The civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and neither Britain nor any other Western European country can avoid that fate because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies. As a result, 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 in the world we had to call home. …<\/p>\n
Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and culture of Europe were lost to the world. Some have clearly decided (as Bertolt Brecht<\/a> wrote in his 1953 poem \u2018The Solution\u2019) to dissolve the people and elect another because, as a recent Swedish conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt put it, only \u2018barbarism\u2019 comes from countries like his whereas only good things come from outside. …<\/p>\n What had been Europe \u2013 the home of the European peoples \u2013 gradually became a home for the entire world. The places that had been European gradually became somewhere else. So places dominated by Pakistani immigrants resembled Pakistan in everything but their location…<\/p>\n Even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact that (coincidentally or otherwise) at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy. <\/p>\n Countless factors have contributed to this development, but one is the way in which Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno<\/a> famously called the \u2018tragic sense of life\u2019. They have forgotten what Zweig<\/a> and his generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilisations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them<\/em>. Other than simply ignoring it, one of the few ways to avoid this tragic sense of life is to push it away through a belief in the tide of human progress. That tactic remains for the time being the most popular approach. …<\/p>\n We know that the Greeks today are not the same people as the Ancient Greeks. We know that the English are not the same today as they were a millennia ago, nor the French the French. And yet they are recognisably Greek, English and French and all are European. In these and other identities we recognise a degree of cultural succession: a tradition that remains with certain qualities (positive as well as negative), customs and behaviours. <\/p>\n We recognise the great movements of the Normans, Franks and Gauls brought about great changes. And we know from history that some movements affect a culture relatively little in the long term whereas others can change it irrevocably. The problem comes not with an acceptance of change, but with the knowledge that when those changes come too fast or are too different we become something else \u2013 including something we may never have wanted to be. …<\/p>\n At the same time we are confused over how this is meant to work. While generally agreeing that it is possible for an individual to absorb a particular culture (given the right degree of enthusiasm both from the individual and the culture) whatever their skin colour, we know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. We cannot become Indian or Chinese, for instance. And yet we are expected to believe that anyone in the world can move to Europe and become European. <\/p>\n If being \u2018European\u2019 is not about race \u2013 as we hope it is not \u2013 then it is even more imperative that it is about \u2018values\u2019. This is what makes the question \u2018What are European values?\u2019 so important. Yet this is another debate about which we are wholly confused.<\/p>\n Are we, for instance, Christian? In the 2000s this debate had a focal point in the row over the wording of the new EU Constitution and the absence of any mention of the continent\u2019s Christian heritage. Pope John Paul II and his successor tried to rectify the omission. As the former wrote in 2003, \u2018While fully respecting the secular nature of the institutions I wish once more to appeal to those drawing up the future European constitutional treaty, so that it will include a reference to the religious and in particular the Christian heritage of Europe.\u2019 <\/p>\n The debate did not only divide Europe geographically and politically, it also pointed to a glaring aspiration. For religion had not only retreated in Western Europe. In its wake there arose a desire to demonstrate that in the twenty-first century Europe had a self-supporting structure of rights, laws and institutions which could exist even without the source that had arguably given them life. <\/p>\n Like Kant\u2019s dove we wondered whether we wouldn\u2019t be able to fly faster if we lived \u2018in free air\u2019 without the bother of the wind keeping us aloft. Much rested on the success of this dream. In the place of religion came the ever-inflating language of \u2018human rights\u2019 (itself a concept of Christian origin). We left unresolved the question of whether or not our acquired rights were reliant on beliefs that the continent had ceased to hold or whether they existed of their own accord. This was, at the very least, an extremely big question to have left unresolved while vast new populations were being expected to \u2018integrate\u2019.<\/p>\n An equally significant question erupted at the same time around the position and purpose of the nation state. From the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 up to the late twentieth century the nation state in Europe had generally been regarded not only as the best guarantor of constitutional order and liberal rights but the ultimate guarantor of peace. Yet this certainty also eroded. Central European figures like Chancellor Kohl of Germany in 1996 insisted that \u2018The nation state \u2026 cannot solve the great problems of the twenty-first century.\u2019 <\/p>\n Disintegration of the nation states of Europe into one large integrated political union was so important, Kohl insisted, that it was in fact \u2018a question of war and peace in the twenty-first century\u2019. Others disagreed, and twenty years later just over half of the British people demonstrated at the ballot box that they were unpersuaded by Kohl\u2019s argument. But once again, whatever one\u2019s views on the matter, this was a huge question to leave unresolved at a time of vast population change. …<\/p>\n The world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is. And while the movement of millions of people from other cultures into a strong and assertive culture might have worked, the movement of millions of people into a guilty, jaded and dying culture cannot. Even now Europe\u2019s leaders talk of an invigorated effort to incorporate the millions of new arrivals. …<\/p>\n Today the ethics and beliefs of Europe \u2013 indeed the identity and ideology of Europe \u2013 have become about \u2018respect\u2019, \u2018tolerance\u2019 and (most self- abnegating of all) \u2018diversity\u2019. <\/p>\n Such shallow self-definitions may get us through a few more years, but they have no chance at all of being able to call on the deeper loyalties that societies must be able to reach if they are going to survive for long.<\/p>\n This is just one reason why it is likely that our European culture, which has lasted all these centuries and shared with the world such heights of human achievement, will not survive. As recent elections in Austria and the rise of Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland seem to prove, while the likelihood of cultural erosion remains irresistible the options for cultural defence continue to be unacceptable. <\/p>\n