The Irresponsible Generation: The Islamization of Europe Dooms Our Children

Even if, as the European Right demands, the flow of Muslim immigration were to be completely halted today, the proportion of Muslims in Europe would continue to grow rapidly due to pure demographic logic, as years ago confirmed by Pew Research Center’s “Europe’s Growing Muslim Population”: they are younger, have much higher fertility rates than locals, and the vast majority consider abortion morally unacceptable, so the percentage of Islamic women who have abortions is minimal.

Beyond official statistics, anyone of my generation, or those aged 40 and older, has had the opportunity to witness the contrast in colors and cultures between the neighborhoods where we grew up—whether in Madrid or Berlin—and the image those same neighborhoods present today. Much has been written about the consequences of illegal immigration on security, the saturation of social services, and the loss of Europe’s Christian identity. However, the problem is less frequently approached from the perspective of generational responsibility.

It is a fact that our ancestors thought more about the legacy they would leave for future generations than we do. Their cultural cosmos placed greater value on continuity, rootedness, and tradition, whereas in our time, immediacy, self-interest, and instant results prevail. Perhaps that is why we pay so much attention to the problems that affect us now and so little to the world we will leave to others. The only exception, curiously, is the environmentalist insistence on the consequences of climate change, which keeps millions of people preoccupied with generational cataclysms. Yet it is a diffuse problem, lacking scientific consensus, full of manipulation and demagoguery, and propelled by an ideological current that seeks not so much to save the planet as to achieve, through green hysteria, what communism failed to accomplish in Europe by other means.

Islamization, however, is a real, tangible problem today, and its evolution is so rapid that it should concern our politicians more than the imaginary problems they are usually distracted by. Yet when it is ever addressed in parliaments, it is always linked to the idea of insecurity in the streets, which is understandable but insufficient. Very few parliamentary interventions in Europe appeal to the danger that the Old Continent, which our children and grandchildren will inherit, will become an Islamic prison for Christians. We have forgotten Edmund Burke’s “contract” between generations.

“Society is indeed a contract,” he wrote, “It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” From G. K. Chesterton to Russell Kirk, from Roger Scruton to T. S. Eliot, all who shaped conservative thought based on the Christian heritage of the West insisted on the need to strive for the permanent, to maintain the work built by our ancestors, and on the fundamental responsibility we have: to transmit to those who come after us the transcendent meaning of existence, the way in which this Western society of freedom and prosperity has been formed over the centuries, upon the pillars of the Judeo-Christian origins of our culture.

By addressing only the problems that affect the present—security, social services, women’s freedoms, or the defense of the Christian family—we leave out of the battle a motivation that should be paramount: the responsibility we have to future generations, which is to transmit at least a world as livable as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

The first consequence of this shift in approach to the Islamic invasion of Europe is the urgency to address the demographic problem as a genuine emergency. But this must also be done from a cultural, not a pragmatic, perspective. Many conservative parties are proposing tax exemptions and aid for large families, attempting to encourage a baby boom. These measures are not inappropriate, but they once again focus solely on the urgency of solving a present problem by any means necessary, without considering that, if there is no European cultural renaissance, the birth rate will fall again as soon as subsidies disappear, or when the left returns to power and decides to cancel birth incentives. That is why the pro-natal discourse of European conservative leaders misses the heart of the matter: what nation do you want to leave to your grandchildren? One of the burqa and Sharia? What moral responsibility do you have for the nation you bequeath to your descendants?

There are those who mock such questions, claiming that despite everything, the presence of Muslim immigrants remains a minority in Europe compared to local Christians. The argument for this mockery is fallacious in every respect: the Muslim presence in Europe is a minority… compared to Africa. Islamic culture is far more invasive and defining of the character of a society than the current Christian culture, stripped of all its strength by the disintegrating poison of European laicism; the rates of insecurity resulting from immigration (look at the statistics by nationality of arrests in Europe for violent crimes or sexual assaults) show that even though they are relatively few, they account for enormous percentages of crime, making their real influence on society much greater than the statistics suggest.

Furthermore, the suicidal ‘refugees welcome’ policy, the consequences of which we continue to suffer, was not the brainchild of European Muslim parties—there were none—nor even of the European far left, always ready to support causes that erode the sovereignty of our nations. Rather, it was a joint initiative of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in which the former will always bear more blame than the latter, from whom ultimately we do not expect much either. 

The successful emergence of New Right parties is largely due to the political suicide of European Christian Democrats, which began not with immigration but with their refusal to endorse the Christian origins of Europe in the European Constitution. Emptying Europe of Christianity, as conservative intellectuals warned at the time, would leave no space for laicism and freedoms, but rather for any other cultural wind that could blow decisively. That wind today—driven by Muslim immigration—is the hurricane of the Islamization of Europe.

Without a determined return by all right-wing parties—new and old—to the restoration of Europe’s Christian heritage and the defense of the sovereignty of its constituent nations, focusing more on the Europeans of coming centuries than on solving the problems arising from Islamization with immediate pragmatic fixes, our children and grandchildren will have every right tomorrow to label us The Irresponsible Generation that broke the contract.