Tribalism Returns to Europe

At
Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young
conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany's attempt
to create a multicultural society where people "live side by side and
enjoy each other" has "failed, utterly failed."

Backing
up her rueful admission are surveys showing 30 percent of Germans
believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe
the foreigners come to feed off German welfare.

Merkel had in mind the Turks who came as gastarbeiters, guest workers, in the 1960s. Some 2.5 million now live in Germany.

Arabs and East Europeans have come more recently. One survey puts the Muslim population at 5 million.

"Multikulti
is dead," says Horst Seehofer of Merkel's sister party, the Christian
Social Union of Bavaria. He wants no more immigration from "alien
cultures." Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, he
contends, not assimilating, not becoming Germans.

Awareness
of deep differences with Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans
when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that
Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam's victory with barrages
of bottle rockets.

Like all of Europe, Germany grows nervous.

This
summer, Thilo Sarrazin, who sat on the Bundesbank board, published
"Germany Abolishes Itself," which sold 300,000 copies in seven weeks.
Sarrazin argued that Germany's Muslim population is intellectually
inferior and unable or unwilling to learn the language or culture, and
mass immigration is destroying the nation.

No rightist,
but a stalwart of the socialist party, Sarrazin was forced out at the
Bundesbank. Half his socialist party stood by him.

Across
Europe, there is a resurgence of ethnonationalism that is feeding the
ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties that are gaining
respectability and reaching for power.

Austrian
nationalists triumphed in 2008 when the Freedom Party of Joerg Haider
and the Alliance for the Future of Austria together took 29 percent of
the vote. The Swiss People's Party of Christoph Blocher, largest in
Bern, was behind the successful referendum to change the constitution to
outlaw minarets and prohibit the wearing of burqas.

Hungary's
Jobbik Party, which to the Financial Times "sits squarely in Europe's
most repulsive arch-nationalist tradition and which blames Jews and Roma
for the hardships of other Hungarians," pulled 17 percent of the vote
this year and entered parliament with 47 seats, up from zero seats in
2006.

The Sweden Democrats just captured 6 percent of the
vote and entered parliament for the first time with 20 seats, joining
right-wing folk parties in Norway and Denmark.

Geert
Wilders, a rising figure in Dutch politics, was charged with hate speech
for equating Islam and Nazism. In June, his Freedom Party swept past
the ruling Christian Democrats, who lost half of their strength in
parliament. "More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam --
that is what the Netherlands has chosen," said Wilders.

In
France, President Nicolas Sarkozy -- one eye on Jean-Marie Le Pen's
National Front, the other on the 2012 elections -- rejecting cries of
"Nazism" and "Vichyism," is dismantling Gypsy camps and deporting
Gypsies to Romania. Milan is now following the French lead.

What is happening in Europe partakes of a global trend. Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nations are disintegrating.

Russians
battle ethnic Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus. Seventy percent
of Americans support an Arizona law to identify and expel illegal
aliens. Beijing swamps the homelands of Tibetans and Uighurs with Han
Chinese. India fights secession in Kashmir, Nagaland and the Naxalite
provinces.

"Wars between nations have given way to wars within nations, " said Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize address.

Ethnonationalism
tore Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union and Josip Tito's Yugoslavia into
22 separate nations, and is now tugging at the seams of all multi-ethnic
states. Globalism is in retreat before tribalism.

But the awakening of Europe's establishment to the shallow roots of multiculturalism will likely prove frustrating and futile.

With
her fertility rate below replacement levels for 40 years, projected to
remain so for the next 40 years, Germany will lose 12 million of her 82
million people by 2050. Her median age will rise eight years to 53, and
40 percent of all Germans will be over 60.

Germany's problem is insoluble. She is running out of Germans.

Yet if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers.

Where
are they to come from, if not the Third World? For not one European
nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that
is not below zero population growth.

Baby boomer Europe
decided in the 1960s and 1970s it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle
of children. It had that sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the
bill is the end of their tribes and countries as we have known them.

Old
Europe is dying, and the populist and nationalist parties, in the
poet's phrase, are simply raging "against the dying of the light."