Journal of Human Security

Seldom have I come across a book that incited in me conflicting reactions of such intensity. They stem from Murray’s reporting of facts—necessarily selective but shockingly effective; his conceptual analysis—eye-opening where it works but shallow and incomplete in other places; his conclusions—shattering mainstream platitudes and misconceptions but at times suffering from a narrowness of worldview and a dearth of historical perspective, not to mention a problematic interpretation of human security.

Throughout the book Murray frequently invokes the image of “death” for an entire continent, without ever explaining exactly what he means by it. A great opportunity would have been his closing chapter where he distinguishes between scenarios of prolonged business as usual and of abrupt change, neither of which really qualify as death without further discussion. One eminent literary precedent came from Oswald Spengler (a favourite read of my grandfather’s), whose Decline of the West appeared in 1918. Spengler’s view of how a civilisation dies is restricted to a portrait of primitive agrarian culture. While Murray mentions Spengler in passing (p. 209), his notions about the death of Europe obviously differ from Spengler’s. He clearly regards it as a threat to human security even though his interpretation of human security always remains implicit and restricted to socio-political and economic aspects. Compared to accounts of how civilisations collapsed in the past [1,2,3], Murray’s proposition rests entirely on the effects of mass immigration.

Left to her/his own imagination, the reader might reason that countries, federations, societies and even cultures don’t just die like persons; rather they tend to morph into something else. Examples include the Hanseatic League, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire and Commonwealth, the Communist International and the League of Nations. Similarly, cultural master narratives tend to be replaced by, or assimilated into, other narratives as part and parcel of historical change. Murray makes much of the fact that “the story has run out” for Europeans (p. 258) but he offers no ideas about possible replacement stories, or how they can change over time. Murray’s vision of Europe’s future portrays an increasing heterogeneity of values and traditions as a result of unrestrained immigration of peoples with very different traditions, leading to a dilution and fragmentation of what he regards as European cultural identity. Regardless of whether one might consider such a future as desirable or regrettable, I remain unconvinced why such a scenario should be referred to as death.

Murray defines European identity as a shared set of values, beliefs and traditions that arose from the continent’s history, coming together in the form of a common culture and civilisation. Physically, aside from the allusion to geographic unity he offers no further suggestions about who gets to be included (p. 300), but newcomers from outside Europe are definitely excluded from his model of European identity. Unlike many British authors as well as a recent electoral majority, he unequivocally integrates the UK into ‘Europe’. His interpretation of culture focuses on shared values but lacks a concise definition. His interpretation of ‘civilisation’ relies heavily on the preservation of buildings, particularly those of Christian significance (p. 263).

The main threat to European identity as Murrays perceives it comes from the direction of the cultural Other— “antagonists of European culture and civilisation” (p. 258) who are entering Europe within the largely uncontrolled and massive stream of migrants from Muslim countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Murray clearly considers national borders and sovereignty to play important parts in how Europe could address the challenges of mass immigration. Yet the very idea of a unified Europe is antithetical to borders—a notion that he criticises a European bureaucrat for emphasising (p. 178). Murray does not weigh the advantages arising for Europeans from the borderless organisation (including rendering future intra-European wars highly unlikely) against the obvious disadvantage of allowing free mobility to unregistered immigrants; he merely points to the latter. He notes the many failings of national immigration policies without suggesting specific pan-European alternatives that might unify those fragmented approaches.

He observes with puzzlement the fact that many Europeans, including elected officials, when being faced with the re-introduction of border checks, react extremely traumatised. Murray dismisses their tears, evidently never having shared in the first place their passionate dreams of a unified, peaceful Europe without borders. They might regard the renewed border checks as indicating the death of a collective dream, but Murray neither shares their sentiment nor connects them to his obvious misgivings about the ‘death of Europe’. For Murray, ‘Europe’ is clearly something different. Where Murray does show emotion is when he discusses the desecration of Christian institutions by homeless African refugees (p. 146)—a first indication of where his own ideals might lie.

1.- Failure of Governments

One obvious strength of the book is the documentation and argument showing the failure of European governments in the face of the immigration challenge (p. 48), a failure that insightful protagonists such as chancellor Merkel have acknowledged themselves (p. 290). Murray accounts for the following manifestations of failure, invoking examples from across Europe but mainly from the UK, France, Sweden and Germany:

The latter manifestation of government failure seems particularly appalling; details of the Rotherham incidents and similar occurrences are described in Lautensach & Lautensach [4]. Murray notes that in the UK not a single prosecution for female genital mutilation has been successful despite it being illegal for three decades and despite the number of victims having reached 130,000. What can one even say to that? But what neither Murray nor the British government seem to realise is that a state does not have to be biased against Muslims in order to prosecute female genital mutilators to the full extent of the law, and with the same lack of mercy as the perpetrators showed those innocent little girls. In fact, what religion those perpetrators subscribe to is, and must be, entirely irrelevant to the case.

Murray points to the lack of official support for individual critics who placed free speech above their personal security and risked heir lives as a consequence. He shines the spotlight on shameful excesses of governmental cowardice, such as the withdrawal of Dutch citizenship from Hirsi Ali, a vocal female critic of human rights violations committed by Muslim groups in the Netherlands (p. 155). The fact that she subsequently chose the US as her home deserves some consideration, as do preventive policy options that European governments should consider to keep such failures from recurring. According to Murray, no such preventive policies are in place.

Underneath Murray’s critique of governance lies a deep concern with ethics. He pre-empts charges of chauvinism by reducing the challenges to their normative bases, explicating repeatedly the ethical dilemmas between justice and mercy, between humanitarian intervention and consequentialist concerns for all parties, between powerful influences shaping public opinion and the moral priorities of their leaders—in short, he never trivialises the plight of the refugee while keeping his attention on the human rights and security of Europeans.

Ironically Murray himself inadvertently models another conceptual failure that most governments worldwide are guilty of—that of not grasping the contingencies of global ecological overshoot, of not following a sustainable vision of a common future. He appears entirely devoid of any understanding how important ecology is for assessing human security (pp. 276-277). While migration can be addressed in isolation in the short term [5], in the long term it cannot be decoupled from overpopulation [6]—and Murray is particularly critical of short-term solutions. His inattention to the drivers of population displacement and their causes guides him into visions of the future that are scientifically impossible. This fallacy mirrors the failure of most of the world’s governments to perceive or address the transgressions of sustainable limits throughout the past half century—their blind pursuit of unlimited economic growth that will lead humanity into disaster.

A charge of failure implies that success would have been possible, had the governments only applied themselves more adeptly—an assumption that turns out more tenuous than Murray believes, as a look at European history can show. Even though Murray’s critique is entirely justified, the problems of inadequate governance are more complex and widespread globally than he implies. Reducing the problem to a vague European sentiment of cultural “weariness” (which in my view hardly seems particularly unique to Europeans) seems neither helpful not entirely accurate. Success in this context would not necessarily mean actually stemming the tide, but establishing an effective Europe-wide consensus among governments and implementing a coherent, well-designed and consistent policy with the aim of stemming the tide. Murray implies as much but his recommendations reveal an underestimate of the strength of the sentiments that make people around the world want to leave their homelands. No wall can stand up for long against that strength, regardless of where or how that is attempted (Germany, Palestine, India, USA—the list is growing). Nor does he recognise the physical drivers that give rise to those sentiments, no better than the Kuwaiti official he quotes (p. 158) who stated that the reason why the Middle East cannot accept additional refugees is its steep cost of living. Both of them have not realised that large swaths of the Middle East have become ecologically uninhabitable, rendering them utterly dependent on imports of food and water—hence their cost. The refugees are driven by hunger, in addition to violent conflict. A Swedish MEP (p. 159) appears equally clueless, reducing those drivers to a vague notion of the world being “on fire”. Along with the reader, Murray expresses his outrage at such incompetence, but he does not respond to it with an adequate measure of analysis into the source of the problems. What he does analyse are the underlying beliefs and assumptions that inform the poor performances of European governments.

Murray’s analysis of the causative factors underlying poor governmental performance, misinterpretations of the signs of crisis, and self-deceptive public statements could still have reached deeper. He frequently portrays “countries” (which he equates with “nations”) as culprits but never considers the influence of ideologies and the memes informing beliefs such as “historical guilt”. His observation that “genetic guilt” is largely confined to people of European ancestry is factually defensible but seems somewhat contrived when the actual causes lie with underlying values. Likewise, the challenges of European governance are too complex to explain them as a problem with political correctness.

Murray presents a convincing vision of what Europe might have been (p. 294) had its governments not failed. Effective solutions to Europe’s migration challenges would have depended on a clear consensus among governments, followed by consistent policies, on whether Europe should be open to everybody (answer: no), to anybody (answer: yes but only for people meeting asylant criteria), in perpetuity (answer: no). Asylant criteria would need to distinguish between people driven by bombs, by official persecution, by hunger, or by greed—not an easy task but necessary. An additional requirement that Murray neglects to mention is the question of carrying capacity limits within Europe, restraining immigration to mandatory quota [7]. A moral requirement that Murray does discuss is the weighing of mercy (for the asylum applicant) against justice (for both applicants and host societies). Murray further suggests that effective solutions should have included forceful exclusions similar to the Australian deterrent model, regionally diverse models of socio-cultural integration, frequent public discussion involving reflections on what European identity means to its citizens, and a deliberated consensus on the achievements of immigration policy. Europeans needed to prevent the possibility that “in pursuit of a ‘liberal’ immigration policy they might lose their liberal societies” (p. 295). In reality, not one of those requirements had been met by 2017, as Murray documents.

2.- Deconstruction of Official Discourse

Government spokespeople went to great lengths to establish factual excuses and justifications for permissive immigration policies that ultimately failed to bring about the stated aims, and often resulted in the opposite. Economic arguments pointed to Europe’s ‘aging population’, labour markets not providing enough unskilled workers, projected benefits to the tax base and to pension funds. Murray refutes all those arguments effectively—even though occasionally his refutations become circular, as when he uses populist or xenophobic sentiments as logical objections against policies designed to combat those sentiments.

With equal effectiveness Murray dismisses the moral justifications put forth by officials, including the attractions of increased cultural diversity, historically naïve statements of what Jesus would have done about today’s refugees (p. 254), obfuscatory rhetoric that blatantly contradicts ongoing actions (p. 255), simplistic appeals to one-sided moral duties and an overwhelming inattention to the implications for future generations and their interests. For example, he attacks the official ‘wait and see’ policy for not addressing value differences between Muslim groups and host societies (p. 54) and causing bloodshed. Murray correctly concludes that such laissez-faire policies exacerbate harm, as evident in the victims of Islam-inspired anti-Semitism and homophobia. The blood on the streets could not speak more clearly.

Governments are not the only culprits, according to Murray. Contemporary European societies at large are influenced by dominant sentiments of “weariness”, disillusionment, and an inability to address the shallowness of modernity (p. 258). Others have also noted that the displacement of European ethos by parochial populism, revived nationalism and basic disinterested apathy is likely to do much harm to the future welfare of the continent’s inhabitants [8].

One error that Murray seems to share with the targets of his critique (Muslim fanatics as well as European governments) is an inattention to the global Big Picture and the global roots of the problems he discusses, namely global and regional overpopulation, demographic trends, climate change, scarcities and environmental degradation and the migration pressures resulting from them. Not once does Murray invoke physical limits such as carrying capacity, which would support his arguments in no small way. The drought of 2006–2009 displaced 1.5 million Syrians from rural regions, triggering waves of emigration [9]. In spite of 20,000 publications per year dealing with climate change, the international community has yet to commit to an effective strategy to prevent global warming beyond 2 ${}^{\circ }$ C—which will set off refugee waves of such magnitudes that will make Europe’s current problem look like a tourist boom. Murray makes much of literary dystopias of an ‘occupied’ Europe such as Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (p. 115) but he ignores the massive amounts of scientific analyses of the global drivers of migration and intercultural conflict. Even though many of Murray’s suggestions make sense on the surface, the fact that he arrives at them without taking into account the wider context renders them somewhat tentative at best.

An effective critique of European policies or practices must include the extra-European context. It cannot convince unless it draws on comparisons with the rest of the world at least occasionally. Murray’s critique hardly meets that requirement; he merely explains the Eurocentric orientation of the book as that of a person who is, or feels, Eurocentric (p. 297)—not exactly meeting the standard of academic analysis.

3.- Critique of Islam—and of Secularism!

Murray points to the precarious situation of ‘minorities within minorities’ (p. 142) to illustrate the intransigence of dogmatic Muslim leaders towards moral compromise and cultural adaptation when faced with internal critics and culturally different host environments. The example of reform-minded Muslims becoming brutally persecuted by their own peers indicates the low level of tolerance and hypersensitivity to offence, substantiated by the abysmal historical track record of Muslim reformers. Leaving the Muslim faith still attracts the death penalty (p. 265), as does homosexuality. Murray fears that this might be a “foretaste of the intolerance to come” (p. 302) if unchecked immigration continues.

While officials emphasise the potential for learning that is evident in European Muslim minorities, Murray likens the proposed learning as adapting classroom proceedings to the “slowest child in the classroom” (p. 301), instead of choosing remedial instruction. His scathing critique of extremist statements given by Muslim clerics and community leaders reveals that their dominant values and beliefs are deeply antithetical to globally accepted standards of human rights, equity and dignity. A useful indicator is the extent of anti-Semitism evident in those statements and in the violence that they keep inciting among impressionable young Muslim males.

A journalist at the forefront of the critique of Muslim immigrant groups was the late Italian anti-fascist Oriana Fallaci. Her targets included politically emasculated Italians, Europeans and other Westerners as much as fundamentalist Muslims and, although he distances himself somewhat from her uncompromising and acerbic language, Murray’s arguments derive much support from her writings. At one point Muslim groups in Italy charged Fallaci with “vilification of religion” (p. 146) which only spurned her on. The charge deserves deeper scrutiny because, as Murray implies throughout the book, every religion (Murray means Islam; no other examples are named) should be evaluated for the ethical norms it perpetuates. I agree with Murray’s implicit suggestion that such an evaluation should not only be freely encouraged but be recognised as a civic duty, to allow humanity to weed out religions that openly encourage violations of human rights and whose followers tend to frequently resort to violent means to settle disputes. In fact, Murray could have asserted more clearly that anybody should be free to ask what the commonalities are among those individuals who send out death threats to members of the public, to what extent they invoke religion as their motives, and which religion that may be. The moral benefits of such an analysis and of its conclusions justify that it is explicated and its political ramifications be publically discussed. That still does not amount to vilification, at least to anyone who has learned to tolerate what at face value might feel like an offence [4].

Murray’s problem is that when it comes to Christianity he drops all that critical evaluation of religions and turns into a model altar boy, ignoring his own principles. Suddenly religion is again elevated to “a source of energy” for Europe (p. 209); one can guess which religion is meant. Not only is Murray’s critique of religion extremely selective (meaning, reduced to the single target of Islam), he seems to forget all about it when he discusses secularism. A convincing critique of religion must stand on a secular platform. Murray, however, paints secularism not as the mainstay of European progressivism and the antithesis to exogenous religious fanaticism, but as the enemy of European culture (pp. 210–211). He regards the liberation of Irish society from the misogynistic dominance of the Catholic Church as just another symptom of the loss of Europe’s “foundational story”. Since the story of Genesis was reinterpreted along the secular principles of natural history, “we have still not found a way to live with them”—Bertrand Russell would turn in his grave at that! A poll by BBC Radio 1 among young people that revealed high levels of distrust towards all major organised religions was reinterpreted by Murray as reflecting anti-Muslim sentiments (p. 235). He considers secularism as not only having failed to strengthen the cultural identity of Europeans but being instrumental in its destruction (p. 259). This anti-secularism which Murray imposes on the reader seems quite reconcilable with his own religious version of humanitarianism but entirely counterproductive in the context of his otherwise convincing critique of Islam.

At several points Murray submits to the temptation of false generalisation, e.g. implying that Muslim immigrants are homogenous and single minded in their uncompromising values and ideals. At other times (e.g. p. 233), he acknowledges that the relationship between the “tiny number of religious extremists who carry out such attacks and the rest of the populations from the same background” is of utmost concern, implying that approval by the latter is not automatic. Muslim terrorism is not a mass conspiracy, not even common religious bloody-mindedness. It might be ‘merely’ violent sociopaths finding a culturally legitimated way to act out their desires. It is false generalisation that turns legitimate critique into racism or collective vilification of people (instead of dogma). Particularly blatant are Murray’s generalisations about Muslim men (p. 194) where he first reifies the generalised proposition and then criticises officials for not following suit, all in the absence of evidence. His evidence supports no more than scattered examples of extreme behaviour, while he downplays the extent of moderation among the Muslim majority. Confusing “fact” with opinion (p. 213) does not help Murray’s argumentation.

Another false generalisation that weakens Murray’s argument occurs where he condemns the whole of European philosophy after the disastrous experience of attending a single conference of postmodern deconstructionist philosophers. One cannot convincingly criticise the inflexibility and dogmatism of Muslim clerics, or the blind confidence of communist apparatchiks, while blaming academics who deconstruct dominant ideologies for eroding Europe’s moral foundation. No genuine advocate of ‘European values’ can portray the failure of communism’s internationalist humanism as a good thing for humanity, or decry the decline of nationalism within a borderless Europe.

In Murray’s defence it should be noted that the governments he criticises are also guilty of false generalisations, though in the opposite direction. While Murray’s attempt to blame Islam for all the violence is clearly misguided, the official attempts to present anti-immigrant organisations as racist Nazis without addressing the reasons for their concerns are unjust and in the long term, politically imprudent. Murray is correct to point that out.

4.- Unsolved Problems