My virility doesn't matter - the EU's does
By Mark Steyn

A couple of months ago, on our Letters page, Mr Tony Roberts of Cheltenham responded to my column on the Pope's death as follows: "Presumably Mr Steyn has never had casual sex, or, if he has, maybe his sensitivity to the 'splendour of truth' prevented him from deriving any pleasure from the experience."

I resisted the urge to respond, ... but, had I run into Mr Roberts in the Cheltenham singles bar, I would have endeavoured to explain that what's at issue is not which of us is getting more and better casual sex but whether it's an appropriate organising principle for society. Or at any rate whether a cult of non-procreative self-gratification is, as the eco-crazies like to say, "sustainable".

I was reminded of our Gloucestershire lad by some remarks Frank Field made at a Centre for Policy Studies seminar last week. The subject under debate was poverty and social disintegration, and pondering the collapse of civility in modern Britain Mr Field gave seven reasons. Number One, he said, was the decline of religion.

At that point, many Britons will simply have tuned out for the remaining six, and the more disapproving ones will be speculating darkly on whether, like yours truly and other uptight squares, he has "casual sex" issues. Religion is all but irrelevant to public discussion in the United Kingdom, and you'd have to search hard for an Anglican churchman prepared to argue in public, as Mr Field does, that material poverty derives from moral poverty.

But the point is: he's not wrong. There aren't many examples of successful post-religious societies. And, if one casts around the world today, one notices the two powers with the worst prospects are the ones most advanced in their post-religiosity. Russia will never recover from seven decades of Communism: its sickly menfolk have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis; its population shrinks by 100 every hour, and by 0.4 per cent every year, a rate certain to escalate as the smarter folks figure it's better to emigrate than get sucked down in the demographic death spiral.

And then, of course, there's the European Union. These last couple of weeks, Tony Blair has been giving off an even stronger whiff than usual of a man trembling on the brink of his rendezvous with destiny: why, he's now the EU's self-proclaimed reformer, the man who'll save the continent from a dreary obsolescent cadre of rigid Euro-apparatchiks. "We have to renew," he says. "And we can. But only if we remarry the European ideals we believe in with the modern world we live in."

But, reading the stirring Blairite blather alongside the gloomy news from Russia, it all begins to sound rather familiar. No doubt, in another week or two, the Prime Minister may even have invented some Euro-buzzwords to serve as equivalents to perestroika and glasnost. Mr Blair is attempting the same trick Gorbachev tried - "remarrying" (an odd choice of word) an inflexible ideology with reality. It's unlikely to be any more successful with the EU than with the Soviet Union.

Every day you get ever more poignant glimpses of the Euro-future, such as it is. In East Germany, whose rural communities are dying, village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructure expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand.

There's simply no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe's, but the early indications are that it's going to be expensive: environmentally speaking, it's a question of sustainable lack of growth. Listen to the European political class defend the status quo on the Common Agricultural Policy, and then tell yourself these are the folks you want tackling the real crises just around the corner.

For Britain and Ireland, two relatively dynamic provinces of a moribund continent, there are only two options: share the pain and expense and societal upheaval, or decide that you're not that "European" after all and begin the process of detachment or at least semi-detachment. ...

A political entity hostile to the three principal building blocks of functioning societies - religion, family and wealth creation - was never a likely bet for the long term. Contemplating the deathbed demographics in the EU and wondering what can be done to reverse it, a correspondent of mine, Jim Ellinthorpe, suggests that President Bush give regular speeches mocking the virility of European males. This is where we came in, with Mr Roberts' mockery of my performance. Two can play at geopolitical manhood-disparagement, but right now it's the European side having trouble with "sustainable growth".