Why has Europe'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.

Christopher Caldwell on Immigration

Immigration is the most exciting journalistic subject I know of — it generates explosive problems that demand the writer’s attention to a half dozen complicated subjects (economics, culture, history, law, language, and so on) simultaneously. A lucky break for me was that I began writing about Muslim immigration in Europe (for the Atlantic magazine) in the late 1990s — i.e. before September 11 — so I had some fairly well-developed ideas about the integration of Europe’s Muslim minorities before everybody started addressing it through the lens of terrorism. Even in those days, it was clear that Europe’s immigration was producing more serious challenges — and lower chances of a happy ending — than the Hispanic immigration in the United States. After September 11, the demand in the US for articles about Europe, and particularly about its Muslim citizens and newcomers, was constant, allowing me to make roughly a trip a month for several years. The dozens of trips — particularly to Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden — began the research on which my book was built.

It struck me that Europeans made a basic false assumption about immigration. They tended to blame specific mistakes made by their own governments or societies for their ethnic problems. But larger forces are at work. Europe’s immigration and minorities problems are, in their rough outlines, the same in every country in Europe. There is the same voluntary and involuntary segregation, the same identity-seeking fascination with extremist movements, the same welfare dependency, the same elevated crime levels and the same complaints about abuses of asylum — but also the same sense of pride in multi-ethnicity, and sense that it is somehow “cooler” to be an immigrant than a native.

As an outsider from a country of immigrants, I had a neutral position from which to judge the successes of Europe’s increasingly multi-ethnic societies. Europeans are often reluctant to make such judgments for fear of sounding either xenophobic or politically correct. I concluded that the basic, hopeful narrative of integration — that Europe would automatically turn into an American-style market-based society where culture mattered less than it traditionally did— was unlikely to happen, except perhaps in France. And many European assessments of immigration and multi-ethnicity were simply wrong:

• thus far, Europe’s experience of immigration resembles the US history of race relations more than its history of immigration;

• Europe never had the economic need of immigrants that it thought it did in the 1950s and 1960s;

• feminism, not foreign policy, is the most dangerous sticking point between Europe and its Muslims;

• the countries with the most serious integration problems in Europe are Britain (for violence), Sweden (for segregation) and Spain (for erosion of social traditions);

• and any reasonable cost-benefit analysis would show that if Europeans had been able to foresee the pluses and minuses of immigration when they embarked on it half a century ago, they would not have gone down that road.

Hope you enjoy the book.