Theodore Dalrymple has a typically superb essay titled, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” on the CATO Unboard Website. If you’d like to place the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006, and The Great Burning Citroen Crisis of 2005 into context, this is a must-read piece:
This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.
The principal motor of Europe
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