prosperity. For migrants in modern Europe, it was the promise of citizenship and ‘rights’, both to remain in the country and to benefit from its welfare system, that made the hard work worthwhile. The deal for the immigrants was that they, and their children, would come to enjoy the perks of this system.

Yet migrants could not come to the rescue of Europe’s social model, and the projected numbers required are wildly untenable. Caldwell noted that the United Nations population division calculated early in this century that maintaining the age structure and support ratio would require 701 million ‘replacement’ immigrants by 2050, a figure that would result in total social breakdown.

What this came to resemble was a Ponzi scheme. ‘The benefits of this indenture accrue to immigrants’ new countries only so long as immigrants are illegal and transnational. Immigrants don’t stay that way forever. As soon as they are legally and socially assimilated in the way that society professes to want, they acquire all sorts of rights and expectations. They become Europeans who, by definition, won't do the jobs-no-European-wants. At that point, to ensure that those jobs-nobody-wants get done, society must recruit a new reserves army of foreign-born grunt workers, which sounds like the capitalism of Karl Marx’s worst imaginings.’

Paradoxically, immigrants were often brought in to help sectors which feel more ‘authentic’ to the national culture. Caldwell noted that Italy imports half a million labourers a year from Africa and the Middle East to work in agriculture and catering, even though ‘Italy’s real comparative advantage may lie elsewhere… in some high-tech economic model that is remunerative but not particularly “Italian”.

‘In many walks of life, Italy has a choice between keeping the population looking the way it did fifty years ago and keeping the landscape and the social structure looking the way they did fifty years ago.’ But they will probably lose both.

Ageing populations in a welfare state are a problem: Caldwell noted that Spain’s population over the next 50 years would stay the same but its ratio of workers to retirees would go from 4.5 to 1 to less than 2 to 1, and yet even taking in two million workers would only lead to a 10 per cent increase of the workforce. On top of this, migrants are more likely to work in low-income jobs so this would be closer to 8 per cent in terms of tax revenue. Caldwell noted the absurdity of a country with a declining population experiencing a building boom which necessitated importing workers to do the work: ‘The houses the newcomers are building are their own.’

This has been overseen by authorities exhibiting a tremendous level of naivety, wishful-thinking and plain delusion. For example, a Home Office report of late 2007 declared that: ‘In the long term, migrants themselves will age and contribute to the increasing dependency ratio but only assuming that they remain in the UK during retirement.’

‘Goodness!’ Caldwell wrote: ‘What other assumptions can be made? Are we to assume that migrants will give decades of their lives and tens of thousands of pounds of their earnings to fund an expensive and comprehensive welfare states for Europeans, and then obligingly slink back to the Third World to pass their retirement in poverty, at the very moment they are due to recoup their contribution?’

One reason that elite thinkers have come to support this system is because, on a global scale at least, it works: the remittances that immigrants send home have come to play an important part in the global economy, and hugely beneficial to some poorer countries (people also spend remittance money more wisely than aid). According to a World Bank document, $250 billion in remittances were wired in 2006; they account for more funds than all the foreign direct investment in the world, and more than double the rate of international aid. Western Union in 2007 set up its 350,000th agency, in India, while transfers to El Salvador account for sixth of the economy, and Moroccans sent €3.6 billion home in 2003. Remittances are an important driver of economic growth in some regions, although he noted the downside that this has led to a shortage of doctors in the Caribbean and Africa. Unsurprisingly, donor countries are keen to lobby for freer movement.

Yet the idea that immigration would rescue Europe’s economy proved illusionary. Indeed, while migrant outcomes vary by country, across continental Europe they and their children are now less economically productive than the natives.

In the Netherlands, 40 per cent of immigrants were on government assistance at the time of Caldwell’s writing, while Turks in Germany on average are only net contributors for 29 years of their lives, compared to 45 for native Germans; only 45 per cent of Denmark’s immigrants work, and half of those earn a monthly salary within 100€ of what they could get on welfare. In contrast to Europe, the US and Canada received 54 per cent of the world's academically qualified immigrants (although Canada has in recent years adopted a more ‘European’ model). The immigration experience in the old continent has therefore been notably different.

As Caldwell argued, there was the socialist case for immigration, as a means to maintaining the welfare ratio, and there was the capitalist case – that immigrants drive economic dynamism. Yet these vary hugely by the regions of origins of the migrants themselves, and the numbers are hardly world-shattering. He quoted Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, who wrote:

‘Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains from freer global migration are huge, and greatly exceed the benefits from freer world trade... The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere 3 per cent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.’

For Caldwell, this ‘reminds one of the movie Austin Powers, in which Doctor Evil emerges from isolation to ominously demand “one million dollars” for not blowing up the world. The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion. In contrast, $139 billion is simply not that much money’ – especially when the culture impact is transformative.

‘The social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certain Europeans, you are infuriated by polyglot markets and street signs written in Polish, Urdu, and Arabic, sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back. If, like other Europeans, you view immigration as a lifeline of excitement, worldliness, and palatable cuisine thrown to your drab and provincial country, then immigration would be a bargain even if it imposed a significant economic cost.’

This is at the core of the debate for the European electorate: it’s about society, not economics. Throughout the world there is a preference for cultural sameness, with Swedes being so taciturn that, according to ethnologist Åke Dunn ‘signalling in traffic is often considered an undesirable expression of aggression’. Swedes like the feeling of being around people with a similar outlook, and theirs is highly unusual by global standards, a culture unusually low on corruption and cheating. And so, Caldwell wrote, ‘immigration can make your life a little bit crummier’. (Indeed, being a racial minority is a risk factor for mental illness, which partly explains higher rates of psychosis among second-generation migrants.)

These cultural differences might once have been self-explanatory, and the desire for community sameness considered to be not just understandable but mundane. But Europe had undergone a huge trauma and was not thinking straight - the immense tragedy of the Second World War was not only physically shattering to the continent but, as time went by, would come to be morally shattering too. It was the end of an old civilisation and the start of a new world, with the Holocaust coming to form a new origin story about the fall of western man.

Caldwell wrote how ‘Western Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind’ and that this was driven by emotional as well as procedural and economic forces: ‘The dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was one of repentance for two historic misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.’ This is the shadow that hangs over European civilisation, and which continues to drive the choices its leaders make.

To be continued…