After the Fall
The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A master historian takes us deep into the heart of Europe's current political and financial crisis
Walter Laqueur was one of the few experts who predicted Europe's current financial and political crisis when he wrote The Last Days of Europe six years ago. Now this master historian takes readers inside the European crisis that he foresaw. Ravaged by the world economic meltdown, increasingly dependent on imported oil and gas, and lacking a common foreign policy, Europe is in dire straits. With the authority that comes from thirty years of experience as an expert on political affairs, the author predicts the future prospects of this troubled continent. Europe is the United States' closest ally, and its prosperity is vital to American's success and security. This is a must-read for anyone invested in our country's future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A feckless, economically stagnant, ethnically fractious mess is the verdict rendered in this gloomy critique of European social democracy. Framing Europe's debt crisis, austerity, and rioting as a vindication of his forecasts in The Last Days of Europe, historian Laqueur blames them on intractable long-term pathologies. Europe's economic union, he argues, will fail without a stronger political union that nationalist loyalties make unlikely. Rising costs will undermine its lavish welfare states. Militarily weak and dependent on foreign energy supplies, Europe will be politically marginalized in world affairs. Underlying all these problems, the author contends, are the twin demographic crises of falling birthrates and his most insistent concern a swelling Muslim immigrant minority that, he contends, refuses to assimilate to Europe's liberal mainstream and would rather join street gangs than get an education. Laqueur harps on these themes in a series of rambling disquisitions interspersed with ruminations on the fall of civilizations. (He believes that cohesive, authoritarian Asian cultures will supersede a continent mired in a slack, permissive liberal relativism.) Laqueur's Euro-pessimism is ideologically charged and sometimes overstated, but it has enough nuance and realism to pose a bracing challenge to social democratic orthodoxies.
