Posted 3:19 PM by Floyd

One of Western Europe's most serious problems is demographic. The birth rate is well below the 2.1 children per female needed to maintain a level population; some nations like Spain and Italy have birth rates as low as 1.6. This means that the proportion of elderly people is rising -- and of course modern medical technology extends the life span and further increases the number of old people. A European-style public pension plan is unmaintainable under these conditions.

The only way to get enough worker money into the state's coffers is to import immigrants. (America would also have a declining population without immigration.) So many European states have a large proportion of immigrants. A tenth of Germany is Turkish, and a tenth of France is North African. The mostly Muslim immigrant population is not assimilating well; many of them have militant religious beliefs, and they do not seem to be accepting the more liberal values of their host countries. Foreign communities are most dangerous and alienated in France, but there are similar problems throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Many in the blogosphere have expressed disappointment that Europe cannot assimilate its immigrants. But this is not realistic; America's melting pot is a rare phenomenon, and Europe would need to change considerably before duplicating it.

The typical European nation, just like the typical nation anywhere in the world, is run by and for a particular ethnic group. There is no enthusiasm for attempting to turn, say, Turks into Germans. Instead, Europeans have used the following strategies to deal with fractious minorities:

• Persecution.
  
• Power-sharing. For instance, the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire by giving the Hungarians equal status with the Austrians. (The Hungarians then had their own minorities to deal with; see "Persecution" above.)
  
• Expulsion. The famous example is the expulsion of Spain's Jews. Less famous was the forced migration of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe after World War II to their new "home countries" -- for example, some ten million Germans were forced out of the Oder-Niesse region and the Sudentenland.
  
• Redrawing of boundaries. Before World War I states grabbed whatever lands they could, but after World War I and World War II attention was paid to ethnic makeup when maps were redrawn.
  

None of these strategies can help Europe deal with its immigrants. Persecution is immoral and does not work. (In some cases, such as the persecution of Poles during the Partition, there is suppression of a people's language and customs. But this is easily avoided and probably strengthens the bond of peoples to their ethnicity.) Power-sharing cannot really work in a democracy, and never worked all that well for anybody anyway. Expulsion is also immoral -- the majority of immigrants are hard-working and law-abiding -- and takes Europe back to square one of the demographic problem. Finally, where can boundaries be redrawn? Immigrants are scattered throughout Europe and presumably concentrated in large cities.

Can a European country develop a melting pot attitude? In America there is the feeling that while immigrants do become kind of an American ethnic group that speaks a dialect of English and has its own culture, this culture is dynamic and borrows customs and habits from the people it assimilates. Because America has not been around that long, there is a willingness for the culture to experiment and change. Europe is a place with a rich and long-standing history; I don't think they can easily adopt a pro-assimilation set of attitudes just because it might help them with their pension or crime problems.