Another good piece is Daniel Johnson's Collective Loss of Europe's Will. Of broader scope is Mark Steyn's Facing Down Iran which examines the geo-strategic implications of a coddled and impotent Europe.

Ironically, the election of Prodi in Italy may prove the undoing of the Euro. Italy is already out-of-compliance on the Euro, and would become vastly and blatantly so should a Prodi government institute even half their promises. Something will have to give -- either Italy pulls out (or is thrown out), or the Euro suffers badly, or, or, or.

It's painful to watch, and goes far beyond France. Enough vignettes and anecdotes can actually form a clear picture, as with a pointilliste painting.

My in-laws are European: one Dutch, one Hungarian. The Old Europe / New Europe fault line in one family. The blatant hedonism and state-dependency amongst the Dutch cousins is remarkable, especially in contrast to the Hungarian side of the family, some of whom are hard-working and productive in their mid-80s.

My Dutch in-law's friends in the US are largely from the most radical fringes of the ANSWER crowd, and she has commented what a loyal Democrat her husband is. Except ten minutes later he said to me privately, with a big grin, "You know, the best thing about America is the secret ballot."

Hungary has the same demographic challenge as Old Europe, but the monumental difference in attitude will probably lead to at least a manageable outcome.

The Netherlands and Norway can afford their elaborate social support systems, for now at least, thanks to the vast wealth the North Sea oil and natural gas deposits provide. France on the other hand doesn't have that luxury.

Eventually all three will have to reform their social safety net systems, but France will have to face that fact much sooner IMO. That even minimal reform attempts in France met such vociferous opposition isn't really suprising to anyone who's spent any time in France. Frankly it's as embedded in the culture just as strongly as some of the odder tendancies are embedded in the cultures of Islamic countries.

What I find interesting is that during a time of massive public demonstrations in both France over job security, and the US over immigration, each country probably looks at the other and is amused. The French see our immigration protests and likely, the recent polling showing little support for draconian immigration reform such as the House bill and say "they just don't get it yet" while Americans undoubtedly feel the same way about the French populace's refusal to make even minor changes in employment law and say basically the same thing.

Davebo, I suspect you're exactly right.

Joe,

Let me make myself clear in regards to immigration reform. I'm for efforts to better secure the border, but doubtful we will ever be able to completely curb illegal border crossings. I'd say the War on Drugs has already proven that point. Still, we have to make the effort.

But I do oppose creating felons of those illegal workers already here. It's pointless IMO.

And frankly, as far as those already here, I'm not so certain just sticking with the status quo isn't a decent idea.

But make no mistake. The problems that the Dutch, French and others are having with their Morroc's and Algerians, etc. could have happened exactly the same way here were it not for the geographical oddity that is the US.

All of us needed the foreign labor. But for America it was much easier to let the problem solve itself via Mexico and Central America with a nod and a wink. The Dutch and French weren't going to be able to do the same thing by hoping Belgians came and solved the problem for them.

In the end we should thank the diety of your choice that our immigrants can stage 500,000 plus person protests in what was an incredibly violence and crime free manner.

Because when it comes to immigration to fill the void, we have it incredibly good.

But again I'm winding off topic and apologize.

Every once in a while, things that I've read over the last few years suddenly re-align in my head. Yesterday was one of those days.

On the one hand, I was reading one of the recent Steyn pieces about how big chunks of Iran's foreign policy rested on the usurpation of other states' domestic policies as regards religious law. In this, they are not so different from other Muslim fanatics (and in turn, probably not so different from any historical brand of expansionist religious fanatics, but let that pass-- they're the ones on the world stage, today.) But they are some of the most savvy, long-lived, and strategic about it.

On the other hand, a few years ago I read The Shield of Achilles by Phil Bobbitt, one of the lesser theses of which was: as we transition from the era of nation-states (states which exist to serve their ethnicities) to market-states (states which use market and economic forces to serve the interests of their constituents) we would begin to see states try to export their economic systems and usurp other states' domestic economic policies.

And since that time, I've tended to view France's (and to a lesser extent, Germany's) behaviour regarding the European Union as being right in keeping with that idea. Every cry for "harmonization!" from the French resounds in my ears with undertones of "Do it our way! Do it our way!" because of course the French would never call on the EU to harmonize on, say, a British model or a Polish model of anything. Clearly, the French believe, their system is good... but would be better if everyone followed it and sank down to the same level of mediocrity.

(For the record, I disagree. I think some of those economies survive, especially in health care, only by scavenging off of the United States' technological prowess. Canada might think that the US should go socialist in its health care system, but in the end I think it would hurt them far more than it would hurt us.)

And of course, it's hardly a secret that the United States is busily trying to export its own blend of individualism and wild-west market reliance into areas where it's never taken hold before.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I was just struck last night by the odd similarity between Iran trying to hijack (hah) everyone's domestic policies in one way, and France trying to usurp them in another, and the United States trying to force the issue in yet a third.

It's not precisely how Bobbitt said it would go down (for one thing, he explicitly discounted everyone not of "the West" from playing major roles, which even at the time I thought was rather paternal and short-sighted) but it does seem to bear a resemblance.

Now: If the United States is one pole, and Iran (for the moment) the other... where do France and China fit?

Just to introduce a little obligatory perspective on the issue of "privilege": everything said about France above is absolutely true, but the notion that we (America) have it "right" just because we've got it better than that absurdly low bar may not be quite as persuasive. Look at the major players in our government and industry. Look at their degrees. You're going to see a heck of a lot of familiar names given the hundreds of major colleges in this country. People often point this out with respect to law and politics, but you would find something similar looking at the upper tiers of the business world: financial services, corporate management, high-end real estate development, etc. We have our own aristocracy, and new members of it are few and far between.

I'm not saying that immigrants don't have it better here than in France (or, for that matter, that American citizens generally don't have it better than French ones). We've clearly got the game won if France is what we set up as our standard. In particular, it's much easier for an immigrant, particularly a legal one, to come here and end up with a college degree and a middle-class job. If the subject is "privilege" and the upper echelons of society, however, I think we might not be in a position to cast too many stones on that score.

Gramarye - it's something to watch, but pick up a book like "The Millionaire Mind" that looks at who the millionmaires in America actually are. Very usually NOT the folks with the flashy Yale degrees.

I believe the essential genius of the great North American experiment rests on two simple propositions:

1. Anyone can become one of us.
2. Anybody can become a Somebody.

Europe's biggest problem is that neither proposition is really true there. The USA's biggest advantage is that this is generally true, but it's something that needs to be watched, nurtured and upheld.

Shifting to another comment... Marcus Virtuvius (#5), that was fascinating and thought provoking.

Now: If the United States is one pole, and Iran (for the moment) the other... where do France and China fit?

There is a three-way struggle for dominance (and, indeed, survival). Socialism, Islamism, and Freedom. No one has convinced me that more than one of these can prevail, or that two of the three lead to utter disaster and many very dark generations.

Most of the 'culture war' and the 'red state'-- 'blue state' thing in the US is a reflection of the large Euro-Socialist fifth column within America ... academia, media & entertainment, and bureaucreacy.

In short, the talkers, not the doers. The Islamists know that if together with the Socialists they can take down America and Freedom, then Islamism will make short work of clueless socialists.

Others have said it in detail, but we are unlikely to defeat Islamism until we have defeated the Left.

An article on how Europe has effectively given up on having a future.

"Clearly, the French believe, their system is good... but would be better if everyone followed it and sank down to the same level of mediocrity."

I think its more than that. They need conformity for the long term viability of their system. Its built into the fabric of socialism and communism that it really needs uniformity to survive. Probably the biggest reason the Euro-socialists despise us is that so long as we are here as an example of economic progress, their system will grow increasingly stale looking and ultimately collapse under the weight of an angry public. Essentially socialism relies on hopelessness to survive. Consumerism is the enemy, and so long as the US is turning out Hummers and plasma screens (well, Japan anyway), the socialist model can never be stable (they assume it can be stable). Our ability to survive (much less prosper) without the all-consuming help of the State is a major problem. That is why communism has always been so dangerous. We thought they were coming to get us because they were coming to get us.

Davebo, I don't think it's simply a matter of geography. We also have a long tradition of Americanizing our immigrants. I can't provide any links unfortunately, but I've read that we're absorbing and assimilating even our illegal immigrants at rates comparable to those of the great waves of immigration in the past. Also, I live in Penacola, Florida. We've almost completely recovered from hurricanes Ivan and Dennis in less than two years, due in large part to an influx of Mexican workers, many of whom are illegal. Frankly, I'm grateful to them. I think you'll find that most of the work of Katrina recovery is being done by the same kind of people (native New Orleanians seem more interested in government dole than work). In addition, do you really want to pay the steep price increases for food, clothes, and some other products that would result from a cutoff of illegal immigration? Besides, again from what I've read and seen first hand, in two or three generations, these people will be Americans in a way that the Algerians and Morrocans will never be French.

Bart Hall says:

Others have said it in detail, but we are unlikely to defeat Islamism until we have defeated the Left.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy into that, and I'm generally a conservative. You can't argue that fighting amongst ourselves is the best preparation for an external existential threat. Perhaps there are those in this country that don't share that view of the threat, and I agree that that is a perception problem that needs to be fought. However, "defeating the Left" is different than defeating the perception that the danger is not real. That has the ring of civil war in it ... the kind of thing that authoritarian societies use to justify internal oppression, "to make us strong against [insert scapegoat du jour here]."

Fred writes:

In addition, do you really want to pay the steep price increases for food, clothes, and some other products that would result from a cutoff of illegal immigration?

The numbers I've seen have been something around 8%, which would be tough but hardly intolerable. In addition, there are more important things in this world than money, and flagrant disregard for the rule of law (which is what our current culture of not defending the borders and not attacking those who reward those who cross those porous borders illegally amounts to) hurts the fabric of our society in all kinds of ways that cannot be quantified in dollar terms. We have our immigration and labor laws for valid reasons and it's not appropriate to suggest that the possibility of losing artifically depressed prices justified ignoring them.

In addition, I'd very much like to see the statistics on integration that you're citing. The numbers I've seen, as well as the neighborhoods I've actually walked through, suggest a much more balkanized reality in which new illegal arrivals immediately gravitate to ethnic enclaves where they never need to learn English, the single most fundamental step towards true integration. The figures for remittances are likewise not suggestive of a trend towards integration.

Some points:

• In proposing this reform, it would seem that the oft revillied M. de Villepin would be on the correct side of an issue; credit where it's due etc... except...

• I saw some live reports on the demonstrations on CNBC; one of the talking points of the protesters was the difference in treatment by age (under 26). Whether this is a geniune grievance or a faux talking point, it does seem to be an issue....

Notwithstanding the motivation of targeting youth unemployment, imagine for a moment the political reprecussions in the US of introducing any kind of legal difference in levels of protections and affordances at that young and arbitrary age. There would be a storm of controversy.

Perhaps Chirac and de Villepin made a cynical calculation that the youth didn't vote Conservative anyway, and so they would escape punishment. That they did not anticipate recourse to the street speaks to their political tin ear.

Comments to comments!

#7, Joe: Thanks. Just spitballing, really, but I really liked The Shield of Achilles. It made a lasting impression, and it's a useful lens through which to view the world.

#8, Bart: I sympathize, but I'm not going to take that hard a line. Or rather, I do see the general sense of what you're saying: if the West becomes completely hollowed out by the brand of socialism that's resurgent in Europe right now, I fear its ability to resist rabid islamism. But I question the notion of "defeating" the Left, because even though there are many policies of the Left with which I disagree, I think they serve a very valuable role in the body politic. An unopposed "Right" would not long remain competetive, I think.

(My views of western government tend toward the systemic, and I see the system as one of seeking political truth and efficiency. Modelled in loose computer science terms, I see it as a societal optimizer which has been profoundly successful because of, not despite, its diversity.)

(I also agree with #12 Gramarye and the points he makes.)

#10, Mark: I think that is there perception, yes, that the dynamism of the farther west serves as an example which makes them look bad, and therefore the natural result is to remove the temptation from their people by convincing us to make our methods of success illegal. To a degree, that's a success in their minds, since people would stop thinking about that pesky other system.

However, (and it's a big however) I think the French and the Eurosocialists in general are in a bit of an unrecognized catch-22. If the farther west took a turn toward socialism, that would not actually solve the underlying problems, and would only make it worse in the long run. For instance, Europe has engaged in the long, willful process of destroying its pharmaceutical research industry through over-regulation and socialization. Europe and Canada get most of their new drugs from the United States-- we develop them anyway because there's still profit in our market plus their social bloc. When the farther west goes socialist, what happens to the global pharmaceutical market? It sinks, probably faster rather than slower.

That's a big, dramatic example, but I suspect similar results will happen in information technology, semiconductor research, nanotechnology research, and so on down the line

----

And finally, comments and expansions on my own thoughts:

One area where the lens of The Shield of Achilles breaks down is that Bobbitt looked at the coming era as one entirely of economic-type struggles. His examples/guesses of the major market-state groupings would be:

1) The American model, which would set up market structures to afford their citizens personal opportunity in exchange for personal effort, and

2) The Japanese model, which would set up market sructures to afford their citizens stability in exchange for lower performance, and

3) The European model, which would set up market structures to afford their citizens liesure in exchange for lower performance.

This is admittedly an Americanized presentation of the ideas, with the overall theme that each one of these necessarily interferes with the other-- each has different preferred interest rates, exchange rates, monetary policies, etc, none of which can act in isolation any more.

It's a nice, neat little scheme, and it stands in contrast to his interpretation of most of the 20th century, which he described as the struggle between Fascism, Communism, and Parliamentarianism (the winner), all of which were different ways to bend the power of the state to serving the needs of the nation (the ethnicity, usually) directly. The later evolution into the market-state is a re-orientation (again, claims Bobbitt, if I understood him) admits to a more personally dangerous world and tries to stand the citizen on his own in a framework that gives him what he wants while the state worris about questions of security that are much more complex than they were a few decades ago.

Problem One: Bobbitt ignored everything not of the West, as I already mentioned... and here we have Islamic Fascism as a rising and very global problem.

Problem Two: I just said Islamic Fascism. But didn't I just put that in the ash heap of the 20th century, according to Bobbitt? Well, yes, I did.

But there it is again, this time trying to export itself into domestic policies just like the market-state policies were supposed to export themselves. That domestic policy is what keeps striking my thoughts, this week, and it seems important.

So to tentatively answer my own question:

What we might have is a French, Chinese (rather than Japanese), and American competition of market-state policies, with the crazy throw-back fascists updating themselves along similar lines. And perhaps a competitive advantage they have is that none of the market-states are quite properly configured to fight fascism.

What a of discussion level on this article!

True. I think Europe is still what it was one thousand years ago: a continent where its population is divided by privileges. Before, they were endowed by the Kings, the Lords and the Clergymen, now the State assumes this role, which is even worse, because noblemen were many, usually not sharing the same interests or vision, but State there is only one: it is the Age of The Total State for Europe. Socialism provides the ideology to keep this system working, as German Chancellor Von Bismarck clearly realised in the end of the 19th century, when he was designing a new country.

Nationalism and Socialism have been dumped out macroeconomics due to their inherent hability to cause World Wars, some kind of experiment now called the European Union is now in place but, going back to the ideology, Continental Europe is still a land of Lords and Serfs, though now the lord is a civil servant, a politician or an oligarch.

On work and leisure, well, my experience in Spain, country that has a loose legislation for young workers is not good either. Moreover, I don't see people more motivated about their future, probably due to high prices and low incomes (with the same working hours than in America). On the contrary, the Spanish fun culture (good weather) and a constant pressure from the media keeps them (us) away from any critic to the system.

Note also that there are many Inmigrants from Latin America, even in colder European countries. They are the main inmigrant community in Spain, a country that has less Muslim population than France or the UK.

I was totally surprised to read after the fact chirac had thrown in the towel. Labor rigidity is the gravest crisis facing every society these days.

In my town I have begun to work w/ large numbers of immigrant business people. Many have backgrounds of skilled labor that aren't being taught in the area or ignored. With the desire for products from back home there are soon many profitable and stable neighborhoods being produced.

The biggest problems for these people is the total lack of control in the school system such that even english isn't being learned. The locals of all races are resentful because they do not understand what is happening before their eyes and many merchants are relucant to market to them as they aren't Americans.

The French are suffering from the same problem. They do not know what to do with the hungry hardworking from home or from abroad. Everyone refuses to recognize that there are those that want to work and create something and those whom don't. My solution is for the school system to teach everyone how to run a small business reflecting whatever skill/wish goal you want to apply to it.

What does scare me is that in both France and in the USA there is a nativist element that is totally racist. It exploits everyone for its goals. It keeps claiming if we kept everyone out it would be alright. These actors are the ones whom need to be watched the most.

The French are suffering from the same problem.[...]My solution is for the school system to teach everyone how to run a small business reflecting whatever skill/wish goal you want to apply to it.

I agree on that, it is a stabilizing factor mbut AFAIK it is not easy to run a small business in France. Sometimes in the end you pay so many taxes that you are actually working for the State. That is, the society is built in a way the State is central, therefore the natural move is to become a civil servant: a privileged worker (earns more than the average, cannot be fired) and get out of the market. No entrepreneurship, just come along with the system: collective loss of Will.

How privileges are endowed is a cause of confrontation in Europe. The solution is clear, the American way: there should be no privileges, or at least, the less as possible. But please note that the ones that have already gotten theirs, will defend them with violence if necessary.