Steyn on the future of Europe

Conservative columnist and author Mark Steyn sometimes says unwise things (such as in his recent recommendations that the United States should topple the Syrian government), but is frequently very insightful. Here he is being interviewed about the likely shape of things in Europe 20 years from now.

. . . you'll be switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired—and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.

. . . . there are really three groups of people in Europe among the native Europeans and they're split three ways. Some of them will decide to fight and turn to Neo-Fascism and some of them will just convert to Islam because it's going to win and they'll talk themselves into figuring they can be Muslim light and it won't make much difference and others will just head to sea . . . .

On why Europeans, generally more skeptical than Americans about the compatibility of Islam and democracy, seem so nonchalant about admitting large numbers of Muslim immigrants:

If Islam is incompatible with democracy, that's not a problem for Iraq, it's a problem for Belgium, you know, because Iraq until, you know, a few months back had no democracy to lose. They can easily adjust to the way it's always been.

For Belgium or for Denmark or for the Netherlands, they've got real democracies and they are likely to lose . . . . I think at some level there's something else going on there, too, that a lot of these [European] countries, you know,—we talk about the Middle East, democratize the Middle East - we forget Spain was a dictatorship 30 years ago, Portugal, a little over 30 years ago, Greece, same 30 years ago.

Italy and Germany and France, you've got to go back half a century, but in essence the idea of living under non-democratic regimes is not foreign to these people and I think they think of themselves, their identities less as Europeans are less bound up with ideas of liberty than it is for the U.S. You know, the U.S. is an ideological project in a way that Italy isn't and so I do think that also accounts for part of the way they look at it.

On the adoption of Islamic dress by European women:

It's certainly happening in some cities. I heard it anecdotally from two friends in the space of a week and I thought it was very interesting that in both cases—one woman extremely wealthy, well-to-do and the other woman just happens to be a poor divorcee living in a part of town that is rapidly Islamifying—but they both reported the same experience—you put on a head scarf and, you know, you don't have to wear the burka, but you look, in other words, you don't look like a full Wahabi woman from Saudi Arabia, but you look like say, an Egyptian lady or a Jordanian. You wear the head scarf and a head to toe dress or you're not showing bare legs, bare arms, uncovered hair. They were stunned at how much more relaxing it was to stroll across the park, stroll to the corner store. They suddenly felt far more secure, they felt far more safe, they weren't jeered at for being an infidel whore or anything—and I would imagine that, you know, it's not actually that big a stage from sort of passing for Muslim in the street to actually embracing it in some kind of way of residual way at least nominally for the advantages of a quiet life.