It’s too late for ‘multicultural’ Europe

On Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the latest European politician to declare the end of multiculturalism. She was blunt:

“Immigrants should learn to speak German,” she said. “We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, some time they will be gone,’ but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed.”

At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan, who agrees with Merkel’s general point, says her epiphany comes too late.

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With her fertility rate below replacement levels for 40 years, projected to remain so for the next 40 years, Germany will lose 12 million of her 82 million people by 2050. Her median age will rise eight years to 53, and 40 percent of all Germans will be over 60.

Germany’s problem is insoluble. She is running out of Germans.

Yet if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers.

Where are they to come from, if not the Third World? For not one European nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that is not below zero population growth.

Baby boomer Europe decided in the 1960s and 1970s it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle of children. It had that sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the bill is the end of their tribes and countries as we have known them.

Now would be a good time to revisit this video overview of the shifting European demographics.

Author

  • Brian Saint-Paul

    Brian Saint-Paul was the editor and publisher of Crisis Magazine. He has a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Religious Studies from the Catholic University of America, in Washington. D.C. In addition to various positions in journalism and publishing, he has served as the associate director of a health research institute, a missionary, and a private school teacher. He lives with his wife in a historic Baltimore neighborhood, where he obsesses over Late Antiquity.

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