Product Description

Why has EuropeÂ’s half-century of mass immigration failed to produce anything resembling the American melting pot? Deadly terrorist attacks and rioting in Muslim neighbourhoods have now forced Europeans, caught up in a demographic revolution they never expected, to question its success and to confront the limits of their long-held liberal values. By overestimating its need for immigrant labour and underestimating the culture-shaping potential of religion, has Europe trapped itself in a problem to which it has no obvious solution? Christopher Caldwell has been reporting on the politics and culture of Islam in Europe for over a decade. In his provocative and unflinching book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, he reveals the anger of natives and newcomers alike. He describes asylum policies that have served illegal immigrants better than refugees. He exposes the strange interaction of welfare states and Third World traditions, the anti-Americanism that brings natives and newcomers together, and the arguments over women and sex that drive them apart. And he examines the dangerous tendency of politicians to defuse tensions surrounding Islam by curtailing the rights of all. Based on extensive reporting and offering trenchant analysis, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is destined to become the classic work on how Muslim immigration permanently reshaped the West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9649 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
The most rigorous and plainspoken examination of Muslim immigration in Europe to date, a sobering book that walks right up to, if never quite crossing, the line between being alarming and being alarmist . . . well researched, fervently argued and morally serious. (New York Times )

Reflections On The Revolution In Europe will inspire some readers, infuriate others and leave very few indifferent. That's exactly as it should be - because wherever you stand on this debate, it's one we can't afford to ignore. (The Sunday Business Post )

Caldwell is a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties . . . compared with most literature on migration, this book pulsates with ideas. (Guardian )

Review

'Caldwell is a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties ... compared with most literature on migration, so often dull and cliché-ridden, this book pulsates with ideas.'

Review
'Reflections On The Revolution In Europe will inspire some readers, infuriate others and leave very few indifferent. That's exactly as it should be - because wherever you stand on this debate, it's one we can't afford to ignore.'

Customer Reviews

Difficult questions for difficult times.
I heartily applaud the author for addressing subject matter normally left to the far right, such as immigration, nationalism, the influence of well-meaning liberalism on Europe, diversity and integration and the 'threat' within. The author also makes the fair point that european societies were too rigid, weak and insecure to make incoming immigrants feel loyalty to their host - a point rammed home by the fact it has taken an American to write a book about immigrations impact on european culture.
Despite this being a serious book it is written in an accessible style - a bit like a toned down, more intellectual, Ann Coulter. I found this book so important and relevant to today's ever changing world that I read it in 3 days - it being a semi-permanent appendage to my right hand. If you want a thoughtful, well-argued book that will make you think again about issues you may have already decided upon, then this is a must buy. If you like this I also recommend another book about race and diversity - although from an English/Nigerian perspective, check out:One Love Two Colours: The Unlikely Marriage of a Punk Rocker and His African Queen by Margaret Oshindele - a book that shows how a Nigerian woman can integrate into the cultural way of life of England - without giving up her own Yoruba culture.
Another book that would serve as an interesting companion to this book is: Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder.

Echo of Edmund Burke
This book pushes the discussion on immigration away from xenophobia. It is a succinct dissection of an issue that encompasses intertwined matters of culture, demographics, the welfare state, democracy, the European Union, the ruling elite, the nature of citizenship, religion and hospitality. He looks back on the last 60 years and analyses our taboo about even discussing the issue...certainly the vilification of Enoch Powell...as an imposition by a post-war, agenda driven and guilt ridden elite to shut down any dissent on this, perhaps, most important of democratic issues.

This book has a title that is designed to remind us of Edmund Burke's 1790 book, Reflexions on the Revolution in France. At first this is puzzling because Burke was observing political changes within France while Caldwell, by his own admission, writes candidly about mostly cultural changes due to Muslim immigration into Europe.

It is only by closer observation that similarities can be drawn. Burke wrote his book just after the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and some time before the Terror of 1793-1794. Those years were taken up in an energetic quest for a new constitutional settlement and were optimistically seen and greeted in England. Burke's book is remarkable because he doubted the wisdom of a generalised destruction of everything that had gone before and in favour of the wisdom of tradition. He advised a French acquaintance that "You are now to live in a new order of things; under a plan of government of which no-one can speak from experience". Like in our post 1945 world view the deliberate and joyful breakdown of all that had gone before appeared to herald a bright future of equality and freedom. Burke, counter to contemporary thinking, argued that it would lead to un-tethered disorder, despotism and, eventually, a Strong Man. As it turned out, the Terror arrived within three years and Napoleon was in power within nine.

Caldwell writes of Europe's situation within that same strange window after the initial revolution (1960's) but while tradition is still being ground down remorselessly...and to general approbation...but before the ending through chaos and despotism. He places the revolutionary keenness of Europe's elite for massive immigration alongside multiculturalism, the EU and welfare dependency as powerful tools calculated to obliterate pre 1939 culture. But, as the demographics of a low native birth rate clearly show, the new `Europeans' will equal or outnumber the grandchildren of those that welcomed the influx and the tolerant consensus may change. Without forced integration (Caldwell's favoured and only resolution), much of Europe may find itself profoundly and chaotically Balkanised.

Caldwell, like Burke, suggests that the end will not be pleasant...that Europe will not be the same with different people in it. Read it and be warned.

Will become the standard text
This is the best book I have read on these subjects. Caldwell is sharp-minded, serious, critical, and clear. He writes very well indeed, both in terms of his style and the ordering and presentation of his many ideas. Little escapes him. Most impressive is the way he tackles a difficult, sometimes taboo, subject like immigration and writes about it often in the context of Muslim issues in Europe, and does all this from a genuinely liberal perspective, defying both the far right, who see immigration and Islam in racist terms, and the far left, for whom multiculturalism and political correctness have become dogmas it is forbidden to challenge. You won't find a more intelligent approach to these important subjects (though equally intelligent studies are available from Jon Gower Davies -- Bonfires on the Ice and In Search of the Moderate Muslim).