There is Europe and there is “Europe,” the fantasy kingdom wished into being by North American ideologues to turn their silly ideas into action movies.
Once upon a time, this pretend continent was the left's dollhouse, a land where high government spending supposedly led to all manner of social good – so long as you avoided noting that Germany has fewer child-care spaces than the U.S., France has the lowest rate of unionization in the West, Italy's hospitals are filthy and ill-run and most of the continent's spending goes to the already well-off.
It is conservatives who fabricate a mythic “Europe” to serve their ends. In this scenario, a lazy, culturally exhausted atheist society has stopped having babies and is being overwhelmed by baby-booming Muslim hordes that are on the verge of becoming a majority and imposing sharia law and Islamist government on the continent.
The champion of this “Eurabia” myth is Canadian Mark Steyn, who was once one of the world's best writers on musical theatre.
Mr. Steyn's argument is, as any serious demographer will tell you, completely false. I've avoided countering it because he has been the subject of a ridiculous hate-speech complaint before a number of Canadian human-rights tribunals. As a result, he deserved all of our support: The right to express hatred of people, ideas, groups or communities is fundamental and important.
Now that this is behind us – I hope – we can turn to the article, titled The Future Belongs to Islam. It is based on three mythic claims about Europe:
1. The Islamic baby boom. The great sine qua non of Mr. Steyn's argument is the idea that Muslims have more children than the rest of us. His article is based on a claim he has made repeatedly, including in a bestselling book, that Europe will have a plurality of Muslims, perhaps 40 per cent of the population, by 2020.
This number appears to have been plucked from space. Here's the reality, which you can easily look up: Slightly more than 4 per cent of Europe's population is “Muslim,” as defined by demographers (though about 80 per cent of these people are not religiously observant, so they are better defined as secular citizens who have escaped religious nations).
It is possible, though not certain, that this number could rise to 6 per cent by 2020. If current immigration and birth rates remain the same, it could even rise to 10 per cent within 100 years.
But it won't, because “Muslims” don't actually have more babies than other populations do under the same circumstances. The declining population-growth rates that will lead Europe to a falling overall population in seven years – as I documented here two weeks ago – are not confined to native populations. In fact, immigrants from Muslim countries are experiencing a faster drop in reproduction rates than the larger European population.
A recent study, Religiousness and Fertility among European Muslims, by demographers Charles Westoff and Tomas Frejka, documents this. Populations need to have 2.1 children per family to keep from shrinking. Among Turks in Germany – one of the longest-standing Muslim immigrant populations in Europe – the rate has fallen to 1.9 children from 4.4 in 1970. Turks in Switzerland also have 1.9, while those in the Netherlands have 1.6, fewer than white British people do. Muslim women in France have 2.2 children, barely more than non-Muslim women there, and that number is falling.
