Mark Steyn: EUtopia Is Over – Join the Real World

I was reading a news item in the Guardian the other day. Didn't get very far. This was the first sentence: "The Church of England said yesterday that police counter-terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them."

At that point, I fell off the chair, howling with laughter. Not because of the strikingly non-ecumenical character of the infanticidal thugs at Beslan, the bombers of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the murderers of the 12 Nepalese workers, the terrorist suspects arrested in north London on Friday, or the beheaders of two American hostages and impending beheader of a third British one.

No, what's hilarious about the C of E's intervention is that it felt the need to make it.

Look forward to, say, 2020. Can anyone doubt that there'll be far more practising Muslims in Britain? And, by the same token, that there'll be far fewer practising Anglicans?

There will be more mosques, full of lively young men, and fewer C of E churches, with the surviving ones catering to a dwindling band of tribal Anglicans, enough to pepper a pew or two but too old and frail to man a full-service church.

I say "tribal Anglicans", because anybody in Britain who gives serious thought to the Christian message will be either a Catholic or evangelical Protestant.

Islam is a vigorous faith with growing appeal, the C of E is wimpy mush with no appeal to anyone. To apply the late Osama bin Laden's strong horse/weak horse routine, Islam is a surging stallion and Rowan Williams and co are an elderly, emaciated gelding.

EUtopia is over – join the real world
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 28/09/2004)

I was reading a news item in the Guardian the other day. Didn't get very far. This was the first sentence: "The Church of England said yesterday that police counter- terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them."

At that point, I fell off the chair, howling with laughter. Not because of the strikingly non-ecumenical character of the infanticidal thugs at Beslan, the bombers of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the murderers of the 12 Nepalese workers, the terrorist suspects arrested in north London on Friday, or the beheaders of two American hostages and impending beheader of a third British one.

No, what's hilarious about the C of E's intervention is that it felt the need to make it.

Look forward to, say, 2020. Can anyone doubt that there'll be far more practising Muslims in Britain? And, by the same token, that there'll be far fewer practising Anglicans?

There will be more mosques, full of lively young men, and fewer C of E churches, with the surviving ones catering to a dwindling band of tribal Anglicans, enough to pepper a pew or two but too old and frail to man a full-service church.

I say "tribal Anglicans", because anybody in Britain who gives serious thought to the Christian message will be either a Catholic or evangelical Protestant.

Islam is a vigorous faith with growing appeal, the C of E is wimpy mush with no appeal to anyone. To apply the late Osama bin Laden's strong horse/weak horse routine, Islam is a surging stallion and Rowan Williams and co are an elderly, emaciated gelding.

How many other weak horses still think they're the strong horse?

In the current issue of The Spectator, Niall Ferguson argues that the Anglo-American "special relationship" is doomed.

"The typical British family," he writes, "looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can."

He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.

A shared taste in Dunkin' Donuts or Celine Dion CDs is no proof of geopolitical compatibility, and never has been: a century ago, The Merry Widow was both Hitler's favourite operetta and the biggest hit on Broadway.

If embracing Europe meant pasta, Mercedeses and flaunting one's wedding tackle on the Cote d'Azur, who could object?

Unfortunately, embracing Europe means embracing German corporatism, French public-service ethics, Belgian foreign policy, Swedish tax rates and Greek state pension liabilities which, by the year 2040, will account for 24 per cent of GDP.

So, if Britons are becoming more European, they ought to stop, because it's a death cult. Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and 50 million Britons joining them in their fantasy won't make it come true.

By contrast, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian is demanding a ballot for November 2 on the grounds that, "if everyone in the world will be affected by this presidential election, shouldn't everyone in the world have a vote in it?"

You might want to try that argument closer to home, dearie - say, in Brussels, where plans are already well advanced to ignore any "no" votes on the constitution and where the "democratic deficit" is, as the computer types like to say, not a bug but a feature.

But, according to Freedland, in demanding the same rights as New Hampshire and Arkansas, "the human race would be making a declaration of dependence - acknowledging that Washington's decisions affect us more than those taken in our own capitals."

Yes, but that was your conscious choice - a choice not to keep up, technologically, militarily, economically, because you preferred 35-hour weeks, two months of vacation, cradle-to-grave welfare, etc.

And even today you Eurofetishists still trumpet all that as the core of European identity. And, if the core of European identity turns out to have made you impotent, you ought to treat the disease rather than demand free Viagra from Washington.

Freedland calls his request for a global anti-Bush vote a "modest proposal" - echoing his fellow Jonathan, Swift. But another passage from Swift seems more pertinent here. The European arithmetic doesn't add up: it leads to high taxes, high unemployment, high crime, disastrously low birth rates.

Yet the Eurofanatics insist that, au contraire, it's the way of the future. As Gulliver observed of the Liliputians: "They bury their Dead with their Heads directly downwards, because they hold an Opinion that in eleven thousand Moons they are all to rise again, in which Period the Earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their Resurrection, be found ready standing on their Feet."

That's modern Europe, with its head in the sand but convinced that it's the only one holding the map the right way up.

EUtopia is over. There's something terribly vieux chapeau about those calls for Germany to get a seat on the Security Council.

Never mind that, if Europe is to have a single foreign minister, it seems curious that it needs three UN vetoes: the truth is that Germany, entering a demographic death spiral and an era of political instability, will never be an economic powerhouse again.

And, if the issue (as Freedland sees it) is to restrain America, there's already far too much of that.

In Darfur, as I wrote more than two months ago in this space, the US agreed to do the Guardian thing and go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strong-ish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped.

There comes a time when you have to recognise that, if institutions - the C of E, the EU, the UN - are that determined to commit slow suicide, you can't stop them. If Britain wants to avoid their fate, it doesn't need to join the US electorate, it needs to rejoin the real world.

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