There are some rather disturbing statistics from recent studies of demographics rates in the EU. The EU population, as in the US also, is in serious decline and fast aging. There are concerns that health insurance and adequate pensions will not be able to be guaranteed for the next generation. According to those demographic rates the EU will need some 80 million new immigrants between now and the year 2015 to man its industries. That makes up a whopping total 20% of the total population of the EU.

The concern is that if that quota of 80 million new immigrants is not reached the EU runs the serious risk of losing half of the share of its total global income, which is now considerable, and going from 24% to 12%. While one cannot argue with mathematical and statistical data on demographics, one can take issues with the way they are interpreted or misread and the misleading conclusions issuing from such misreading.

What is astonishing in all of this is the sheer myopia of the ongoing and growing xenophobia of current right wing European parties, such as the Lega in Italy, and the phenomenon of the “ronde” already explored in my last piece, but also present in supposedly progressive countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, and elsewhere. The shrinking population of Europeans does not worry those parties as long as the “purity” of the race is preserved. It appears that racism trumps even the economy.

The shrinking population does not worry either the growing number of Epicureans and hedonists in Western civilization. They seem to value fast cars and expensive trips and soccer games much more than children and numerous families, considered medieval and retrograde. In Italy the current rate is one and half children per couple; in the rest of Europe it is not much better. That phenomenon is misguided and pernicious not only on an ethical level but also on a purely economic level of self-interest. As the saying goes it’s like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Comparisons are odious, no doubt, especially when conducted for the purpose of bragging and sounding one’s horn and asserting one’s superiority, but they can also be enlightening and insightful if done dispassionately keeping orange and apples separate and with no bias and hidden agenda. Let us therefore attempt one between the EU and the US immigrant experience. Since that experience is much older in the US let’s begin there.

I think that there is little doubt that one of the recognized strengths of the Federation comprising the United States of America is that, despite a lamentable imposition of quotas and restrictions from time to time, it has never completely shut its doors to immigration. The benefits deriving from that policy are innumerable The US has become a nation of nations and has shown the world that it is possible for people of different cultures to live together with a modicum of harmony and tolerance as long as there are some overarching ideals spelled out in its constitution to which most of its inhabitants adhere.

Of course the term immigrant cannot be applied to the native American nor to the slaves brought from Africa as mere property. Many will argue that such being the case, it trumps the argument of the harmony of different cultures and nations. And so it does in a way, but not completely, for one can envision the time, still unthinkable now, when a native American will run for and become president of this nation. Indeed, even a Black president was unthinkable only ten years ago.

Bur let’s come to the EU. Those who misguidedly suggest that poor third world countries ought to start implementing and practicing birth control so that there would be no need to invade prosperous Europe, should perhaps revisit that misguided position, for as the present Pope has suggested in his first social encyclical, it is the privileging of “life style” and luxury at the expense of life itself that has contributed to the present social economic impasse. Selfishness is never self-enlightened even when it looks after one’s self-interest.

To conceive of borders as protection, the way the Italian leghista does as well as all the assorted xenophobes of Europe, is ultimately to have created fortress Europe. An iron armor is what one puts on when one is ready to fight and die, even when it is rationalized as mere protection. And indeed, it may be sweet and glorious to die for one’s country, it is even sweeter and more glorious to live and work for it. In fact, it is divine to put the truth above patriotism and to die for it.  Socrates is exemplary here. He had already proven his physical courage when he fought as a soldier, but if he taught us anything, it is that one can also be a hero in the ethical and spiritual realm. I dare say that in neglecting that exemplary lesson Europe has forgotten its glorious heritage and cultural identity. There is another way of conceiving borders, however. If one conceives them as organically, as porous skin that divides the inside of an organism from the outside while permitting it to live because the organism breathes through them, one arrives at a stance which is much more enlightening because it allows for more inclusion and less exclusion.

Taking to heart the lesson of the US, one can safely say that the EU will be true to its heritage when it becomes not only a hyper-nation of nations, aping that other hyper-nation across the Atlantic, but a nation of immigrants respectful of the inalienable human rights of all its inhabitants, not excluding its non-citizen immigrant aliens. It has in fact no choice, if it wishes to compete on a global scale and survive as a polity on both economic and political spehere.

There are in fact lessons to be gathered from that ex colony named the United States of America which has painfully gone through that kind of experience via a civil war, and as imperfect as it remains, has achieved a modicum of unity in diversity best expressed by the motto under the eagle on the dollar bill: “e pluribus unum.”

So the admonition and the warning to the assorted xenophobes of Europe is this: twenty per cent of one’s population with non Western heritages cannot all be culturally assimilated (as the French continue to delude themselves oblivious of the lessons of Algeria); that kind of assimilation is a neo-colonialism of sort. The European immigrants will need to be integrated, not assimilated. Which ultimately means that their particular cultures, religions and languages need to be protected and respected, and not sacrificed to the idol of modernity and technology. For genuine integration those immigrants will need to swear allegiance to something less ephemeral than euros and soccer games, for a union around a bank and a stadium never a people made.

As I see it, the only hope of forming a union of “e pluribus unum” is an adherence to universal principles and ideals as spelled out in a visionary constitution that enshrines them in a Constitution and declares them inalienable, not given by the state, not to be taken away by any state and accruing to all, even the non-citizens by the mere fact that they are human beings. Purely geographical, ethnic, regional, provincial consideration simply will not do.

Moreover, the best guarantee of issuing a Constitution that is more than a banal commercial treaty and that honors inalienable human rights is to be ever mindful of the Judeo-Christian ethos and its ideals and ideas, for if truth be told, neither Greeks nor Romans has such a universal concept as inalienable rights. Those ideals are the very foundation of Western Civilization and they did not spring ex nihilo in the age of Enlightenment in the head of Locke and Jefferson. The Romans used to declare “corruptio optima pessima,” the rottenness of the best is the worst, by which they meant I suppose that to forget the origins of one’s ideals and cultural identity is to run the risk of becoming worse than the barbarians, for the barbarian destroys what he does not understand, the civilized man on the other hand burns books and people too by destroying what he understands only too well but does not like. In the process he becomes a fascist and a Nazi anew.

The incovenient truth is that Machiavellian paradigms of “real politik” have ill served Western Civilization in the last four hundred years or so, and the sooner we admit it the better it will be for everybody concerned. Power has become the last aphrodisiac of tired old men, barely mitigated by responsibility. New paradigms are urgently needed as new wine in the new wineskins. To fail to do so will sadly result in the very same mistake of Italian unification: having made Europe by aping super-power status, the European (now called “Newropean”) will still have to be made, for in effect by privileging raw military power and Machiavellian tactics, rather than soft cultural power, the cart will have been put before the horse.