For decades, the debate in Denmark around problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully. If not in the first generation, then the second. For much of this time, I thought that was a reasonable thesis. But reality has proved it wrong.
If literally every country in Europe has struggled in the same ways, and for decades on end, to produce the fabled "successful integration", it's not a compelling explanation that it's just because the Danes, Swedes, Norweigans, Germans, French, Brits, or Belgians just didn't try hard enough. It's that the mission, on the grand and statistical scale, was impossible in many cases.
As Thomas Sowell tells us, this is because there are no solutions to intractable, hard problems like cultural integration between wildly different ways of living. Only trade offs. Many of which are unfavorable to all parties.
But by the same token, just because the overall project of integrating many of the most divergent cultures from mass immigrations has failed, there are many individual cases of great success. Much of the Danish press, for example, has for years propped up the hope of broad integration success by sharing hopeful, heartwarming stories of highly successful integration. And you love to see it.
Heartwarming anecdotes don't settle trade offs, though. They don't prove a solution or offer a conclusion either.
I think the conclusion at this point is clear. First, cultural integration, let alone assimilation, is incredibly difficult. The more divergent the cultures, the more difficult the integration. And for some combinations, it's outright impossible.
Second, the compromise of multiculturalism has been an abject failure in Europe. Allowing parallel cultures to underpin parallel societies is poison for the national unity and trust.
Which brings us to another bad social thesis from the last thirty-some years: That national unity, character, and belonging not only isn't important, but actively harmful. That national pride in history, traditions, and culture is primarily an engine of bigotry.
What a tragic thesis with catastrophic consequences.
But at this point, there's a lot of political capital invested into all these bad ideas. In sticking with the tired blame game. Thinking that what hasn't worked for fifty years will surely start working if we give it five more.
Now, I actually have a nostalgic appreciation for the beautiful ideals behind such hope for humanity, but I also think that at this point it is as delusional as it is dangerous.
And I think it's directly responsible for the rise of so-called populist movements all over Europe. They're directly downstream from the original theses of success in cultural integration going through just-try-harder efforts as well as the multicultural compromise. A pair of ideas that had buy-in across much of the European board until reality simply became too intolerable for too many who had to live with the consequences.
Such widespread realization doesn't automatically correct the course of a societal ship that's been sailing in the wrong direction for decades, of course. The playbook that took DEI and wokeness to blitzkrieg success in the States, by labeling any dissent to those ideologies racist or bigoted, have also worked to hold the line on the question of mass immigration in Europe until very recently.
But I think the line is breaking in Europe, just as it recently did in America. The old accusations have finally lost their power from years of excessive use, and suppressing the reality that many people can see with their own eyes is getting harder.
I completely understand why that makes people anxious, though. History is full of examples of combative nationalism leading us to dark edges. And, especially in Germany, I can understand the historical hesitation when there's even a hint of something that sounds like what they heard in the 30s.
But you can hold both considerations in your head at the same time without losing your wits. Mass immigration to Europe has been a failure, and the old thesis of naive hope has to get replaced by a new strategy that deals with reality. AND that not all proposed fixes by those who diagnosed the situation early are either sound or palatable.
World history is full of people who've had the correct diagnosis but a terrible prescription. And I think it's fair to say that it's not even obvious what the right prescription is at this point!
Vibrant, strong societies surely benefit from some degree of immigration. Especially from culturally-compatible regions based on national and economic benefit. But whatever the specific trade-offs taken from here, it seems clear that for much of Europe, they're going to look radically different than they've done in the past three decades or so.
Best get started then.
David Heinemeir Hansson
January 20, 2025
