Europe Must Awaken Its Patriotism to Halt Its Decline — and Face Putin; Assimilation, Not Integration, Should Be the Object of British Immigration Policy

Europe must awaken its patriotism to halt its decline — and face Putin:

Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, might not shock Europe’s leaders the way Donald Trump does, but he too has a tough message for them.

“Hear for yourself how it sounds,” he said last month: “500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians.”

“If you can count, count on yourself,” Tusk continued. “Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.”

Decline is a choice — and for 30 years now, decline is what Europe’s political class has chosen.

Poland, like Ukraine, has always been alert to the danger Russia poses.

But Western European leaders can’t claim Vladimir Putin surprised them with his full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He’d already grabbed Crimea eight years earlier and set up pro-Russian secessionist militias in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Russian assassins even targeted dissidents in England, poisoning and killing Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and attempting to do the same to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.

Yet all the while, Western Europe slept.

Islamist terrorism did little to awaken the continent’s slumbering leaders, who continued to treat citizens calling for immigration restriction as the real enemy.

Europe didn’t choose decline just because voters would rather spend money on welfare states than providing for defense.

In two world wars and the protracted struggle of the Cold War, Europe’s democratic governments earned the popular support they needed to carry on their fight or prepare to meet future aggression.

What changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t the people of Europe, but the quality of its leaders.

From London to Brussels to Berlin, from Madrid to Paris to Stockholm, the continent’s elites adopted a philosophy that the American political theorist James Burnham described as “the ideology of Western suicide.”

They embraced a progressive liberalism that demonized all the traditional sources of a nation’s strength — its historic religion, patriotic pride and industrial base.

Green parties and environmentalists emphasized fighting climate change over readiness to fight wars.

Patriotism was treated as synonymous with xenophobia and the worst kinds of nationalism — with which Europe certainly had plenty of experience.

But patriotism, and nationalism at its best, was the motive of those nations and resistance movements that fought the Nazis in World War II and defied Communist “internationalism” — really Communist imperialism — during the Cold War. —>READ MORE HERE

Assimilation, not integration, should be the object of British immigration policy:

What is integration, really?

In the context of our national experiment with mass migration, we hear this world a lot. Whether it’s voices such as Fraser Nelson, lauding Britain’s “integration miracle”, or politicians such as Robert Jenrick, who have criticised our efforts to integrate immigrants into the British mainstream, this concept looms large in our public debate.

But should it? Is this really a useful way to think about our handling of migration – and are the outcomes desired by the integrationists even desirable in the first place?

My contention is that we should abandon our drive for integration altogether, and instead pursue a migration policy which prizes assimilation. Though often merged for the sake of rhetorical convenience, there are real and meaningful differences between these two ideas.

The first of these ideas, integration, has been the stated policy of British governments, of both parties, for the last thirty years. It is a process of compromise, in which society is shaped to accommodate newcomers and the majority group affords concessions to minorities. The ultimate aim is not the maintenance of the base national culture, but the preservation of peace and orderliness, with conflict between groups kept to a minimum.

The idea of ‘British values’ is fundamentally an idea designed to encourage and enable this integration. By reducing national identity to a handful of politically expedient slogans, it becomes easier to ensure the buy-in of newcomers.

Never mind the fact that it requires the abandonment of a cultural understanding of what formed our nation in the first place. These modish values did not really shape Britain; they did not belong to Alfred when he fought the Danes at Edington, or William when he landed at Pevensey. They are not found in the Bill of Rights, or the Acts of Union, or Magna Carta.

But that isn’t the point. The point is to provide a broad framework which allows groups to live side-by-side with one another. The ideal migrant, in the integrationist worldview, is a non-violent net contributor, who maintains a basic loyalty to the institutions of state.

It is this integrationist ideology which has enabled some of the worst effects of mass migration. It inspired police officers and social workers to ignore concerns over Pakistani grooming gangs, for fear of “worsening community tensions”, and leads the Home Office to avoid publishing inconvenient statistics about crime or terrorism.

Integrationism enables the devolution of society into a zero-sum contest over limited resources – even amongst high-earning migrant groups. We have also seen this play out in the political and institutional arenas, as different groups jostle for special treatment.

At the last general election, pro-Gaza candidates saw success in pandering to Muslim voters – but a number of Conservative candidates engaged in the same sectarian pleading to Hindu voters. Parallel court structures have been established to cater to a wide variety of different religious communities, while in recent years, various campaign groups have agitated for special legal protections against Islamophobia, Hinduphobia, and anti-Sikh hate.

For the integrationist, this is an acceptable price to pay for the maintenance of peace, stability, and multiculturalism.

By contrast, assimilation is a process by which newcomers to a society become indistinguishable from their peers. An assimilated migrant is not merely non-criminal and economically successful; they belong to the nation as a whole, fully adopting its customs, norms, and habits. The assimilated migrant will feel deep ties to the nation and its history, beyond the mere institutional loyalty expected under the integrationist model. —>READ MORE HERE

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