Is European civil war inevitable? Increasingly the question is posed these days not only by those who were in the past labeled alarmists and political amateurs, but by all sorts of people who are waking up to the disconcerting aspects of Muslim immigration in Europe. At first thought, predicting civil war would indeed still sound somewhat irresponsible to many westerners, especially the middle and upper classes who have retreated in pleasant and quiet suburbs, and therefore believe the whole country must look like their quiet, pleasant suburbs,  populated by the same friendly and orderly kind of people. Indeed it is stunning to what extent  this group have become totally isolated from evolutions in their own country, to the point that once again we may refer to “the two nations”; the pays réel, so to speak, composed of people who are often confronted with Muslim behavior and simply don’t like what they see, and the pays légal, composed of the estranged upper middle classes and politicians of all parties. I can very well imagine that all warnings about growing Islamic influence in our cities, and eventually in the country as a whole, strikes these people as apocalyptic. Nonetheless, -and this is also an answer to critics of Islam who aren’t very impressed by the Islamic threat and believe a Muslim takeover is impossible- it is very hard to deny the overwhelming evidence, both relating to current affairs and to larger historical patterns, that within the next century Europe will witness, if not an Islamic takeover, at least serious internal tensions that will probably complete the process of decline that set in after the First world war. 

The problem of large numbers of Islamic immigrants arriving in Europe each year, is serious enough in itself. Currently, the Muslim population is believed to exceed ten percent in France, and in all major European countries it has reached the five per cent mark some time ago. It may be true that, as some critics of the “Eurabia” thesis reassuringly note, a less than ten per cent total for western Europe as a whole is not alarmingly great, because their influence on society as whole is negligible even if they pose grave problems by themselves. But this is to ignore the long-term evolution: since 2000, the Islamic population in Europe and the United States has almost doubled, and there is no  reason to assume that this trend will not continue in the next decades; already, it can be predicted with certainty that some major European cities will have a Muslim majority some years from now. Arguments to counter this prediction are unconvincing and, mostly, simply ignore reality: Muslim birth-rates may be slowly declining, but as Muslim communities in the west become larger and form their own closed systems, impervious to western influence, this decline is already becoming less marked.  Second, even with declining birth rates, there is not much hope if immigration continues as it does today, legal as well as illegal. It has been estimated that in the worst case of the United Kingdom, about two hundred thousand immigrants arrive each year, undoubtedly for a large part Muslims, and Sweden is actively encouraging immigrants and expects to receive another forty thousand of them this year. In total, more than a million immigrants are still arriving in Europe annually, and current democratic policies and standards can in no way suffice to stem this avalanche. Europe will probably only be shaken out of complacency when it is too late, and the apparatus of state coercion will already partly be dominated by the Islamic community. 

But the problem is not simply a demographic problem: as readers of the BJ will know, the Muslim immigration question in the West is intimately connected with political and cultural factors, first of all the influence of the Arab oil countries, and secondly the demographic explosion in the Muslim world. In fact, the revival of Islam stems from these two factors, combined with the cultural crisis in the west and the corresponding dominance of political correctness. You do not have to accept the Eurabia theory to appreciate the weight of these factors: maybe it cannot be ascertained that at a given moment political leaders from Europe and Saudi Arabia concocted some scheme and that all current evolutions have been planned in some way, but what is certain is that Saudi oil money has bought large segments of the American and West-European campus and has decisively influenced the academe and policy makers with its propaganda campaign to obscure the real nature of Islam. And of course, it must be visible to all that the foreign policy decisions of western nations have been determined by Arab demands and preferences, as in the Bosnian crisis when the US deployed an air force to protect Bosnian Muslims who were in fact the original aggressors, while at the same time hundreds of thousands of Christians were slaughtered in Darfur by Jihadist, and the international community even refused to impose an air blockade. Similarly, the Obama administration rushes in to complain to the Burmese government about its treatment of Muslims, while Christians and other minorities are almost without exception persecuted in Islamic countries, first of all in Egypt and Nigeria, and all western response is lacking. In short, it simply a fact that the Wahabis and the Muslim Brotherhood have had a strategy to infiltrate the west and break down its defenses from the inside since the fifties; and in this goal they have succeeded very well up till now.

But perhaps change is on the way, if we look more closely at evolutions in the Islamic world. As I mentioned, two components of the Islamic revival (by which I mean, the revival of Islamic civilization) are the oil weapon and the demographic weapon; and precisely in these two areas significant changes are on the way. The United States can already provide all its own energy, so the leverage of the Arab oil states on the largest western nation is certain to diminish rapidly; at the moment this evolution is still halted by the exceptionally pro-Islamic and strategically inept Obama administration, but over time no American leader is likely not to understand the enormous benefit of being freed at last from Arab tutelage. But also for Europe there is hope, simply because the Gulf states, with the exception of Qatar, are running out of fossil fuels and within decades will not be able to supply Europe with energy as they did in the past; and the domestic consequences of diminishing returns on oil and the resulting decline in stand of living will be highly disruptive.

Less attention has been paid to the demographic decline of the Islamic world. David P. Goldman, the “Spengler” columnist of the Asia Times, has repeatedly pointed out this evolution, and predicts a near-collapse of Islamic civilization within the coming decade. Already, countries like Iran and Turkey have a birth rate almost as low as west-European countries, and all Arab countries are going through the same evolution. Probably this will not directly influence Muslim immigration to the west for the next decade, and it is even probable that increasing poverty and all sorts of crises in the Middle East will result in an increase, but population decline will undoubtedly mean a blow to the self-confidence of the Islamic community and its self-image of a vigorous civilization unaffected by western demoralization and the resulting influence on fertility. Moreover, as Goldman points out, the consequences for Islamic societies themselves will reach farther than mere population decline: in countries with a low standard of living it will prove utterly impossible to support an aging population, and severe crisis will result. Combined with the running out of Arab oil, it is indeed no exaggeration to speak of a coming collapse of Islamic civilization. 

The big question mark is how the west will react to these obviously favorable circumstances. It would also be a test for the Eurabia theory: if the grip of Arab oil on Europe loosens, how will that influence the western treatment of Muslims? Will political correctness be brushed aside by our political leadership since there is obviously no sense in keeping up pretenses? Because after all, we should not be mistaken about the real thoughts of our politicians: they know very well that Islam is a time-bomb for Europe and the world, but “political necessity” has forced them to serve the Islamic interest. The past provides us with one precedent that can be studied to predict the reaction of the west to the end of Arab power, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union. This episode laid bare typical western attitudes and behavior: as long as a rogue state threatens the west, it will not dare to react out of lack of self-confidence; the rogue state can extend its influence at will and with impunity infiltrate our political systems. But as soon as this rogue state begins to falter, and shows signs of tending implosion, the reassured western countries are delighted that the threat has receded and will exploit the sorry state of the formerly menacing rogue state to the full. The USSR was lavishly provided with western loans for years, and was able to build up its military and industrial power with western technology; but from the moment communism showed signs of collapse in the late eighties, the west became reticent about new credits and later immediately demanded payment of past loans; the new leaders of Russia were reducing the country to a carcass of what it once had been, and that suited the relieved west very well. A similar pattern can be seen in the western approach to Egypt and Syria. While many critical westerners have deplored the IMF loan of five billion euro to the new Egyptian government, they miss the essential point: in the past, the west readily granted Egypt larger sums, and after all, five billion – only to be paid on condition of ridiculously stringent conditions, compliance with which would result in starving the population- is not that much for a country of eighty million inhabitants and in times of economic crisis and increasing poverty. The same applies to Syria: apart from the role the traditional allegiances of the great powers  play in the conflict, these powers –even China in the long run-  cannot fail to appreciate the underlying meaning of the conflict: a serious, disastrous weakening of the Islamic world, not only in the sense that two direct enemies of the west are annihilating each other in Syria, but simply because this conflict will turn part of the Middle East into a waste land and drastically undermine the confidence of Muslims. And of course we all know that nobody wants a strong Islamic world, like nobody wanted a strong communist bloc, if it could be avoided easily. At the moment, two contrasting lines of thought are struggling for influence in the western chancelleries: the old approach of sucking up to Arab interests and gratifying their wishes, and on the other hand the dawning realization that this may be our chance to decisively weaken the Islamic world. We have the singular misfortune that at the moment the United States is led by the most jihad-appeasing clique to date, so there is a big chance that it will not let Syria destroy itself. But even then, the Syrian civil war is in many aspects comparable to the Spanish civil war, in that its outcome will determine the future course of events. It is a well-concealed fact that Stalin did not sufficiently supply the communist side because a communist takeover in Spain would have resulted in an alliance between France and England and Nazi Germany to face the Bolshevist threat; consequently, after Franco’s victory, the Soviet Union became a privileged partner of the western democracies and was able to exploit the conflict between these democracies and Germany to its own profit, utterly blinding the western to the threat of Bolshevism which was in fact no smaller than that of fascism. Similarly, a Jihadist defeat could have the effect of deflecting western attention from the growing threat of Islam, while a victory of the rebels and another domino falling in the Islamization of the Middle East, could send an unpleasant shudder through the west, and in particular the European union. The best option would be to let the combatants destroy each other in a long war, but short of that, perhaps paradoxically, a jihadist victory would have the most positive effect on European public opinion (note that European public opinion is already critical of the so-called freedom fighters because of the media attention that is given to the large number of European jihadist that have departed for Syria. Unlike earlier conflicts in the Middle East, the public is also informed of the situation to a certain degree and is sure to react in some way to a jihadist victory and the resulting imposition of an Islamic state.)

Concerning the future of Europe, the developments in the Islamic world can be exploited, but it is far more complicated than in the case of the Soviet Union, and it will probably be a race against time. The question is if western governments will be able to throw off Arab power before the Islamic community has become too strong to be opposed, i.e. before the infiltration of government, army, and security services and the growth of the Islamic population in Europe will have definitely made Islam (real Islam, sharia and all, what it has meant for thirteen centuries before political correctness deluded us into thinking that it was simply some variation on other world religions) a part of Europe and changed the face of the old continent for good. An Islamic takeover is improbable, but bloody civil strife and a continuing threat of subversion and revolt from the Islamic community are very likely, because Muslim communities will always attempt to take over the power of the state, since Islam itself is essence a system of political ordering; the only example of an Islamic presence in a West-European state, the Moorish community in sixteenth century Spain, which caused immense trouble for a hundred years despite having been granted still greater privileges than the current Islamic communities in Europe, does not permit us to be optimistic. 

Needless to say, however, the future does not look very bright for Europe’s Muslim minority itself. Although in the worst case scenario they will form a vigorous minority of up  to twenty or thirty per cent in a country like France (due to immigration, birth rates, and the fact that approximately one out of five young people is currently Muslim in certain countries) and will have infiltrated government in the most politically correct countries like Sweden and the United Kingdom, over time a severe backlash from the autochthonous population is inevitable as terrorist attacks, Islamic racism, and the targeting of Europeans for murder and rape continues at the same pace as today. Already, polls in all major west-European  countries show that populations are fed up with Islamic immigration, and the news of Islamic barbarity in the Middle East only contributes to building up a climate of intense fear for the Islamic peril. Indeed, parallels are to be found with the bolshevist threat, when fascism developed as an answer to the advance of communism which normal political movements refused to address, let alone check by military intervention. Parallels are also to be found with the time of the crusades, when Christianity took over some of the negative characteristics of Islam in order better to fight their enemy, and at some moments became just as brutal in the fight against the Arabs. There is one difference, however: while bolshevism and Islam in the middle ages where strong and expanding, Islamic culture will decline in the course of this century, which means that the Islamic community will have no ready means to assert itself outside its own numerical strength. There is no chance that, as after the Crusades or after the second world war, the enemy of the west will as yet, after a struggle that seemingly resulted in a western victory, conquer part of it by a sideway as it were. Will Europe turn back to its Christian tradition, to the point of view that dominated its culture merely hundred years ago, namely that Islam is a barbarous religion than in no way belongs in Europe? In that case, the return of European and western assertiveness would result in the expulsion, or at the least heavy discrimination and regular persecution of Muslims. After all, when Enoch Powell spoke about “rivers of blood”, he did not only or necessarily mean misery for the European population alone; he was talking about a coming condition of civil war. 

The decline of western civilization will inevitably follow. Not that the west is about to be taken over by the so-called emerging markets, which in the aftermath of the financial crisis have turned out to be shams to a large extent -except for China- but its internal instability will further diminish its stature on world scale, especially vis-à-vis the United States. It is very probable that with the partial collapse of the European economy and stagnation of most of the rest of the world, we will witness some kind of de-globalization in the coming centuries, as western influence recedes and, as predicted, China re-emerges as the economic (and cultural, since European high culture is undoubtedly almost dead beyond recovery?) powerhouse of the old world. Civilizations and countries will to some extent resume their older economic, political, and cultural roles, consistent with their size and natural resources. 

So the fate of Europe will essentially be determined by how fast the Islamic world declines and especially how quickly those effects will be felt, because it is not to be expected that our politicians, uncertain of themselves and of their culture, will act before they are definitely sure that Islam is indeed a totally spent force. Meanwhile, easy chances to stem the tide of Islam are ignored: the Turkish Trojan horse retains its influence in the EU, Palestine keeps receiving its money, and while practically every critic of Islam is persecuted in the Western Europe these days, the EU is criticizing Russia –the only semi-western country not infected by political correctness- for its political repression and is making every possible effort to convert the country to a political correct entity after its own image. Every decision that could possibly incur criticism from the cultural Marxist academe and the multicultural lobby, or indeed from the Islamists themselves, is anxiously avoided.