Book Recommendation: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West comes too late - perhaps - for Europe but just in time for the United States.

The book can be read on several levels. The obvious is as a thorough and thought-provoking review of how Europe got into, shall we say, an immigration challenge, where large numbers of people with no allegiance to European values have become citizens. It can also be seen as an examination of how an combination of elite groups can make decisions with little understanding as to how those will translate into reality on the street. It can certainly be studied as an illustration of how vulnerable a society becomes when it ceases to believe in itself.

Caldwell explores how many European nations, suffering from self-directed xenophobia and reacting to Nazism and colonialism, not only became reluctant to defend values but embarked on a course to repress criticism of immigration. In the name of tolerance, intolerance was expanded. [In one British inquiry, racism was defined as "any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person."]

We can see similar, although not as extreme, efforts to foster an intolerant tolerance in the United States. And to me, that was the book's greatest attraction: spotting the ways in which Americans are following the same path as the Europeans and considering how the positives of diversity can be obtained without retaining the poisons.

One excerpt:

When it interacted with immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity "enriched" and "strengthened" nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into the broader society? That would be drawing down the nation's valuable fund of diversity. ...Or was the fund of diversity meant to remain - via immigration - permanently on tap? No European public wanted that. So European leaders defended large-scale immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration).

Caldwell makes it clear that they've failed to pull off that trick.

Five out of five stars. Check it out.