Mark Steyn's book is excerpted by MacLeans under the title (The future belongs to Islam). It is worth reading because I think it gives you a very accurate sense of what Steyn's book is all about (America Alone: the end of the world as we know it).

I bump into the online article because in this excerpt he obliquely cites BFA, noting that I read Robert Kaplan--unlike he, apparently, because otherwise I assume he'd cite Kaplan directly. The cite on Kaplan is just the reference to the phrase "Injun country," which he dissects very narrowly in its historical context, noting that the Sioux never ravaged New York City (although, I might add, the Irish did when sufficiently provoked, a la "Gangs of New York"--but again, Steyn likes to use his imagery very narrowly, so pointing out stuff that like is meaningless here).

Since Steyn focuses on "them" coming here (actually, arguing only Europe instead of the West at large) instead of noting the far more profound global flow of "us" going there--in the form of globalization--he only describes Islam's potential for cultural invasion here while ignoring the powerful effect of the West's cultural penetration of the Middle East (where does he think all this nationalism/Islamism is coming from?).

So, Steyn's basic technique is much like a Lou Dobbs or a Pat Buchanon: anecdotes that scare, compounded with some today data extrapolated to tomorrow's frightening inevitabilities. This is a technique often used by fear-meisters, especially in the realm of the environment, and it betrays an "all things being equal" assumption that just never holds true in the real world. A good example of this was all the "population bomb" logic from my youth, which has simply fallen apart on a global level. Now we're getting a "clash of civilizations" version of that from Steyn with reference to Europe, which is apparently the center of his universe.

But here's some limits to this logic:

1) The simple extrapolation approach on population in Europe is unlikely to unfold, as time and time again we find that those baby-crazy immigrants simply don't maintain that fertility rate the longer they live in an advanced economy. Strangely enough, they become subject to all the same pressures on family that everybody else does. We hear this argument on Hispanics here in the States, except we already find that birth rates are dropping as Hispanics get more wealth and opportunity--go figure! Just like everybody else who's come to America in the past.

2) If the amazing did come true in Europe, making it unique in human history, then what would be the difference to global history? Answer is, not much. Either Europe gins up its demographic vitality through the effective integration of Muslims or "Eurabia" simply becomes an extension of the loser Middle East. Meanwhile, the rest of the world simply wouldn't hang around. It would move on. To some, the "end of the world," but to others who "know" more of the world than just Europe, no big deal. Not big for America, whose allies will lie in the East and South, not in Europe. Not big for the East or the South either.

3) But if it did come true in Europe, it would constitute no more than a strange migration of the problem set from the Middle East to Europe, because the Middle East isn't slated for rapid expansion as a population indefinitely. Indeed, the baby boom of the 1970s, associated with oil wealth in many instances, has ended already throughout the region. Weirdly enough, as globalization increasingly penetrates the region, fertility rates have dropped throughout the region, as Olivier Roy noted in Globalised Islam, a book I used plenty in BFA. If Steyn worries so much about aging Europe, I am plenty optimistic about a middle-aging Middle East, where today's youth bulge becomes tomorrow's middle age spread. So if Steyn expects a neverending flow of population from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa to fuel his invasive species fears in Europe, that's simply not in the cards. As for the processing of that youth bulge in the Middle East, two outcomes are possible: 1) lotsa violence as politics and economics remain unchanged and 2) politics and economics in the region change a lot. If the former occurs, the Middle East will be as disconnected from globalization's Core as central Africa is today. With some pain, the world will simply learn to get along without Middle Eastern oil, as the tumult there will push the Core down the hydrocarbon chain even faster than it will proceed on its own natural course, which has been quite steady throughout human history. If the latter occurs, then just watch the flow of humanity from the Middle East to Europe dry up. Impossible? We've seen that occur on a state-by-state basis plenty with Latinos here in the States over the past 40 years. If it hadn't, then America would have been overrun by Puerto Ricans a long time ago, based on logical extrapolations you could have made in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. But no matter.

4) Steyn assumes that the invasive Muslims will simply pervert democracy in Europe, rather than avail themselves of democracy's avenues to press their economic and political demands. In effect, Steyn's making the same glum assumptions about market-democracies that Karl Marx once did about a different proletariat, yielding the same sort of decisive assumptions that will be just as powerfully disproven as his ultimately were.

5) Of course, Steyn's (and others') counters to that last argument is to say that the intense religious-cultural coherence of Islam will transcend all those changes that tamed such past threats--like say, the immigrant Irish in America who were described in all the same ways then (in the mid-1800s) as Muslims are described by Steyn today in Europe. But do we see that coherence throughout the Middle East? Hardly. When given the chance, Muslims throughout the region seem to move into an acceptance of modernity that looks suspiciously like that of every other culture on the planet. Can it be done en masse? Check out East Asian Muslims. Can it be done in Western democracies? Check out America. But these are unfair arguments to someone as fixated on Europe as Steyn, as he displays the same fatalism on culture and civilization as Osama and others do regarding the Middle East. Neither's gloom is justified. Globalization won't warp the Middle East beyond all recognition, although it will kill Osama's nostalgic dream of turning back the clock there to a time he finds more comforting. And the Islamization of Europe won't warp Europe beyond all recognition, although it will kill Steyn's nostaglic dreams for turning back the clock there to a time he finds more comforting.

There is much intellectual danger in Steyn's form of reasoning, which I believe betrays the course of his life education and experiences. Coming from the rather narrow and self-absorbed world of theater, he really doesn't have the chops to do good horizontal linkaging of trends and driving forces associated with globalization, and that's too bad, because if he understood his biases better, his arguments could be a lot more powerful, although they'd also be far less frightening, and since he works his gallows humor in this vein, I guess that's just a choice he prefers making. But this is not seriously systematic thinking about the future. Steyn's futurism betrays the usual myopic problem of the pessimists going all the way back to Malthus and Marx: they simply refuse to acknowledge the enduring ingenuity of mankind to change and adapt, plus they ignore the obvious power of markets to take advantage of both good and bad, treating all churn as simply an opportunity for new sales of new goods and services to new customers. In short, the "bad" that Steyn describes for Europe will not occur in some vacuum. Wherever Europe fails in this respect, others will exploit, and I'm not just talking about his invasive Muslims. I'm talking about the rest of this flat world.