Menace In Europe Part 5

This was precisely what the perpetrators of the ma.s.sacre intended. Four months before, an ent.i.ty with ties to al Qaeda called the Media Committee for the Victory of the Iraqi People had used the Internet to publish a doc.u.ment t.i.tled Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers. The premise of the doc.u.ment was that the United States could not be defeated by direct military action. Its allies, however, could be pared away, leaving the United States isolated. The committee recommended attacks on the less resolute coalition partners-specifically, "painful strikes" against Spain before its election.

The doc.u.ment was notable for the sophistication of its a.n.a.lysis of Spanish domestic politics. "We think," wrote the author, "that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program." If Spain was forced out of Iraq, the committee theorized, pressure on the other coalition partners would mount, "and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly." The use of the phrase "domino tiles" suggests that the author was a student not only of contemporary European political culture but also of American foreign policy and its history: It was President Eisenhower who advanced the Domino Theory to justify American support for South Vietnam. It is odd that even in excoriating the United States, militant Islam looked to America for a.n.a.lytic inspiration. It suggests that the author studied at an American or European university.

The following Monday, the prime ministerelect vowed to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq. The Spanish forces there had not been cosmetic; they had been playing an important role in the flashpoint s.h.i.+a holy city of Najaf and could not readily be replaced. In a statement that pa.s.sed nearly unnoticed, Zapatero added that he hoped to nurture closer ties between Spain and Morocco. Three of the five men arrested in connection with the bombings were Moroccan. Imagine how the American people would have responded had President Bush announced, following the September 11 attacks, that he hoped to strengthen U.S. ties to regimes that harbored terrorists.

By capitulating to the terrorists' demands, the Spanish electorate proved that a well-timed bloodletting could achieve better results than the perpetrators of the slaughter had dared to hope. In doing so, they condemned many more of us to death. Why wouldn't the murderers repeat such a successful experiment? Is it any surprise that they did, in London, in July 2005?

It is painfully obvious that the people of Spain either fundamentally misunderstand-or do not care about-the nature of the threat posed to Western civilization by Islamic radicalism. They are not alone, obviously. Shortly after the bombings, Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, declared that "using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." In a joint press conference with French president Jacques Chirac, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said of terrorism, "Military force is not the only solution. One needs to look at the roots of it, including lack of development in the developing world."

This is an extraordinary thing to say in the aftermath of such an event. For one thing, it's nonsense: The world's fifty least-developed nations rarely produce terrorists. Who has ever died at the hands of a terrorist from Upper Volta? Samoa? Equatorial Guinea? Consider UNESCO's list of the world's forty-nine least-developed countries: So little are they known for exporting terrorism that one might with equal logic conclude that the remedy for terrorism is lack of development.22 The nineteen hijackers who took 3,000 human lives on September 11 were mostly educated, upper-middle-cla.s.s Saudis, citizens of one of the most developed countries in the Middle East. The terrorists who attacked London came from Britain.

But more important, what the Spanish voters and European leaders seem unwilling to comprehend-surely not unable, for the concepts are not complex-is that this, like the battles against fascism and communism, is an ideological conflict, not an economic one, and it is a conflict against a pitiless enemy that seeks the destruction of modernity and nothing less. This point may readily be confirmed by consulting Osama bin Laden's multiple fatwas to this effect, which conspicuously lack clauses offering an end to the unpleasantness in exchange for an infusion of development aid. These doc.u.ments, much like Hitler's Mein Kampf, tell the world exactly what the author has in mind and how he plans to achieve it. One need only read them to understand the terrorists' program completely; they are available on the Internet. The goal is the worldwide establishment of a medieval caliphate-a global Taliban regime. No one can say we were not warned.

WHETTING THE ALLIGATOR'S APPEt.i.tE.

If the Spanish believe their conflict with Islamism to have been resolved by their withdrawal from Iraq, they are living in a fantasy. The terrorists themselves explicitly placed their attack in the larger context of Islam's expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the videotape discovered after the bombing, one of the terrorists can be heard referring to Spain as "the land of Tarik ibn-Ziyad," the first Arab leader to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in 711. Another said, "You know the Spanish crusade against Muslims, the expulsion from al-Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisitions, that was not so long ago." These are not isolated statements. The corpus of Islamist doctrine is clear on this point: The expulsion from Spain was the most bitter of historic grievances visited upon Islam. This is a living memory, one that vitalizes the terrorists' quest for vengeance, a humiliation they fully intend to reverse.

Given the choice between war and dishonor, the Spanish chose dishonor. They would have war as well. Two weeks after the election, another ma.s.sive bomb was discovered on Spain's high-speed train line, forty miles south of Madrid. Had it detonated, the carnage would have considerably exceeded that of the previous bombings. The promise to withdraw from Iraq predictably did no more than whet the alligator's appet.i.te. Clint Eastwood's creation, Dirty Harry, was asked why he was so sure the freed murderer of a little girl would continue to kill. "Because he likes it," he replied. Exactly so. They like it.

In the succeeding months, Spanish security services narrowly foiled plots to blow up the Spanish High Court and the Madrid soccer stadium. In September 2004, Spanish police arrested a cell of Pakistani drug dealers and extortionists with links to al Qaeda. The cell had been sending money to the group of Islamic radicals who killed journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan. Their video collection suggested their keen interest in the architecture of unusually large buildings in Barcelona. From this alone, it would seem that Spain's new Iraq policy has not worked as planned.

It is possible for reasonable men to argue that the war in Iraq was a misguided step in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism. It is not possible, however, for reasonable men to believe that the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq at that moment and in that context, coupled with comments like Prodi's and Schroeder's, would not thrill and embolden terrorists around the world, confirming to them their belief in the decadence and pusillanimity of the West, bringing even graver jeopardy upon Europe, the United States, and their allies. Again, this point can readily be confirmed at the source: Bin Laden himself has spoken, often, of the delirious exhilaration and inspiration he derives from each instance of Western capitulation to terror. In this 1996 fatwa, for example, he considers the American withdrawal from Somalia: When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge, but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the "heart" of every Muslim and a remedy to the "chests" of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.

Can there really be any doubt about how the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq would have been perceived by Bin Laden and those who share his ideology? Can there be much doubt about how they understood Prodi's and Schroeder's comments?

Of course it is true that military force is not the only solution. Overwhelming military force is the only solution. If Prodi does not believe force to be the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists, how does he propose combating terrorists who believe force to be the answer to resolving their conflict with us? They have demonstrated their willingness to kill us by the thousands and have clearly stated their ambitious plans to kill as many more of us as possible, preferably with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. One of the Madrid bombing suspects, not incidentally, was found with floor plans to Grand Central Station on his computer. Why would Europe's leaders seek to diminish this dreadful truth while the blood of their compatriots was not yet dry, rather than morally and psychologically preparing their citizens for a long military conflict against a depraved enemy-a conflict brought to European soil only days before?

Schroeder's comments were not merely an abdication of leaders.h.i.+p, they were astonis.h.i.+ngly insensitive to historic resonance. Confronting in the n.a.z.is a similarly murderous, anti-Semitic, and expansionist ideology, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain happened upon the identical response. "We should seek," he said, "by all means in our power to avoid war, by a.n.a.lyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will." The consequences of his posture have now pa.s.sed into infamy. Yes, yes, I do keep bringing up the n.a.z.is. Those who would argue that this is not the correct historical a.n.a.logy are challenged to find one single relevant place where the a.n.a.logy fails.

Had the Spanish government responded to the Madrid bombings by announcing that in light of this irrefutable confirmation of al Qaeda's connection to Iraq, Spain would now not only refuse to withdraw but quintuple its troop strength, the more rational calculators among those tempted to emulate the bombers might have been given pause to ponder. Imagine Schroeder speaking thus: Never give in- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. That, of course, is what Churchill said-and it is Churchill, not Chamberlain, whom history has vindicated-but it is impossible to imagine any contemporary European leader saying any such thing.

How is it possible that Europeans could fail to see in Spain's flight, to hear in the rhetoric of its leaders, the echo of Neville Chamberlain? How is it possible that Europe could again be embracing appeas.e.m.e.nt? Why are Europeans so unwilling to fight for their civilization and so willing to surrender to wicked, bloodthirsty ideologues who despise every value and freedom Europeans profess to cherish? Chantal Delsol's answer makes sense: They cannot imagine fighting for a cause because they no longer believe a cause may be worth a fight.

CHAPTER 6.

NO PAST, NO FUTURE, NO WORRIES.

RECENTLY, WANDERING THROUGH PERUGIA, in Italy, I stopped in the Pasticceria Sandri, a ravis.h.i.+ng, high-ceilinged pastry shop built in 1871. I took in the pyramids of chocolates on filigreed silver platters, wrapped in sparkling blue-and-silver foil; the extravagant platters of pastries made from raisins, spices, figs, walnuts, apples, cocoa powder; the boxes of panettone, wrapped in thin golden paper, piled high on the countertops. The air was fragrant with anise and almonds and the whole bakery seemed to sparkle, as if dusted in spun sugar. The exuberantly frescoed walls were decorated with toys-gla.s.sy-eyed antique dolls and marionettes, cheerful wooden drums, soldiers, brightly painted figurines, music boxes. I am sure that every Italian in Perugia has nostalgic memories of that shop, of the way Mamma took them there for a sfogliatelle with hot chocolate after school, as a special treat. The place was, clearly, designed to delight children.

But there were no children in the Pasticceria Sandri. Not one. Nor were there any on the streets of Perugia. I looked carefully, in the evening, when the crowds poured into the Corso for the pa.s.seggiata. The city's twelfth-century aqueduct culminates at the piazza in a marble fountain with sculpted panels depicting animals and mythological creatures. There were no children examining them, no parents gently explaining, Now, that is a unicorn, Bruno, and that, that is a faun.

The piazza is framed on one side by an opulent palace built of travertine and local stones, on the other by the high Gothic windows and Baroque facade of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, where Urban IV is buried, and where, under the portico, a section of the city's original Roman walls endures. There were no parents pus.h.i.+ng strollers past the palace, no grandparents coaxing hesitant toddlers down the cathedral stairs. I saw thousands of Italians walking, shopping, gabbling with friends, taking aperitivi, sitting on the San Lorenzo steps and watching the other people pa.s.sing by-but I did not see one single child.

On my flight to Italy, I had noticed an article in the in-flight magazine about a long-limbed woman in her thirties, evidently at her leisure at a beach resort. Wearing a gauzy white dress, she stood at the edge of the sea, gazing into the horizon, alone. She lounged in the solarium, alone. She sipped a tropical drink, alone. On the next page, a sidebar translated the text into crude English: The portrait of a generation in skirt that rides a new philosophy of life: gathering in urban tribes and-above all-escaping from marriage. About thirty years old, with good education and a medium-high income, good looking, single for choice rather than for need, they are an army of women living in solitude as a period of their life, maybe transitory, certainly positive. A portion of the existence suspended among the dependence upon the parents, the complications of life in pair and the responsibility towards the family. A privileged moment to live alternating happy hours with friends to evenings at home, with a cuc.u.mber mask on the face, watching a movie and weeping, eating a light single-portion dinner, wearing an old sweater and wool unmatched socks. Spinster, therefore, has no more a negative meaning.

I looked up at the flight attendant who was pouring my coffee. She seemed remarkably cheerful for a spinster who had spent the past night weeping alone in her unmatched socks with a cuc.u.mber mask on her face, whether that had a negative meaning or not.

The sociological developments so cheerfully celebrated in that magazine are in fact an utter catastrophe for Italy, as they are in the rest of Europe. Not since the Great Plague has Europe's population been so dramatically gutted. Italian women are, as the magazine correctly noted, postponing marriage. When they do have children, late in life, they are having very few of them-rarely more than one. Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's birthrate has plummeted. It is now the lowest in Western Europe.23 If a society has modern standards of medical care, the inevitable correlate of a decline in births is a rise in the elderly proportion of the population. Italy is now the first country in human history with more people over the age of sixty than under the age of twenty. If current trends continue, according to the UN's projections, the next fifty years will see Italy's population drop from 57.5 million to 45 million. The youngest generation, children under the age of fourteen, will shrink by 14 percent. The cohort of people between fifteen and sixty-four- working age-will shrink by 44 percent. The aged population, over sixty-four, will grow by 50 percent. There will be a 160 percent increase in the population of Italians over the age of eighty.1 Imagine the state of Italian universities, music, literature, theater, the arts when its population comes to be distributed in that manner.

The contraction of Italy's population has had drastic economic repercussions already. Italian industries are suffering severe labor shortages. Italy's extensive welfare system-funded through workers' wages-is going bankrupt. Ten years ago, Italians who had worked for twenty-five years could look forward to retiring at the age of forty-three with a pension that amounted to 80 percent of their salary. The narrowing tax base has forced the government to raise the retirement age to fifty-seven. In 2008, it will be raised again to sixty.2 The government recently proposed raising it to sixty-five, a suggestion that triggered labor unrest and strikes.24 The Italian case is the most extreme, but throughout Europe the birthrate has been declining since the Second World War. Demographers speak of the total fertility rate, or the number of children the average woman is apt to have over the course of her reproductive life span. That rate is now about 1.5 in Europe. Scandinavia, Britain, and the Netherlands are slightly more fecund-total fertility rates there are slightly above 1.7. But Ireland and France are the only countries in the European Union where fertility approaches the so-called replacement rate of 2.1, the level required to keep population levels stable.25 When total fertility rates drop below a certain point, a shrinking population will enter a sudden, steep spiral of decline. Demographers call this phenomenon negative momentum, and Europe is on the verge of it. Gross domestic product will drop commensurately. Imminent depopulation means that no one need worry about Europe's aspirations to become an economic superpower, or any kind of superpower, for that matter.

Unless these trends reverse themselves-and there is no reason to imagine they will-European countries will soon be unable to make payments on their extensive pension and health care programs. No serious economist disputes that at this rate, barring reform, Europe's pension schemes, along with the rest of its costly social welfare programs, will bankrupt the Continent within a generation. Immigration is Europe's only hope. There is no alternative, unless Europeans are prepared to give up on the welfare state, and they are not. Whenever pension reform is proposed in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, protesters immediately take to the streets in numbers sufficient to bring civic life to a halt and cause swift, devastating economic damage. It does not seem to trouble them that the economies they are damaging are the source of the welfare payments they are trying to protect. Labor unrest and demonstrations routinely cripple French transportation and public services. Italy-all of it-is more or less permanently on strike.

But immigration in numbers adequate to rectify the population decline will come at a huge cost in social stability, particularly if the majority of immigrants are Muslims, as they are now. Immigration levels are nowhere near high enough now to offset the diminution of Europe's native population: to do so they would have to be five to ten times higher still. Particularly given Europe's high rate of unemployment-some 15 to 20 million Europeans are jobless-it is hardly likely that so many immigrants could easily be culturally, politically, or economically integrated.

The latter point is so obvious that it hardly needs to be argued, but if in doubt, consider this: Shortly after September 11, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci published a pa.s.sionate and undisciplined polemic called The Rage and the Pride. In pa.s.sages that infuriated anti-discrimination activists-who sought to have the book banned- Fallaci castigated her countrymen for permitting immigrants to overrun Italian cities. Here she describes a tent erected in the center of Florence by Somali vagrants: Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters-in-law, and if they had their way, their relatives' relatives as well. . . . A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi's cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti's golden doors. A tent, finally, furnished like a sleazy little apartment: seats, tables, chaise-lounges, mattresses for sleeping and for f.u.c.king, ovens for cooking food and plaguing the piazza with smoke and stench. . . . Thanks to a radio tape player, enriched by the uncouth wailing of a muezzin who punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells. Add to all this the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the marble of the Baptistery. (My, these sons of Allah sure have a long range! However did they manage to hit the target when they were held back by a protective railing that kept it nearly two whole meters away from their urinary equipment?) And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore al Vescovo: that exquisite Romanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a s.h.i.+thouse.3 Fallaci was of course immediately condemned by Europe's politicians, clergy, academics, and journalists as a hysterical bigot. This she may be-I'm staying out of this one-but here is the point: The Rage and the Pride, a violent, uncensored anti-immigration manifesto, was also the most successful book ever published in Italy. The entire first edition, 200,000 copies, sold out within hours. For months, the publisher printed 50,000 new copies a day. Italians who had never before visited a bookstore waited on line for copies. It was also the number one best-seller in Germany, France, and Spain. The success of Fallaci's book should be a hint that Europeans are not adjusting well to immigration, nor are immigrants adjusting well to Europe.

Anti-immigration parties are gaining strength across the Continent. If immigration rises to ten times the current levels, Europe will explode. If it doesn't, Europe will implode.

"ITALIANS HAVE, YOU KNOW, BEEN AROUND FOREVER"

However uneasily Italians view immigration, few seem fully to appreciate that the only alternative, if their country is to avoid terminal decline, is reproduction. When I was last in Rome, a friend introduced me to two Roman girls, both from distinguished Roman families. Giulia Arceri is twenty and Cristina Rossi is twenty-one. We sat on a bench beneath a spreading Roman pine in the courtyard of a villa on the crest of the Janiculum, Rome's highest hill, where the shadows cast by the sharp light made the courtyard look like a chiaroscuro painting by a Renaissance master, and discussed Italy's future. "Are you worried," I asked them both, "about the decline of Italy's population?"

Giulia looked at me as if I had asked whether she was alarmed by the remilitarization of Alpha Centauri. "No," she said finally.

"Does anyone in Italy worry about it?" I asked.

They both giggled. At last Cristina spoke up: "I don't think so."

"Why not? After all, if current trends continue, there will be no Italians."

They soaked that thought in for a while. Giulia waved her hand in the general direction of the Coliseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Forum. "I guess we think," she said, "that Italians have, you know, been around forever."

They have been around forever, that's what's so mystifying about it, and that's what makes all the explanations generally on offer for this demographic transformation seem so inadequate. Some attribute the decline of Italy's population to rapid industrialization, which, accompanied by urbanization, has broken up traditional family networks. They note that rural Italians traditionally viewed children, who provided farm labor, as an economic a.s.set, whereas urbanized Italians see them as an economic burden. Some note that better medical services, and a resultant decrease in infant mortality, have led Italians to bear fewer children in the expectation that more will survive.

It is not just Europe. Virtually every advanced industrial democracy is suffering from population decline. But there is one enormous exception: the United States. If industrialization, urbanization, and medical advances necessarily led to population decline, one would expect the American population to be declining fastest of all. During the 1970s, American fertility briefly dropped below the replacement rate. But in the 1990s, the trend reversed itself. The United States now has an annual population growth of 1.1 percent, higher than China's and by far the highest of the developed countries. There are 3 million new Americans born each year. The population of the United States is about 293 million. If the total fertility rate stays at current levels, there will be about 600 million Americans by the end of the century.

Some see the cause of Italy's population decline in the diminished role of the Church and the loss of traditional Catholic values. (Italy's Catholics have been vigorous lobbyists for solutions to save the Italian family from extinction, but they have not been particularly successful, and Rome, as it happens, has the lowest fertility rate in Italy.) Others place the blame on the Italian government, which has taken few measures to provide child care or social support to mothers. Some fault Italy's high housing costs, which encourage children to live with their parents well into middle age. The Italian rental market is over-regulated, making it difficult to find a house or apartment. It is nearly impossible to get a mortgage to buy a home: The Italian banking sector, which runs on a complex, antique system of family crossshareholding that protects banks from compet.i.tion and takeover, is Europe's least compet.i.tive and least responsive to market demand.

Quite a few commentators point to the near-congenital immaturity of Italian men, who, Italian woman complain-and complain, and complain, and complain-are lazy, spoiled, self-indulgent, unfaithful, slovenly, and swinish, unwilling to help with household ch.o.r.es, incapable even of dressing themselves without their mother's aid. Italian women, evidently, consider them unfit for reproduction.4 All these theories doubtless have some explanatory power. But none is fully satisfying. If a woman badly wants to have a baby, she will go to great lengths to do so, whatever the economic obstacles and the inconvenience, even if she has no partner at all. One need only spend a day at a fertility clinic to see that this is so. So why do Italians-and Europeans generally-now need to be coaxed, forced, cajoled, or bribed into doing something that has always been viewed as the central imperative of existence, the act that most lends meaning to people's lives?

THE LOSS OF A VISION.

Something else about Italy immediately strikes the visitor as odd. Again take Perugia: The city center is an ancient, melancholy maze of arched caverns and twisting alleys, built on a jutting hill that dominates the Tiber Valley. In the winter, fog snakes over the rooftop gardens and pours into the narrow streets. Perugia was the capital of the Etruscan empire, and an imaginative spectator can inspect the original Etruscan gates, thousands of years old, and for a flicker of a moment see ghostly Etruscans pa.s.sing below, then scuttling off through the misty, narrow streets, fretting about the prospect of imminent obliteration by the Romans.

But if you descend that hill to the outskirts of the city, you will see housing projects made of clapboard and cheap, cracking cement. The buildings are tall and unornamented. They are not made of local stone and they do not use local colors. They look like giant tomb-stones. The squat concrete shopping malls on the outer rings of the city are sprawling, unplanned developments completely ant.i.thetical in spirit to traditional Italian architecture and civic design. If historically the Italian city was contrived to draw city dwellers into the streets in a kind of daily communal celebration, these suburbs seem designed to foster anomie and indifference to civic life. All the suburbs around Italy's great cities-Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples- look like this.

These gloomy suburbs are where Italians live now, not the picturesque city centers, which have become too costly for all but the most successful urban elites and the handful of ancient families who pa.s.s their apartments from one generation to the next. Ordinary Italians visit the city center as an outing, or to shop, then return to their modern neighborhoods. They no longer live on charmingly haphazard streets scaled to a pedestrian size-they live on streets laid out in rectangular grids, where the traffic and pollution are nearly overwhelming. In the winter, when it rains, the oppressive concrete buildings turn dark and glowering. The long concrete blocks form wind tunnels. In the summer, there are no shady alleyways. To save heat or to keep out the sun, the windows are always shuttered, and the shutters are made of ugly metal, giving the impression that the buildings have no windows at all-they appear to be nothing more than concrete and metal walls.

The streets are decorated not with frescoes but with trash cans and billboards featuring vaguely p.o.r.nographic advertis.e.m.e.nts for Italy's three competing cell phone companies, or for competing funeral homes (funerals with honor, or funerals at the lowest prices, guaranteed). There are few trees in the suburbs, no public s.p.a.ces-and where there are public s.p.a.ces, they are nearly empty, with no cafes, no churches. The piazza is no longer the center of civic life. And while the architecture in the historic city centers is carefully preserved by diligent curators, their streets and walls are covered with graffiti. No one cleans it off.26 Italy's coastlines, too, have been desecrated from end to end with urban sprawl, industrial parks, landfills, and unremittingly ugly tourist resorts. The waters have been polluted, often by sewage. This is not the inevitable consequence of economic development: The California coastlines are by comparison pristine, and California's economy is roughly the size of Italy's. This is a monument to greed, and shortsighted greed at that: by permitting the beauty of the coasts to be destroyed, Italians have ensured that in due course they will cease to be tourist attractions.

But it is not just greed and shortsightedness at work here-Italians have not become more greedy and shortsighted than they were when The Merchant of Venice was written. Italy has clearly experienced a change in some kind of collective cultural vision. In the age of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the city planners of Florence supervised the development of the city in minute detail, concerned, above all, to cultivate the absolute value of absolute beauty. When Stendhal visited Florence, he reported that the tide of emotion was as intense as a religious feeling. My soul . . . was in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand. . . . I had reached that most high degree of sensitivity in which the divine intimations of art merge with the sensuality of emotion. . . . I was seized by a fierce palpitation of the heart. I walked on fearing that I might fall to the ground.5 In the late 1970s, the chief of psychiatry at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital described a phenomenon she termed Stendhal's syndrome-an intoxication with Florence's high Renaissance beauty so intense as to inspire dizziness, fainting, even outright madness. It is still quite common among visitors, apparently.

How is it that the inheritors of Italian culture have lost the genius for creating this kind of beauty? And what does it mean that they have? I had filed this question in its own mental category, but while I was thinking about Italy's declining population, I received a letter from David Hazony, the editor of Azure, a journal published in Jerusalem. David immigrated to Israel from the United States as an adult. He is in his mid-thirties and the father of eight children. I had asked him why he had undertaken willingly to raise so large a family, wondering if his response might help me to understand why Italians, by and large, no longer feel this impulse. I had expected him to say something about his religious beliefs, but his answer made no reference to religion.

People who live in civilizations with a strong sense of history are more likely to want to have more kids. If you are encouraged to think of your culture as something important within the flow of human history, something that is handed from one generation to the next, then you will feel a debt to the past and an obligation to the future, and you are more likely to relate to the project of having kids with a certain degree of seriousness. Raising children is hard and mostly thankless, so you need a good reason to do so, even if it's to some extent instinctive or intuitive. It is through kids that people express a certain fundamental loyalty to something greater than themselves. Conversely, societies that discourage reverence for the past, that discourage loyalty in general, will almost automatically undermine any kind of vision for the future-since once you have disregarded the past, you have no reason to think that the next generation will not similarly discard whatever you have done. The result: People are more likely to have fewer kids.6 I doubt this is a complete explanation for Italy's declining birthrate. Clearly the problem is complex and multifaceted. But having seen the architecture of contemporary Italy, I wonder if he might not be on to something.

ARE THE AXIS POWERS PUNIs.h.i.+NG THEMSELVES?.

Although strictly economic explanations do not seem adequate to explain Europe's large-scale population trends, countries that invest in policies to make it easier to have and raise children do tend to have higher fertility rates than those that don't. The showcase example is France, which now has a total fertility rate of 1.89, the highest rate in Europe save Ireland. Women in France are ent.i.tled to four months of paid maternity leave, with job protection and a range of benefits to offset the costs of education, housing, and transport. The more children a Frenchwoman has, the more benefits she receives. In recent years, France's natural population growth-that is, growth excluding immigration-has accounted for nearly all of Europe's natural population growth. Swedish fertility, too, spiked when the state began offering extensive financial benefits to mothers.

In 2003, Silvio Berlusconi's center-right government introduced a scheme to bribe couples into having a second child with a 1,000-euro bonus. Few have taken it-the amount is considered insultingly trivial by most Italian women, as indeed it is. The Italian government is making no plans to invest in social services needed by working mothers.

Why is Italy reluctant to take steps that might reverse, or at least slow, its declining birthrate? Because these schemes instantly call to mind Mussolini's campaign to raise the Italian birthrate. Mussolini, believing a nation's dominance to be tied directly to its population, sought to increase Italy's population by 20 million people. "Fertile people," he declared, "have a right to an Empire, those with the will to propagate their race on the face of the earth."7 To encourage marriage, he decreed a tax on all bachelors. He implemented a scheme of financial aid for large families, offering bonuses to the families of soldiers and civil servants for each new child. Childbearing contests were held: the winners were applauded as national heroes, reviewed on parades, given medals, and sent on promotional tours of Italy; their faces beamed from the covers of Italian magazines and newspapers. Abortion and contraception were severely criminalized. Italian women were inundated with unrelenting propaganda encouraging domesticity and maternity. It is no surprise that schemes for increasing fertility are now, in the Italian mind, intimately a.s.sociated with the memories of Fascism.

This was also true in Germany and Spain, the two other European nations where birthrates are now declining most precipitously. Franco, too, equated a people's influence with the size of its population and took measures much like Mussolini's to increase birthrates. The n.a.z.is were obsessed with German population growth. Central to n.a.z.i ideology was an emphasis on traditional gender roles, and from the time the n.a.z.is came to power, their propaganda focused intensely on German women, urging them to stay at home and bear as many children as possible. Grants were awarded to "hereditarily healthy" German families with four or more offspring. Mothers of large families received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother. Fathers received cash awards. Whenever aggressive schemes are now proposed to raise the German birthrate-which is in steep decline, and lowest, interestingly, among German academics 8-vehement objections are raised, and these objections inevitably make reference to the n.a.z.is.

It is enormously suggestive that birthrates are dropping faster in the former powers of the Axis than anywhere else in the world. It is tempting to wonder whether, in some way, the experiences of the Second World War convinced people in these countries, at a deep, inarticulate level, that they do not deserve to exist.

When one accepts (if only unconsciously) the precept that one's life is essentially meaningless, and that one's own culture and values are in no way so commendable that they deserve perpetuation, the impetus to risk one's life or sacrifice one's comfort to defend that culture and those values is strongly diminished in favor of seizing temporary daily pleasure and gratification. The impulse to replicate oneself becomes starkly attenuated. Contemporary man, writes Chantal Delsol, no longer seeks any joy he cannot have in the present. If he dismisses eternity and immortality, it is because he is tired of seeing the present sacrificed for an uncertain future. Too often duped, like someone whose hovel has been expropriated on the promise of a palace that never materializes, he now only wishes to take advantage of his brief but sure duration on this earth. . . . He will hear nothing of sacrificing his own inclinations in order to perpetuate a family business or preserve material things. . . . He has seen so many inherited certainties, inst.i.tutions and behavior patterns turn out to be indefensible that it is without regret that he abandons all of these obligations.9 Without regret, perhaps-but surely not without consequences.

CHAPTER 7.

BLACK-MARKET RELIGION: THE NINE LIVES OF JOSE BOVE.

If anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions, if he has a pain in the bowel, even . . . he forthwith sets about reforming-the world.

-HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU, Walden.

YET IT IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE in nothing. European men and women still confront the same existential questions, the same mysteries, the same suffering as everyone who has ever been born. They are suspicious now of the Church and of grand political ideologies, but they nonetheless by nature yearn for the transcendent. And so they wors.h.i.+p other things-crops, for example, which certain Europeans, like certain tribal animists, have come to regard with superst.i.tious awe. If asked, they will not say that they are wors.h.i.+pping their crops, of course. Officially, they do not wors.h.i.+p anything. But in practice their activities take a particular and recognizable form, their rhetoric employs a distinct and familiar vocabulary, and their beliefs form part of a European religious tradition no less ancient than the Papacy.

As a case study, let us look now at one particular purveyor to Europe of black-market religion, Jose Bove. The charismatic anarchosyndicalist was born-most recently-in 1953 in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, where he is usually born, although he has been born, from time to time, in Flanders, and in Westphalia, and sometimes he has been born in Hungary. He has occasionally been born in Holland, and he has been particularly apt to be born in the Rhine Valley. The most recently born Bove is a great folk hero in France, a modern Robin Hood, they say, or when they are being more Gallic about it, a modern Vercingetorix, who in 53 B.C. raised an army against the Roman legions wintering in Gaul.27 Bove is applauded for standing up against what he calls "the totalitarianism of capitalism." The founder of the powerful French farmer's union, the Confederation Paysanne, and the leading spokesman for the international peasant movement Via Campesina, he advocates agriculture based on the family farm and what he terms "food sovereignty," which he defines as a nation's ability to grow, rather than import, its own crops. Bove seeks strict government controls on agriculture, as well as high subsidies and tariff barriers to protect the kind of local farming he favors. He has become one of the most vivid and visible spokesmen of the antiglobalization movement, and a leading critic of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Bove speaks English fluently, having at the age of three accompanied his impeccably bourgeois parents-who have no traditional farming roots whatsoever-to the United States, where they conducted research in agricultural chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Few of Bove's followers realize that his father leads French research into GMOs, and has notably saved Brazil's orange industry by creating a transgenic orange immune to the insect-borne disease that once destroyed 300 million Brazilian trees. The elder Bove was until recently director of the French National Inst.i.tute for Agronomic Research near Bordeaux, and his infrequent but exasperated public comments about his son's activist agenda suggest that he wishes he had taken the time to genetically modify his own organism. It is tempting to view the younger Bove's career entirely through the obvious oedipal prism. But there is more to the story.

Bove attended a Catholic secondary school near Paris, from which he was expelled-significant enough, as we shall see-for rejecting Catholic doctrine. He declined a university education, instead joining a group of conscientious objectors to military service. This led him to the protests against the militarization of the Larzac, a limestone plateau in the south of the Ma.s.sif Central, where French farmers fought against the extension of military camps between 1971 and 1981. Arrested for invading a French army base during a 1976 protest, Bove spent three weeks in prison. Following this, he attended a "direct action" training camp in Libya sponsored by Muammar Qaddafi. ("Direct action" is a common leftist euphemism for violence or, in fact, terrorism, as in the French Leninist terrorist group of the same name, Action Directe.) No one has any idea what he did there, or if they do, they are not saying.

Bove formed the Confederation Paysanne in 1987, becoming one of its three princ.i.p.al spokesmen, and certainly its most telegenic. He led the destruction of GMO rice plants at the Nerac research lab early in 1999, then pillaged a Novartis seed production facility and the greenhouses of a public research center. He has been credited with hijacking s.h.i.+pments of biotechnology-grown corn.

The Larzac is where Bove now lives, and the Larzac was the site of a ma.s.sive demonstration against the World Trade Organization in August 2003. It was in the Larzac that Bove learned the fundamentals of sheep farming. In between public appearances and prison time, Bove produces what I am told is an excellent Roquefort.

THE FIRST LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

It is not clear when exactly the first Jose Bove was born. The year, perhaps, was A.D. 560. The place was Bourges, we believe, in the Loire Valley. The man first came to the attention of St. Gregory, Bishop of Tours, in 591; he writes of him in his Historia Francorum.1 We do not know the man's name, so let us call him the ur-Bove. The ur-Bove, afflicted by madness induced by a swarm of flies, made his way to Arles, where he became a hermit devoted to prayer. When he emerged from his ascetic seclusion, he p.r.o.nounced himself possessed of the gifts of healing and prophecy. Indeed, he declared, he was Christ himself. His unlettered contemporaries agreed, flocking to him in great numbers to be healed by his touch. He displayed such powers that Gregory sensed the hand of the Devil.

His followers brought him gifts, which he distributed to the poor. He insisted that his followers wors.h.i.+p him, and they did. Later, he organized them into an armed band; he led them through the French countryside, ransacking and pillaging, ultimately arriving at Le Puy, where his stark naked messengers streaked into the city, vaulting and somersaulting, to announce his arrival to the bishop. The bishop sent a party to meet the ur-Bove: they chopped him into pieces.

Gregory was much dismayed by these events; connecting the advent of the false prophet with the occurrence of famine, he concluded that the end was nigh.

That is all we know of the ur-Bove.

THE DARK ANGEL OF THE ANTIGLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT.

The Great Peasant Revolt of 1999 began in August after the United States imposed tariffs on French cheeses and pate de foie gras as a reprisal for the European Union's ban on American hormone-treated beef. To symbolize his vexation, Bove took his tractor and, in the term he favors, "deconstructed" a McDonald's in Millau, near his home in the Larzac. Some 300 people joined him, and a good time was had by all, except, of course, by the owners of the McDonald's (who were French, not American). All present reported a festive atmosphere. The day concluded agreeably in Millau's outdoor cafes.

Today, McDonald's; tomorrow, the world. Bove instantly became the new darling of the antiglobalization movement. The sack of the McDonald's was not, he hastened to explain, an anti-American action per se. "This is a fight," he explained, "against free-trade global capitalism. It's about the logic of a certain economic system. . . . It can be a struggle against any country, this one or that one. " 2 Those around him have not necessarily understood this subtlety; since then, wherever he has appeared, effigies of Uncle Sam have gone up in flames.

Bove was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the uprising. He was photographed, famously, on the steps of the court-house, handcuffed arms above his head, beaming broadly, his extravagant mustache fanning out from his face like a revolutionary banner. "This image," writes a Bove admirer, the French journalist Gilles Luneau, "has become a historic symbol; it ill.u.s.trates a world where we live in chains, where revolt is both necessary and legitimate."3 Bove refused to pay bail to escape going to jail, but supporters the world over sent checks to free him. The Confederation Paysanne set up an office in front of the prison gates. Hundreds of visitors came every day to sign pet.i.tions on Bove's behalf. Daily, demonstrators throughout France demanded his release. On Bastille Day, Bove was pardoned by President Jacques Chirac, and in the end served only forty-four days of his sentence. In the spring of 2000, in mimicry of Bove's protest, a bomb was detonated at a McDonald's in Brittany, in the northwest of France. A young Frenchwoman, Laurence Turbec, was killed.

Following his release from prison, Bove adopted a dizzying global schedule of protests and publicity appearances in the service of antiglobalization causes. He attended the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, where he ate a Roquefort sandwich in front of a McDonald's that was then, inevitably, vandalized. He later described the riots there-which led the governor to declare a state of emergency and call in the National Guard-as "glorious events."4 My mother, who lives in Seattle, wasn't so sure. Her first taste of martial law left her nonplussed. I believe she described the protesters as "animals."