The Indo-European Project
Explaining the Ursulawave
This is a sort of coda, or bonus, to yesterday’s piece on the Ursulawave.
There’s a great contradiction within the European project. While the continent’s elites define themselves in contrast to Americans, whom they regard as less sophisticated – the comfort blanket of poor relations down the ages - the EU also consciously imitates the United States of America, and not just in its political structure.
In particular, the European Union mimics the American concept of itself as a nation of immigrants – and does it rather less well. Europe lacks any of the components which made the American experiment successful: plentiful land, an aggressive assimilationist culture, economic freedom, culturally compatible immigrants, and a minimal welfare state which both aided integration and improved selection.
Most crucially, and unlike the US, Europe has drawn its immigrants from a civilisation with which it is in historic conflict, creating conditions which, as Christopher Caldwell observed, are far more like white America’s relationship with its black minority than with either Ellis Island or post-1965 immigrants.
Caldwell wrote that American policymakers saw migration from Latin America and Asia as a way of undermining the relative strength of African-Americans, and nullifying their arguments that racial injustice defined America. He wrote that ‘It may also be that the arrival of non-white immigrants served the white majority in the United States by providing a standing refutation of charges of white racism’.
I wonder if, seeing the problems caused by migration from regions such as the Maghreb and Horn of Africa, Europe’s leaders now look to India as a way of undermining the conflict between the majority and oppositional culture.
Perhaps the large-scale arrival of Indians will prove that immigrants can make it here too, and there are reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to arrivals from some of the world’s trouble spots, Indians in Europe have very low crime rates: in Denmark they are among the most law abiding group; likewise in Britain their arrest rate is half the national average. Much of this must be due to selection effect, as Britain’s post-war wave of Indians largely came from the mercantile classes, and their descendants are today way above the national average in terms of income, home ownership and education.
Yet one can admire and like Indians, and still see that this deal is unwise. It not only ignores the fact that America’s race problem has not been watered down by diversity, but that Europe still lacks all the ingredients which made the US a success story.
