Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Just in time for spring, the winter 2009 issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) has been published. Taken as a whole, this may be the richest issue of the magazine yet published. RealClearPolitics has already posted editor Charles Kesler’s editorial on the Tea Party movement.
Our friends at the CRB have given us the opportunity of selecting three pieces to preview here for our readers. We’ll be following up this post with the issue’s two articles on Winston Churchill on Thursday.
Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is one of the best books published in the past year. It joins Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Bat Yeor’s Eurabia, Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept and Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan on a small bookshelf of books addressing the Islamization of Europe.
In “The incoming tide,” Professor Gerard Alexander concisely relates Caldwell’s argument that a constant influx of Muslim immigrants is weakening the bonds that hold Europe together. Meanwhile, most Europeans have failed to muster the courage to defend their way of life.
Professor Alexander holds out hope that the Islamic fervor gripping Europe’s Muslim population might fade in a decade or two. This hope is tempered by his lack of confidence that Europe, in every sense of the term, can afford to wait it out.