The Strange Death of Western Europe and why is Eastern Europe different?

I am currently reading, am deeply depressed and alarmed by and am lost in wonder at Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Please read it people, if you read only one book this year.

The opening sentence is:

Europe is committing suicide.

and he continues

By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place we had to call home.

He deals with Eastern European attitudes to migrants in a couple of pages and says this, under the rubric "Why is Eastern Europe so different?"

"....In January 2016, when the Swedish authorities, the European Commission and others began publicly to acknowledge that the majority of people they had taken in the previous year had no right to claim asylum in Europe, Jean Claude Juncker continued to insist on the Commission's proposed quota system to share out the migrants between each country. Slovakia refused to have any part in what its government described as a 'nonsense' and 'complete fiasco'. The left-wing Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, said in despair, 'I feel that we in the EU are now committing ritual suicide and we're just looking on'. The other Visegrad countries held the same view as Fico.


"....Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our question -- the divergence between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'. That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East. And nowhere have the consequences of this been more clearly displayed than in the attitudes of Eastern European leaders, with the support of their publics, to the migration crisis." 'The divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'."

To understand why Eastern European attitudes towards migrants and Islam are different from ones that obtain (at least at an official level) in the West, you have to look at Western, not Eastern, Europe. Eastern Europeans (those who have not been educated in the pieties of Western universities) retain the common sense ideas to which everyone in Western Europe subscribed in 1945.

Eastern Europeans love their countries the way they are, homogeneous and cohesive ethnic states with long and beautiful traditions, as everyone in Western Europe did until a moment ago.

But there are other reasons too. Eastern European countries have all been oppressed by empires (Ottoman, Russian, Hapsburg). They rightly see themselves as victims of imperialism, most recently by that imposed in the name of the proletariat by the Soviet Union. They do not feel post-colonial guilt, because they had no colonies. They were colonised. 

And they are much poorer than the West, though nowadays quite a lot richer than the Third World. They are emigrant countries, not immigrant societies.

Most Romanians I know think mass immigration from Africa and Asis to Western Europe has been a disaster, but all, without exception, think it is a just punishment for colonialism. 

A young, left-wing Romanian friend who won a scholarship to Yale told me that she hopes in her lifetime (she is about 30 now) that Italy will have an African majority. This, she says, will be a fitting punishment for Italy's short-lived and small colonial empire in Africa.

Mr. Murray swats away this argument effortlessly.

I’ve particularly never heard, for instance, that the country of Turkey should have a large infusion of Yorkshiremen or people from Wales, Dublin, in order to not only diversify that country but to make some kind of reparation for the Ottoman Empire.

In Eastern Europe, patriotism and the martial, masculine virtues are considered virtues. Eastern Europeans have not rethought their values to be as unlike Nazi values as possible. Communists blamed Nazism on capitalism and the recent horrors of Communist rule have in most countries (not in Poland or Serbia) displaced from folk memory what the Germans did. 

Most Eastern European countries were allied with Hitler, in any case, and many Eastern Europeans, if they are not Jews, gypsies or Slavs, think that they would have been better off had he not Stalin won the war.

Eastern Europe used always to be an ethnic mosaic and Eastern Europeans know, as a cursory reading of history, especially the history of 1939-45, or simple common sense teaches, that ethnic minorities living side by side do so unhappily and often violent conflicts arise. 

Ethnic minorities lived side by side in Eastern Europe for a long time when Eastern European societies were essentially mediaeval. With the coming (imposition would be a better word) of modernity, that changed. 

Conflict between Muslims and Christians led to the forced migrations of millions of Greeks and Turks before and after the First World War. In 1945 and 1946 a Procrustean reordering of East Europe's ethnic minorities took place across the region. An ethnic war was fought between Ukrainians and Poles which the world ignored. Ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians were expelled from the places across Central and Eastern Europe in which their families had lived for many centuries. The whole story of displaced persons - the so-called DPs- is calamitous. Coming after the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, by 1950 a terrible simplicity had been imposed on Eastern European countries which had hitherto been ethnic mixtures. 

Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered these vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939, stipulating that they should be "humane and orderly". They were, of course, neither. 

At almost the same time as Attlee agreed this, oddly enough, ethnically homogeneous Britain began to become rapidly multi-ethnic. 

In his last chapter Douglas Murray concludes

By the middle of this century, while China will probably still look like China, India will probably still look like India, Russia like Russia, and Eastern Europe like Eastern Europe, Western Europe will at best resemble a large-scale version of the United Nations. ...This place where international cities develop into something resembling international countries will be many things. But it will not be Europe anymore.

I shall blog more about the ideas with which this very readable and well-written book fizzes. But much as I love interesting, original, perceptive ideas, this is desperately sad work. The saddest story ever told. 



A pedant writes: I wish he knew what disinterested meant and did not split infinitives. I do not necessarily expect good grammar from Oxford men, but I do from Etonians (Douglas Murray won a scholarship there).