A Prophecy Confirmed but Unfinished

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, Knopf Doubleday, 2009, 384 pages.

Vice President JD Vance was being diplomatic. 

“Europe is on the brink of civilizational suicide,” Vance said on Fox News in March 2025. “Countries don’t control borders, restrict free speech. If Germany takes in millions more incompatible migrants, it’ll destroy itself. America can’t save it.”  

Some might take issue with the use of the words “on the brink;” Europe is already well over the edge.

Vance might have been channeling Christopher Caldwell’s 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and Europe.  Caldwell, a conservative journalist who has written for a broad range of outlets, from the Financial Times and Weekly Standard to the Claremont Review of Books, received criticism for the book when it was published but it was mostly positively received at the time. As the Economist put it, Caldwell’s book was “the best statement to date of the pessimist’s position on Islamic immigration in Europe.”

More than fifteen years later, the pessimist’s position holds up quite well. Not only is Caldwell an excellent, careful and curious writer, the book filled with incident and the telling detail, but all the trends that he identified as pressing concerns in Europe then are still there and indeed have accelerated. His essential premise, that the current European immigration flood is unprecedented in both scope and composition (the Islamic part of the immigration) and that Europe is suffering an identity crisis, is indisputable.

Some nascent trends identified by Caldwell have become much more obvious with the passage of time. He touches on the birth dearth, which has become such a major issue recently. He notes increasing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Europe, both of which have been turbo-charged (because of Trump and because of the Hamas war) over the past months. He asks of Europe fifteen years ago as if speaking of the E.U. in the face of the Ukraine War, “whether or not it can defend itself, [because] it has lost sight of why it should.” 

Caldwell highlights a bizarre reality that has existed for decades and yet still bedevils the continent: “Europe is getting more immigrants than its voters want,” which is a good sign that Europe’s “democracy is malfunctioning.” We saw this in the February 2025 German elections with mainstream parties (both left and right of center) promising a harder line on immigration demanded by public opinion only to seemingly renounce such policies once the votes were counted. Parties in the United Kingdom and Greece have played the same double game.

There are areas where perhaps Caldwell didn’t follow the trendline far enough.  He notes that immigrants in general, including Muslims, vote left. What he didn’t see was how strongly that pattern would develop. Sixty-two percent of French Muslim citizens voted for the hard-left LFI (La France insoumise) party in the 2024 elections. Seventy-seven% of German Muslims voted for the left in the 2025 elections, 29% of them for the far-left Die Linke.  To paraphrase Brecht, European leftist parties are importing new voters to replace the ones who no longer vote for them.  In Spain, not only is the ruling left-wing coalition welcoming mass immigration, it is speeding up the process of giving migrants citizenship in order to pad the voter rolls.   

There is also, finally, in Europe some high-profile pushback to the dire situation that Caldwell described. One anti-immigration hardliner not mentioned in the book is Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Sweden, long an object lesson in permissive immigration dysfunction has adopted tough anti-immigration policies in recent years. Not only do rightist parties today openly call for tougher rules on migration, the issue of forced “remigration” has emerged both as meme and topic of conversation. 

In response to immigrant violence and the massive Nahel Merzouk riots of 2023, small groups of right-wing youth took to the streets in France armed with iron bars and baseball bats to defend their neighborhoods. The numbers were tiny, but the prospect of “far-right” or “ultra-right” vigilantism was terrifying to the authorities. The more immigration remains an issue the greater the possibility that the Populist Right will break through in Europe, despite feverish, often heavy-handed, efforts by Eurocrats and increasingly threadbare traditional centrist parties to prevent it. 

British leftist humanist Kenan Malik chided Caldwell in a review back in 2009 that the problem was not immigration nor Muslim immigration at all but Caldwell’s (and presumably all the alarmists’) “lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project.” Today that project looks increasingly exhausted and ripe for replacement by something else, an Islamo-Leftist coalition — political Islam has always been extremely pragmatic about alliances — or a resurgent populist Right. One wonders if the ultimate fate of Europe is to be caught in an existential struggle between extremes, between future Fanonists and Maurrassians.

The presence of Islam alone or large numbers of Muslims in a country is not the determining factor. Percentage wise, there are more Muslims in Bulgaria (8%) or India (14.2%) or Israel (18.1%) than in the United Kingdom (6%) or Germany (6.1%); however these are not migrants but long-existing indigenous populations, and those first three nations are not in real danger of being replaced by minority Muslim populations. Caldwell accurately saw the challenge as strong communities encountering weak ones: “the strongest communities in Europe are culturally speaking, not European communities at all,” as a result of inexorable migration pressure, made worse by population decline.

Europe may be divided between those states which manage, even with relative population decreases, to position themselves in demographic “safe zones” (fertility above 1.6) where declines are gradual and eventually reversible (while also restricting most immigration) and those states where it seems to be already too late. Spain and Italy may be, unfortunately, too far gone.

That is not to discount one factor that Christopher Caldwell could not foresee – who could? – which is the rise of a man of destiny who can alter the fate of a nation. A nation is not a company but a specific people bound by time, custom and place. It is not disposable, like so much in our culture. In our days we have witnessed what seem to be astonishing revolutions, reversals of national fortune, in leaders like Bukele, Milei and Trump. Does the old continent retain any of its old fervor? As Caldwell asks, “why was ethnic pride ‘a virtue’ and nationalism ‘a sickness?”

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