The Return of Blasphemy Laws

The Return of Blasphemy Laws | Interview by Jeremy Lott | July 2009 issue | Catholic World Report 

Political writer Christopher Caldwell on immigration, Islam, and the future of free speech in Europe.

Christopher Caldwell is a political writer whose work has appeared in, among other publications, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The American Spectator. He writes a weekly column for the Financial Times and serves as a senior editor for The Weekly Standard.

CWR interviewed Caldwell in May about his first book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Doubleday). A correspondent for the New York Times called Reflections “a dense and important book about whether Europe’s identity…can absorb or survive a fast growing Muslim population.”

CWR: How long did it take you to write this book?

Christopher Caldwell: I started writing about immigration and these ideas in the early 90s. I got interested in [immigration in] Europe in the late 90s. I feel very lucky that I was working on it for a few years before September 11, which gave me a reference point, because I think that changed an awful lot about the way Europe dealt with immigrants.

CWR: You’re interested in immigration in the US, but what was it about immigration in Europe that was attractive to you?

Caldwell: I love the drama of the immigration story, the multidimensionality of it. All the stories I like tend to be about society rather than politics, but the parts of society that have political overtones or implications. Immigration has a lot of those wherever it happens. It’s cultural forces clashing, it’s the economy, and family life, and things happening at the level of a neighborhood, and that interested me. My Spanish is not that hot and I don’t know as much about Mexico as I know about France or Germany, and it occurred to me that the problems of immigration that interested me in California and around here were more dramatic in Europe, and it was, in that way, a more interesting story.

CWR: How much travel did you do to research this book?

Caldwell: At the height of working on this book, I was going to Europe at least once a month, or about 15 times a year. Sometimes I had other business there, but on every trip I would do something immigrant-related. In fact, on every single trip I would go to immigrant neighborhoods in whatever country I happened to be in, and I would usually talk to politicians who were involved in it, sociologists, other academics. There was a lot of travel. When I sat down to write the book, I sort of stopped the traveling and called up all the research and then did all the writing.

Read the entire interview...

Comments

[Evan]

This jumble of points confused me a bit:

"[Europeans are] less accepting of pre-feminist ways of living for women. There are very, very few Sarah Palins in European politics. You very often hear government statements, and I quote a few of them in my book, that “our goal is that everyone be in the workplace.” There’s not even any lip service to traditional family models, so I think that anyone from a traditional culture is going to clash with that."

Is he attempting to suggest that Palin represents a pre-feminist, stay-at-home, traditional-family-model woman, or some kind of advocate thereof? Wow. I know that it's all supposed to be about the advertising, but I didn't know that people reflective enough to write books were still buying into her advertising on this particular cultural meme.

Does he miss the fact that she's a working mother? That her grandchild was conceived out of wedlock? Not that I'm trying to drag the Palin family in the dirt for these things- I think they've handled both situations well enough- but nor was I the one who chose to throw her name out there in the first place, and it just intrigues me that the first person who came to Caldwell's mind as an example of what he's describing here is Sarah Palin. I think it says more about the effectiveness of her political allure than it does about her values.

[Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto]

Good for Caldwell to invest time and effort on Inmigration, be that in Europe or Latinoamerica. I wonder if this gentleman used his best judgment in choosing and ascertaining which of the two was best to dwell into.
Immigration is, apparently, and innate endeavor in man.It has happened, endlessly, through history.Is part of our DNA, one could say. Some countries or nations have been more strict than others, but, without regulation , it has always ended in chaos. In the USA, we seem to have ignored history and failed to manage it, shamefully.
I find Caldwell neglect to give mexican/latino immigration highest rate, a want of proper discern.
I shall look into his book, since my interest in Europe's 'imbroglio' with the arabs ought to be of importance for us all.

[Robert Miller]

I find Caldwell's take right on target. But I do think he ought to make more (and maybe he does in the book)of the historic sources of "entitlement" to immigrate of Islamic immigrants in Europe and Latin American immigrants in the US.

When Christendom became aware, early in the sixteenth century, that Columbus had discovered a "New World", Popes and Catholic Kings conceived of the Americas as a New Christendom. Accordingly, the Catholic Kings proceeded to liberate their new subjects from their demon-worshipping, human-sacrificing native potentates. A little later, English Protestant privateers encroached on the territory of the new Catholic commonwealth, exterminating the native population and replacing them with African slaves, bought from Dutch Protestant privateers who acquired their chattels from African Moslem captors. The US has continued in the English and Dutch tradition to this day. Thus, the hissy-fit about "illegals" from south of the border who are merely trying to reclaim their ancient rights granted by Popes and the Catholic Kings.

Europe, in contrast, is invertrebrada because its Enlightenment and its nation-state system prevent it from doing anything effective about the "Reconquista of the Reconquista".

Maybe someday, Palin will turn out to be the Jeanne d'Arc who opens the Obamanation to its brethren south of the border, and rallies Europe to the defense of Christendom. Stranger things have happened -- think France/15th century.