If Europe Does Not Pull Up the Drawbridge

“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote James Burnham in his 1964 “Suicide of the West.”

Burnham predicted that the mindless magnanimity of liberals, who subordinate the interests of their own people and nations to utopian and altruistic impulses, would bring about an end to Western civilization.

Was he wrong? Consider what is happening in Europe.

Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia, small nations sensing they will be swamped by asylum seekers from the Muslim world, are trying to seal their borders and secure their homelands.

Their instinct for survival, their awareness of lifeboat ethics, is acute. Yet they are being condemned for trying to save themselves.

The Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas says he would welcome Palestinian asylum seekers. Both sides know that, in this struggle, demography may very well be destiny.

The Schengen Agreement that guarantees “open borders” among EU nations is also unlikely to survive this invasion. The old national borders of Europe will be re-established.

And as divisions deepen within and between countries over how many to accept, and when to shut the door, the EU may itself crack up over this most momentous and emotional of issues.

The scores of thousands of migrants bursting into Europe and the hundreds of thousands and millions coming after them are going to force Europeans to address an existential question.

Who are we? Are we unique and separate peoples of a particular race and tribe, history and faith, language and culture, identifiable to all the world and worth preserving at the price of our lives?

Are we Germans, Russians, Poles, Italians, Spanish and French first?

Or are we simply Europeans, people who live on the world’s smallest continent and share a belief in the equality of all peoples and cultures, and in secularism and social democracy?

Liberal Man almost alone excepted, every species of animal life reacts or recoils when another species intrudes upon its turf.

Thus, in the end, Burnham was probably right.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.