Those who hold the fate of Europe in their hands speak with the voice of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Look here, Lithuania has just scrapped its currency in favor of the euro, that token of togetherness: a rare instance of people in a lifeboat scrambling to board the sinking ship. Outside observers like Mark Steyn, Christopher Caldwell, or Bruce Bawer have long since analyzed the slow-motion catastrophe which appears to be the continent’s goal, but Europeans who share this view are—how to put it?—unpopular, sidelined, ostracized, virtually certain to be exposing themselves to fanciful accusations of racism, Islamophobia, and the general derangement of their senses.
Thilo Sarrazin and Eric Zemmour have broken ranks in their countries, respectively Germany and France, through the tried and tested expedient of publishing their opinions regardless. Deutschland schafft sich ab, the title of Sarrazin’s book, might be translated as “Germany is deconstructing itself.” Since coming out in 2010, it has sold something in the order of two million copies. Published in 2014, Zemmour’s Le Suicide français already has sales of half a million. The copy I bought was one in an impressive pile in the bookshop of a provincial town in the Pas de Calais with a population of 2,000.
Born in the final shattering months of World War II, Thilo Sarrazin might well serve as a standing representative of the German public figures who have brought about their country’s peace and prosperity, with a claim on posterity for reuniting a divided Germany and helping to close the Cold War free from crisis. In the course of a virtuous career, he has been an economist, a civil servant, finance director of the city of Berlin, a Socialist politician, and on the board of the German national railroad. As might be expected, the tone of his book is neutral. Plenty of statistics and graphs substantiate themes that are familiar but critical. The birth rate is so low that the population of Germany is declining dramatically. Declining educational standards no longer provide the inventiveness and skills on which the German economy depends for selling products abroad.
Halfway through, Sarrazin comes to the point. In the post-war years Germany was the first country in Europe to recruit foreign labor, for the most part Turks and then Moroccans. In time these euphemistically described guest-workers acquired rights that put them on an equal footing with Germans. In concept and then in realization, this policy has been, in Sarrazin’s words, “a gigantic mistake.” The costs of Muslim immigration, he states outright, are far higher than any potential benefit. A census taken in 2007 gives the figure of 15.4 million with an immigrant background, or approximately a fifth of the population. A third of the children starting the school year in Berlin have origins other than German. “In the final analysis,” he concludes, “we are allowing our culture, civilization and national character to go in a direction we do not want. It will take only a few generations before we become a minority in our own land.”
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