Victor Davis Hanson: Can Europe Become Western Again?

American Greatness ^ | 22 Nov, 2023 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

Europe still remains the most popular tourist spot on earth. Its hallowed architecture, art, infrastructure, and natural beauty still remind millions of visitors of the world’s once most dynamic and grandiose civilization.

Even now, European nations, in and out of the Europe Union, still produce a combined gross domestic product of $24 trillion, second only to the United States.

Europe’s exports are among the world’s most coveted cars, sophisticated technology, and valued industrial goods.

Yet since World War II, Europe has played an increasingly reduced role in world affairs, despite its membership in the NATO alliance and the growth of the European Union.

Why?

The twentieth-century traumas of World War I and II—in which some 70 million Europeans were killed—saw Europe commit near collective suicide. The ensuing Cold War hinged on protecting a relatively unarmed Europe from an aggressive nuclear Soviet empire on Europe’s borders.

But as World War II and the Cold War faded into memory, Europe did not snap back and assume its centuries-old role as a world leader and beacon of Western Civilization.

Instead, a weary Europe outsourced its security to the United States. It redefined itself as a postmodern, pacifist, socialist utopian project—most recently predicated on redistributionist entitlements, open borders, and radical green policies that have all inevitably ensured European decline.

Europeans grew louder and whinier the less relevant they became.

Although Europe has large sources of untapped hydroelectrical, nuclear, coal, and natural gas power, its green religion has all but shut down new nuclear and fossil fuel generation and closed existing plants.

[x]

The EU is genetically inferior as a result of losing the gene pool to two twentieth century wars.

Somebody always says that here, but it's nonsense. Not all the "fit" people were killed and plenty of the "unfit" were. Many of those who died had often already had children before or during the war. Primitive peoples around the world lose a higher percentage of their populations to warfare, but go on being warlike generation after generation.

[x]

Maybe what they are is what it now means to be “Western.” With luck and a lot of effort, they may be able to slow down immigration, but they are still going to consumerist and pacifist and irreligious.

[DavidThomas]

Eh, assuming the EU does have superior genetics, the post WWII population boom made up for the lives that were lost during the war.

[bert]

The warrior genes are gone. The remaining gene pool is inferior to what was. No warriors left

[PerConPat]

Increasingly, a lonely U.S. must face the fact that our deadliest enemies are now a part of our own body politic. Just as POGO once warned us...

Until the big, blue urban areas etc. are rolled out of their collectivist trances; Europe and its stupidity are not our biggest problem.