Mark Mazower reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
“His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an ‘adversary culture’, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat….
“Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and ‘non-natives’ as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam.
“But the best case of ‘white flight’ he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims….
“Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls ‘beachheads’ – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse ‘colonisation’ of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a ‘project to seize territory’, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam.”