The foundations of European civilization are crumbling. This is not just about buildings set alight, monuments burned to a cinder, people rioting in the streets. It is about something subtler, more visceral, a violence that has been wreaked on the innards of European society over decades rather than merely over the course of a 10-second TikTok short.
To understand what is happening, you have to glimpse the trajectory of a once disciplined group of societies that dominated the world, but which also — through a process as subtle as it has become devastating — started putting the present ahead of the future, today above tomorrow, fast living over collective sacrifice.
“Delay of gratification,” the psychologist Carol Dweck said, “is the route to all good things” — but this is what has been missing for a quarter of a century and more.
France has been running fiscal deficits not for one year, or five, or 10, but for 52 straight years under parties of all colors.
This always felt good in the here and now, because swiping ever more cash from bond markets permitted the state to spend beyond its means. Yet the cumulative effect has been ruinous: debt stands at almost 120% of GDP and interest payments are swallowing ever larger parts of the budget, which means public spending is at near record highs while people feel more squeezed than ever before.
You see the same pattern in the welfare system. France cut the retirement age in the early 1980s as life expectancy climbed, and started giving ever more generous handouts to those not working.
Again, this appeased older voters and the unemployed but the piper always has to be paid in the end. Today, the parties that parade themselves as the “solution” are offering yet more profligacy. Marine Le Pen of the populist National Rally wishes to cut the retirement age back to 60 from 62 and nine months, a policy that would all but guarantee national bankruptcy.
There is a term for this and it has often been used by historians like Spengler and Gibbon who chronicle the dynamics of civilizational decline: delusional.
Railway employees in France can stop working 18 months before retirement and continue receiving 75% of salary, presumably because high pay for less work is a “human right.”
The UK, which is on the same track to a bond market conflagration, has almost four million people on incapacity benefits (often with diagnostically ambiguous mental health conditions) but MPs are up in arms not at this scandalous waste of human potential but at calls to tighten up criteria for claimants.
For societies as much as for individuals, discipline has always been the key to success, but this is what has been frittered away over years of decadence, denial and creeping socialism.
This later term does not merely apply to the current Labour government in the UK; the David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak governments between 2010 and 2024 presided over unprecedented increases in government spending, regulation and taxation.
These were socialists not with wool jackets and waving the Little Red Book, but posh accents and pompadours. The “right” in Europe has been no such thing for a quarter of a century at least.
As the cracks started to become more ominous in the 2000s and 2010s, many nations in Europe reached for a new solution to square the circle: mass uncontrolled immigration. Angela Merkel permitted a million refugees into Germany in a single year during the crisis of 2015.
Rather than a controlled approach focussed on high-skilled labor that would have boosted the economy, France has presided over increasingly permissive policy. The UK under Boris Johnson and successors let in almost as many people on visas between 2020 and 2023 than arrived between 1066 and 1950 combined.
Knowing these politicians, particularly in the UK, I sense the underlying motive was pure expediency, the hope that the reckoning could be delayed with a flood of cheap workers and new tax revenues. You might call it “human quantitative easing.”
But there was no plan for cultural assimilation, let alone the provision of more homes, doctors or hospitals as the population bulged. Nor was there any assessment of the long term cost as these workers reach retirement age, triggering pension liabilities vastly outstripping any taxes paid in the here and now.
More coverage of the riots plaguing France’s streets
- French leftists plan major Paris protest Saturday as absent Macron vows no repeat to riots
- French Apple store looters get unpleasant surprise on stolen iPhones: ‘Disabled and being tracked’
- Anarchy in France: Behind the riots and violent protests
- US radicals who traveled to France to join cop-bashing protests reveal plans to ‘raise hell’ on our shores
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK is on route to a debt to GDP ratio of 300% by 2075; a trajectory matched by France.
The riots on your TV screens are, in many ways, the concatenation of these factors, the citizenry revolting against a political settlement they connived in by eviscerating any politician who dared speak the truth.
When Emmanuel Macron sought in 2023 to raise the retirement age — an obligatory move — he was condemned by right, left, rich, poor, suburbs and towns. This of course is a familiar historical pattern, the sense of entitlement rising as the willingness to make the sacrifices to pay for it shrivel.
In his masterwork “The Fate of Empires,” the historian and general Sir John Grubb noted that at the very moment the Abbasid caliphate was approaching bankruptcy in 9th century Baghdad, its people demanded a shorter working week.
And perhaps there is lesson here for America, too.
What the European experience reveals is that socialism doesn’t work. Higher debt and dependency doesn’t work. Short termism doesn’t work.
If the Democratic Socialists ever gained power, America could morph into a sclerotic European power within a single presidential term. Yet sadly it is not just so-called “progressives” who run permanent deficits and over-regulate the allocation of capital; this is the modus operandi these days of Republicans too.
What is crucial today, then, is not to repeat the terrible mistake of the European powers, which ignored the warning signs, not least in rising bond yields — which are now hitting US Treasuries, too. For if history teaches one thing it is that there are always hungrier, more disciplined societies ready to pounce when the apex power loses its edge.