The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (100 page)

The family unit is the basis of society, and the true focus for the growth and elevation of mankind… Women were drawn away from the family unit and [put into] the condition of ‘being a mere thing’, or ‘being a mere tool for work’ in the service of consumerism and exploitation. Re-assumption of the task of bringing up religiously minded men and women, ready to work and fight together in life’s fields of activity, is a serious and precious duty of motherhood.

Such attitudes help to explain why, although the average fertility rate in Muslim countries did decline from the 1970s onwards, it remained consistently more than twice the European average.

Though very far from being a feminist, Margaret Thatcher herself embodied a profoundly different social change that went hand in hand with the liberalization of the Western economies in the late twentieth century. With the decline of traditional trade unions and the introduction of new flexible working practices, it became easier than ever before for British women to enter the workforce. Legislation against sex discrimination opened all kinds of careers to them that had previously been dominated by men. Market forces encouraged women to work. At the same time, the ready availability of contraception and abortion in the West gave women an unprecedented control over their own fertility. The two things went together. Women wanted to work, or maybe economic pressures obliged them to work. It was much harder to work with three or four children to look after as well; so women opted to have just two, or one, or – in the case of many of the most professionally ambitious – none at all. From the late 1970s, the average West European couple had fewer than two children. By 1999 the figure was just over 1.3, whereas, for a population to remain
constant, it needs to be slightly over two. Europeans, quite simply, had ceased to reproduce themselves. The United Nations Population Division forecast that if fertility persisted at such low levels, within fifty years Spain’s population would decline by 3.4 million, Italy’s by a fifth. The overall reduction in ‘indigenous’ European numbers would be of the order of fourteen million. Not even two world wars had inflicted such an absolute decline in population.

The consequences of these two diametrically opposite trends were dramatic. In 1950 there had been three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995 the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain. By 2050, the population of Iran could be more than 50 per cent larger. At the time of writing, the annual rate of population growth is more than seven times higher in Iran than in Britain. A hundred years ago – when Europe’s surplus population was still flocking across the oceans to populate America and Australasia – the countries that went on to form the European Union accounted for around 14 per cent of the world’s population. By the end of the twentieth century that figure was down to around 6 per cent, and according to the UN by 2050 it could have fallen to just 4 per cent. That raised at least one awkward question: who was going to pay the taxes necessary to pay for Old Europe’s generous state pensions? With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed fifty by 2050 – one in three people in each of these countries would be sixty-five or over – the welfare states created in the wake of the Second World War looked obsolescent. Either new-born Europeans would spend their working lives paying 75 per cent tax rates, or retirement and subsidized health care would simply have to be scrapped. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans would have to tolerate substantially more legal immigration. The UN estimated that to keep the ratio of working to non-working population constant at the 1995 level, Europe would need to take in 1.4 million migrants a year from now until 2050. The annual figure for net migration in the 1990s was 850,000.

But where would the new immigrants come from? Obviously, a high proportion would have to come from neighbouring countries. Yet Eastern Europe could not supply anything like the numbers needed. Indeed, the UN expected the population of Eastern Europe to have
declined by a quarter by 2050. Those who feared waves of migrants from Eastern Europe were facing the wrong way – east instead of south. The reality was that Europe’s fastest growing neighbours by the end of the 1990s were, for the reasons discussed above, countries that were predominantly if not wholly Muslim. Consider the case of Morocco, where the population growth rate is seven times higher than in neighbouring Spain. At the very northernmost tip of Morocco, directly opposite Gibraltar, lies the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta, one of the few surviving remnants of Spain’s imperial past. Today, however, it is no longer an outpost of an aggressively expansionist European empire, but a defensive bulwark maintained by a continent under siege. Camped outside Ceuta are thousands of people from the Maghreb and beyond, some fleeing zones of conflict, others simply seeking better economic opportunities. Here they sit for days, waiting for a chance to sneak past the Spanish border patrols. The European Union has responded by subsidizing the construction of a five-mile border fence, equipped with razor wire, watchtowers and infra-red cameras.

European officials admit that they have no idea how many people are making their way illegally into Europe. About 50,000 illegal immigrants are seized at Europe’s ports or at sea every year, but it is impossible to say how many get through or die in the attempt. Every week Spanish police patrolling the waters between Africa and Europe catch dozens of people, most of them Moroccans, trying to sneak into southern Spain and the Canary Islands in small smuggling boats known as
pateras
. For those who survive the journey, El Ejido is the point of entry into Europe. In the asphyxiating heat of the greenhouses there, 20,000 immigrants work in conditions that few Spaniards are willing to endure. And El Ejido is just one manifestation of what some call ‘Eurabia’. A youthful society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is quietly colonizing, in the original Roman sense of the word, a senescent and secularized continent to the north and west of it. Today, at least fifteen million Muslims have their home in the European Union, a number that seems certain to rise. Bernard Lewis’s prophecy that Muslims would be a majority in Europe by the end of the twenty-first century may go too far, but they may well outnumber believing Christians, given the collapse of church attendance and religious faith in Europe.

Predictably, the growth of Muslim communities has generated some resentment on the part ofwhat we might as well call the old Europeans. There is clear evidence that whatever the economic benefits of immigration there are also real costs for unskilled indigenous workers. Periodically, violence flares up. There are attacks on the immigrants; sometimes on their mosques. In the eastern outskirts of Paris in 2005 disaffected youths from predominantly Muslim immigrant communities ran amok after two of their number died while hiding from the police. The fact that a minority of European Muslims – not all of them first-generation immigrants – have become involved with extreme Islamistorganizationsaddsfueltothesmoulderingfireofmutualantagonism. Once, Spaniards and Britons alike hadto worry about terrorism by nationalist minorities. The attacks in Madrid in March 2004 and in London in July 2005 have made it clear that there is a new enemy within.

Such tensions are familiar to the historian. Today’s economic optimists celebrate the fact that ‘the earth is flat’, a level playing field where all countries can compete for world market share on equal terms. A hundred years ago, globalization was celebrated in not dissimilar ways as goods, capital and labour flowed freely from England to the ends of the earth. Yet mass migration in around 1900 was accompanied by increases in ethnic tension from Vladivostok to Višegrad, with ultimately explosive consequences. In 1914 the first age of globalization ended with a spectacular bang because of an act of terrorism by a radicalized Serb in a predominantly Muslim province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. War escalated because of the German violation of the neutrality of another multi-ethnic country, Belgium. In the mayhem of world war, an extreme anti-capitalist sect gained control of Russia and her empire, proceeding to betray its early promises of self-determination for that empire’s minorities. And in the succeeding decades, three diabolical dictators, Stalin, Hitler and Mao, rose to control vast tracts of the great Eurasian landmass that stretches from the English Channel to the China Sea. Their totalitarian regimes and pseudo-religious cults caused unquantifiable suffering and tens of millions of violent deaths, with the peoples who lived on the strategic borderlands between the empire-states suffering the most in relative terms. Could a similar fate befall the second age of globalization in which we live?

Today it is China not Japan that is the rising power in Asia. But it is not difficult to imagine a clash between East and West that would dwarf the Russo-Japanese War of a century ago. What if there were a setback to economic growth in China? Rather than risk popular protests against their monopoly on power (and the rampant corruption that goes with it) might the Chinese Communists be tempted to take refuge in patriotism? Just as Belgium was for Britain and Germany in 1914, so Taiwan could be the
casus belli
that sparks a conflict between China and the United States. The People’s Republic has always treated Taiwan as a renegade province and has repeatedly stated that any attempt by it to declare formal independence would warrant military intervention. Meanwhile, as I write, the possibility grows of renewed conflict in the Persian Gulf as Iran is referred to the UN Security Council on account of its suspected nuclear weapons programme. Israel struggles to extricate itself from the territory it occupied in 1967 and to establish a Palestinian state with which it can coexist; yet the Palestinians vote for Hamas, an organization committed to the destruction of Israel
tout court
. The hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East seems precarious, as Iraq stubbornly refuses to follow the neo-conservative script by becoming a peaceful and prosperous democracy; a descent into civil war still seems the more likely outcome. Galloping economic growth in Asia exerts increasing pressure on global energy supplies, increasing the leverage of the undemocratic regimes that sit on so much of the world’s oil and gas reserves and in creasing the likelihood of a new era of imperial scrambles for scarce raw materials. A scenario-builder who entirely dismissed the danger of a new War of the World – a new era of ethnic strife, economic volatility and imperial struggle – would be a Pangloss indeed.

In the fifty-second chapter of his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Edward Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam? ‘Perhaps’, speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ‘the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.’ The idea was to amuse his readers, and perhaps to make fun of his old
university. Yet today work is all but complete on the new Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford, which features, in addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, a prayer hall with a dome and minaret tower. That fulfilment of Gibbon’s unintended prophecy symbolizes perfectly the fundamental reorientation of the world which was the underlying trend of the twentieth century. The decline of the West has not taken the form that Oswald Spengler had in mind when he wrote
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
soon after the First World War. Rather it was precisely that reawakening of ‘the powers of the blood’ by the ‘new Caesars’ whom Spengler anticipated – and the assault they launched on ‘the rationalism of the Megalopolis’ – which accelerated the material, but perhaps more importantly the moral descent of the West.
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A hundred years ago, the West ruled the world. After a century of recurrent internecine conflict between the European empires, that is no longer the case. A hundred years ago, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now it seems to run through every European city. That is not to say that conflict is inevitable along these new fault lines. But it is to say that, if the history of the twentieth century is any guide, then the fragile edifice of civilization can very quickly collapse even where different ethnic groups seem quite well integrated, sharing the same language, if not the same faith or the same genes. The twentieth century also demonstrated that economic volatility increases the likelihood of such a backlash – especially in the context of the new kind of welfare state that emerged in the first half of the century, with its
high levels of redistributive give and take. For ethnic minorities are more likely to be viewed with greater hostility when times are hard or when income differentials are widening. Finally, it was not by chance that the worst killing fields of the mid-twentieth century were in places like Poland, the Ukraine, the Balkans and Manchuria; while extreme violence in the later twentieth century shifted to more widely dispersed locations, from Guatemala to Cambodia, from Angola to Bangladesh, from Bosnia to Rwanda and, most recently, the Darfur region of Sudan. Time and again it has been in the wake of the decline of empires, in contested borderlands or in power vacuums, that the opportunities have arisen for genocidal regimes and policies. Ethnic confluence, economic volatility and empires on the wane; such was and remains the fatal formula.

On the eve of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells had imagined a ‘War of the Worlds’ – a Martian invasion that devastated the earth. In the hundred years that followed, men proved that it was quite possible to wreak comparable havoc without the need for alien intervention. All they had to do was to identify this or that group of their fellow men as the aliens, and then kill them. They did so with varying degrees of ferocity in different places, at different times. But the common factors that link together the bloodiest events of the twentieth century should now be clearly apparent.