As many of my readers know, my thoughts on modern Europe are essentially based on historical comparatism, and particularly on the similarities between today’s West and the crisis of the Roman Republic during the first century BC.1 Mass migration, declining birth rates, social polarization, the implosion of the family, the decline of traditional religion, asymmetric wars, globalization, the crisis of cultural identity, insecurity, the transformation of a participatory political system into an oligarchy, and populism—none of this is unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but can also be found at the end of the Roman Republic. The consequences were first an endemic political and economic crisis, then a period of disorder and civil war, and finally the rise to power of a conservative, plebiscitary authoritarian regime as the only means of mediating between opposing ethnic and political groups—and at this point, I find it difficult to see how France, Germany, or even Europe as a whole can escape such a development.
Defending European Civilization
