The End of European Civilisation

It had to be just a matter of time. The ‘debate’ over the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe, like the ‘debate’ over immigation in previous decades, makes much of the imagery of ‘swamping’; entire streets and districts are being taken over by Them, there are places where you don’t hear any English/French/German and they eat cats you know, our lovely culture is being smothered in curries and sharia law and so forth. The obvious riposte, from the people who feel a duty to respond wearily to this sort of nonsense, is that Muslim immigrants make up at the most 3-4% of the population of Europe; what sort of ‘swamping’ is that, and what sort of a society feels threatened by a tiny minority of mainly poor and marginalised foreigners? A society run by wishy-washy liberal multi-culturalist race traitors, of course...

The Roman Empire always tends to crop up in these discussions. Enoch Powell’s classical education allowed him to pinch the image of rivers foaming with blood from Virgil, but decades earlier there was the obsession of the French with the vast hordes of German barbarians lurking just over the eastern border, intent on destroying all (i.e. French) civilisation just as their ancestors had done, the obsession of the Germans with the vast hordes of Jewish and Slavic barbarians lurking just over the eastern, intent on swamping true (i.e. German) culture, and the obsession of almost everyone, British and American included, with the threat of the Inferior Races. The example of Rome showed what happened to a civilisation that allowed itself to be overwhelmed by aliens and/or corrupted from within by allowing aliens in.

What lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities.

(Tenney Frank, ‘Race mixture in the Roman empire’, American Historical Review 21 (1916).)

The last few decades of research into the later Roman empire has undermined the main planks of these accounts. Even leaving aside all the evidence that in most cases the transition from a loose federation of cities paying taxes to the Roman state to smaller but more tightly organised kingdoms paying taxes more locally was gradual and peaceful, how do we imagine that disorganised barbarian tribes, numbering a few hundred thousand at the most, swamped a population of 60 million? Either Roman culture was completely rotten and needed to be invigorated with an infusion of Germanic dynamism, as German historians and Nazi ideologues tended to argue in the first half of the twentieth century, or we’re thinking about the phenomenon of ‘culture change’ in completely the wrong way.

‘Yes, but Rome did fall.’ That’s the line of argument that worries me. At some point – quite possibly it’s already happened, but I can’t bear to read every racist screed about the threat of ‘Islamification’ – someone is going to say, yes, I accept that Muslims are a tiny minority – but Rome fell because of a tiny minority of barbarians, so we need to be even more afraid, and protect our culture ever more zealously. Rome as the archetypal empire, above all in its ending; ‘decline and fall’ appears to legitimise any dodgy political position you care to mention, even contradictory ones. The political organistion of the empire fell apart; that is taken to mean that the entirety of Roman Civilisation was destroyed, and then the alleged lessons of Rome’s fall are extended to contemporary Europe. Modern Muslims are the vast barbarian hordes that swamped the empire, and the sinister groups of outwardly civilised barbarians who undermined it from within – and the descendents of the Arabs who, according to the French historian Henri Pirenne, should take the real responsibility for destroying the empire’s unity in the eighth rather than the sixth century. They are to be seen as the great enemy, and we can find any number of dubious but powerful historical analogies to present them as such.