Demography and national security

The cover story in the new issue of The American Conservative is not available online yet, but I'll reference it here. It's by James Kurth, the Swarthmore political scientist, who writes about how demographic changes will affect the ability of Western societies to wage war. Excerpt:

Current social attitudes and demographic trends in the West suggest that there will be a continuation of low reproduction rates among Western peoples and therefore a severe decline in their populations. Conversely, there will be a continuation of high immigration of non-Western peoples into the Western nations and of higher reproduction rates among the non-Western communities in the West than among the Western people themselves. This will have major consequences not only for the military strategies of the Western nations but for their national security -- and even identity.

The most dramatic consequences are likely to occur in Europe, where most of the non-Western populations will be Muslim. These communities already perform functions essential to the economic system, and within the next decade, they are poised to become an important part of the political system. Many European countries will become two nations, and Europe as a whole will become two civilizations. The first will be a Western civilization or, more accurately, given Europeans' rejection of many Western traditions, a post-Western civilization comprised of people of European descent. It will be secular, even pagan, rich, old, and feeble. The second will be the non-Western civilization, descended from non-European peoples. It will be religious, even Islamic, poor, young, and vigorous. ...The two civilizations will regard each other with mutual contempt. In the new civilization, there will be a growing rage, and in the old civilization, there will be a growing fear. These will be the perfect conditions for endemic Islamic terrorism, urban riots, and mob violence: an Islamist insurgency within Europe itself.

Kurth concludes that given these and other irreversible demographic facts facing Europe and the US:

For the nations of the West, which have arrived at this historically unprecedented state, a viable strategy for the nation is no longer possible because they are no longer really nations at all.

That's a tantalizing walk-off line, but Kurth doesn't give in the essay an indication of what he means by "nation." But I'm betting he's trying to say that the people of the West see themselves as individual consumers more than members of a distinct collective with a shared history and a common, binding sense of values rooted in that experience. In other words, wealthy barbarians. I'm reminded of the following line from Philip Rieff's book "Charisma," which is partly a protest against the death of Western culture:

[C]ontemporaneity is the mark of a true barbarian. For barbarism is not some primitive technology and naive cosmologies, but a sophisticated cutting off of the inhibiting authority of the past.