To my chat with Fausta Wertz on Blog Talk Radio which starts in about ten minutes, here.

UDATE: Always fun to do these radio chats. What is important to highlight is the context in which certain things happen and sometimes that gets lost in radio conversations, purely because of a lack of time. Here are a few comments that I wanted to add:

It is important to understand that failed Muslim integration to a large extent has resulted from the long held belief that allowing different religious pillars to exist in The Netherlands would contribute to a solution like it had in the past for the Catholic-Protestant divide on which the nation was built. The problem is that a template for neutralizing religious tensions between a culturally and economically largely homogenous group has limited use to integrate a group that both ethnically and economically occupies a different and separate world. Add to that the fact that Catholic and Protestant structures have largely become defunct in one of Europe’s most secular nations and you can picture the divergent tracks in Dutch society.

Secondly, following on caller Siggy’s questions – check out his blog here – the EU has gone through very different stages. From an economic project to a political “counterweight to the US” effort and now that its sheer size makes it impossible to foster a single European identity, a rather uncertain future. Again, the years of a Franco-German axis setting a largely political agenda appear to have waned, but it is not unthinkable that a possible Merkel-Sarkozy alliance could breathe new life into it. They could however shift the attention towards more economic reform and growth, but that is hopeful speculation on my part.

Dutch emigration numbers are released by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics and require close examination. I will continue to follow these and interpret them and while they may not be as dramatic as you break them down, the trend of increasing emigration stands.

Also, as some of my readers have no doubt noticed I am increasingly annoyed at the hyperventilating over the notion that ‘Muslims are taking over Europe’. Yes, immigrants from Muslim nations will make up an increasing and significant portion of Western Europe’s population, but so will Eastern Europeans and other immigrant groups. Many measures are being taken at different levels to curb or streamline immigration. At the same time early evidence indicates that immigrant birth rates are trending towards those of native Europeans. The reason for the latter is economics: it requires two spouses working to maintain a decent lifestyle in urban Western Europe and that will impact on the number of offspring one has.

In short, we are witnessing fundamental social and economic change in Europe the outcome of which remains highly uncertain. In my chat I alluded to a decade of uncertainty and it seems that old Europe is not terribly adroit in adapting to the rapid sequence of events that is changing their continent. The ‘passive contentedness’ of both citizens and political elites do not really help here.

Also, remember that we haven’t even talked about the competitive economic pressures from outside Europe and the graying of the native population combined with the sustainability of the welfare state. The Dutch case above all is so interesting because they have as I pointed out in my original column all of the social, demographic and economic challenges compressed into one small nation. Consequently they have become a sort of laboratory for the new and changed Europe of tomorrow. Nations that are on a similar track are Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and most of the Nordic countries.

Related Posts
The Church and the Nation – Background on how 'pillarization' helped to build the Dutch nation and mitigate religious tensions in the past.

The Pragmatic Revolution – Explaining that the Dutch are not tolerant or overly liberal by nature as is often suggested, but rather pragmatic and sometimes indifferent people as a result of the cards geography and history have dealt them.