Is Civil War Coming to Europe?

Opinion|Is Civil War Coming to Europe?

Whether the debate is occasioned by a polemical book or a movie like last year’s “Civil War,” I consistently take the negative on the question of whether the United States is headed for a genuine civil war.

In those debates it’s usually liberals warning that populism or Trumpism is steering the United States toward the abyss. But with European politics the pattern is different: In France and Britain, and among American observers of the continent, a preoccupation with looming civil war tends to be more common among conservatives.

For years, figures associated with the French right and French military have warned of an impending civil conflict driven by the country’s failure to assimilate immigrants from the Muslim world. (The great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” famously imagines this war being averted by the sudden conversion of French elites to Islam.) Lately there has been a similar discussion around Britain touched off by an essay by the military historian David Betz that argues that multicultural Britain is in danger of tearing itself apart, and lately taken up by the political strategist, Brexit-campaign architect and former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings in an essay warning that British elites are increasingly fearful of organized violence from nativists and radicalized immigrants alike.

When I’ve written skeptically about scenarios for an American civil war, I’ve tended to stress several realities: the absence of a clear geographical division between our contending factions; the diminishment, not exacerbation, of racial and ethnic polarization in the Trump era; the fact that we’re rich and aging and comfortable, not poor and young and desperate, giving even groups that hate each other a stake in the system and elites strong reasons to sustain it; the absence of enthusiasm for organized communal violence as opposed to lone-wolf forays.

Does the European landscape look different? On some fronts, maybe. Tensions between natives and new arrivals are common on both sides of the Atlantic, but ethnic and religious differences arguably loom larger in Europe than they do in the United States: There is more intense cultural separatism in immigrant communities in suburban Paris or Marseilles than in Los Angeles or Chicago, more simmering discontent that easily turns to riots.

At the same time, British and French elites have been more successful than American elites at keeping populist forces out of power, but their tools — not just the exclusion of populists from government, but an increasingly authoritarian throttling of free speech — have markedly diminished their own legitimacy among discontented natives. This means that neither under-assimilated immigrants nor working-class whites feel especially invested in the system, making multiple forms of political violence more plausible: pitting immigrant or native rebels against the government, or pitting immigrants against natives with the government trying to suppress the conflict, or, finally, pitting different immigrant groups against one another. (English cities have already played host to bursts of Muslim-Hindu violence.)