Europe’s decline now fueled by absence of religion, democracy
AVIGNON, FRANCE » France’s Rhone River Valley is a storybook marriage of high technology, traditional vineyards and ancestral villages. High- speed trains crisscross majestic cathedrals, castles and chateaus.
There’s a Roman Empire-like sameness throughout Europe in fashion, popular culture and government protocol — a welcome change from the deadly fault lines of 1914 and 1939.
Yet, as in the waning days of Rome, there’s a growing uncertainly beneath the European calm.
The present generation has inherited the physical architecture and art of a once-great West. But it seems to lack the confidence that it could ever create the conditions to match, much less exceed, such achievement.
The sense of depression in Europe reminds one of novelist J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythical land of Gondor in “The Lord of the Rings,” which once served as bulwark of a humane Middle-earth.
But by the novel’s time, the people of Gondor had become militarily and spiritually enfeebled by self-doubt, decades of poor governance, depopulation and indifference, paradoxically brought on by wealth and affluence.
Europeans are similarly confused. They claim to be building a new democratic culture. But the governing elites of the European Union are terrified of popular protest movements. And they think voters cannot be properly taught what’s good for them. Free speech is increasing problematic. It’s more dangerous for a European citizen to publicly object to illegal immigration than for a foreigner to enter Europe illegally.
Oddly, less wealthy Central and Eastern Europeans are more astutely skeptical of mass immigration than wealthier but less rational Western Europeans.
Germany wishes to be the good leader that can live down its past by virtue-signaling its tolerance. Yet it rams down the throat of its neighbors its politically correct policies on Middle Eastern immigration, mandatory green energy, virtual disarmament, mercantilist trade and financial bail- outs. Rarely has such a socialist nation been so hyper-capitalist and chauvinist in piling up trade surpluses.
The world assumes that the rich European Union won’t do much about unscrupulous Chinese trade practices, radical Islamic terrorism, or Iranian and North Korean nuclear proliferation.
Such problems are left to the more uncouth Americans. That explains why many Europeans concede that the hated Donald Trump’s deterrent foreign policy and his economic growth protocols could prove in the long term a better deal for Europe than were the beloved Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind and redistributionist agendas.
The European Union’s sole reason to be is to avoid a repeat of the disastrous 20th century, in which many millions of Europeans were slaughtered in world wars, death camps and the great communist terror in Russia.
Yet paradoxically, the European reaction to the gory past often results in an extreme Western sybaritic lifestyle that in itself leads to decline.
European religion has been recalibrated into a political correctness. Buying a home and getting a job depend more on government ministries than on individual daring and initiative.
Yet the more credible European lesson from the last century’s catastrophes is that too few 20th-century European democracies stayed militarily vigilant. In the 1930s, too few of them felt confident enough in Western democratic values to confront existential dangers in their infancy like Hitler and Stalin.
Atheistic nihilism and a soulless modernism — not religious piety and a reverence for custom and tradition — fueled German and Italian fascism and Russian communism.
Contrary to politically correct dogma, Christianity, military deterrence, democracy and veneration of a unique past did not destroy Europe.
Instead, the culprit of European decline was the very absence of such ancient values — both then and now.