Tsar Nicholas I coined the term "the Sick Man of Europe," describing Turkey and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Nicholas made this observation in 1853, when the Great Powers of Europe were circling the Ottoman Empire like buzzards overhead, picking pieces of flesh off the Ottoman carcass.
It wasn't until the Versailles Treaty in 1919, sixty years later, that the coup de grâce to an empire that had once struck fear in the hearts of Western Europeans was finally delivered.
Today, "the Sick Man of Europe" is most of the continent, as the same illnesses that afflicted the Ottoman Empire are now ravaging nations from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Empire faced "military decline, internal instability, economic difficulties," and internal revolts by minorities. Those same powers that took advantage of Turkey's "sickness" are now suffering from the same maladies.
England, France, and Germany are today faltering and in rapid decline. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that those governments are running out of other people's money to spend. In a desperate attempt to find more tax dollars, European governments opened the doors to a couple of million illegal aliens, hoping the influx of cheap labor would lead to an economic renaissance.
That has been an unmitigated disaster is now hastening the end of the idea of "Europe."
Too many immigrants are arriving too quickly, without sufficient diversity, language fluency, skills, or familiarity with the customs and culture of their host nations. They often enter with separatist religious and cultural values antithetical to the very place they seek refuge.
Yet, there is no European plan of civic education to assimilate immigrants and teach them the rules, laws, and culture of their hosts.
It is then no surprise that what follows is ghettoization, resentment, and loud attacks on the very nation in which they seek sanctuary, denouncing it as decadent and godless.
In the past, Europe’s anemic military budgets, reliance on borrowed money, socialism, and a once-strong economy papered over these existential challenges of illegal immigration.
Or, as the left-wing former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, once inanely said of massive illegal influxes into Europe, “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”).
Merkel's famous confrontation in 2015 with a sobbing Palestinian girl who didn't understand why she was being deported reveals the push-pull forces in Europe that are now overwhelming much of the continent.
The girl sobbed, “I have goals like anyone else. I want to study like them ... it’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can’t myself.”
Merkel's realpolitik response went viral. She told the girl that “politics is sometimes hard. You’re right in front of me now and you’re an extremely nice person. But you also know in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are thousands and thousands and if we were to say you can all come ... we just can’t manage it.”
This was Europe's first refugee crisis. Between 2010 and 2020, the refugee population exploded from 2.1 million to 2.7 million. After a brief respite as anti-immigrant political parties gained traction and the open borders tide ebbed, the momentum is once again on the side of untrammeled illegal immigration. And Europeans are having a hard time finding places to put the newcomers.
In Great Britain, the left-wing government of the Labor Party's Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, is in the midst of a war with British citizens who are trying to protect their daughters from illegal immigrant predators.
Beginning in 2018, the illegal aliens began showing up in small boats, making the perilous crossing from France to avoid traditional border controls and reach the UK, with its liberal asylum policies. What started as a manageable trickle of refugees has become a tidal wave as more than 125,000 refugees have floated onto British shores since 2022.
British law requires that the government find housing for the refugees. The solution conceived by the UK government was to spread the illegals out across the country, placing them in hotels in smaller cities.
The government put 32,000 asylum seekers in 210 hotels across England. One of those hotels is in Epping, a small city of 135,000. At the beginning of August, I wrote about the origins of the Epping protests.
The troubles began in early July when Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, a 38-year-old Ethiopian, arrived “informally on a boat” and claimed asylum in Britain. The migrant propositioned and tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl in a restaurant close to the hotel. Kebatu was charged on July 17 with “three counts of sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity, and one count of harassment without violence."
Protests by British mothers began in Epping and quickly spread across the country. The father of the 14-year old girl who was accosted by the migrant wrote a letter to the town council pleading to get rid of the threat to their children.
“I just want the hotel to be moved, not only off our streets, but away from making any other family feel how we’re feeling right now,” the 14-year-old’s father said in the letter to the town council. “It’s not fair that the Government are putting our children and grandchildren at risk, even their own.”
The Epping protests spread across the country. The Starmer government accused the protesters of being heartless racists for refusing to house the migrants.
The Epping council sued and won a temporary injunction against the hotel. The victory was short-lived. The Home Office sued, and the highest court in the land ruled against the mothers.
The high court proclaimed that the rights of illegal aliens supersede those of British citizens. Yes, really.
Nigel Farage, UK Reform Party leader, said: “The Government has used the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) against the people of Epping. Illegal migrants have more rights than the British people under Starmer.”
They said that Yvette Cooper had a duty as Home Secretary to prevent asylum seekers from being made destitute under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and so they should continue to live at the Bell Hotel.
They claimed this responsibility trumped the council’s powers to close the hotel, which has been at the centre of protests in recent weeks after an asylum seeker living there was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
The judge ruled that illegal immigrants must remain in the Bell Hotel in Epping because removing them would reward parents for protesting.
— Connor Tomlinson (@Con_Tomlinson) August 29, 2025
The purpose of the law in Britain is to force you to battery-farm foreign criminals at your expense, and to criminalise any complaints about… https://t.co/Mm02XQsitQ pic.twitter.com/wBwnXUp81R
“If an outbreak of protests enhances the case for a planning injunction, this runs the risk of acting as an impetus or incentive for further protests, some of which may be disorderly, around asylum accommodation,” the judges said.
The mindset that led to this decision is part of the "new" Great Britain. Screw the Magna Carta and other talismans of traditional British law. If you oppose the government's migrant policy on nationalistic grounds, you're a "terrorist."
"Concern about mass migration is a 'terrorist ideology' that requires intervention by the Government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme," according to Home Office documents.
This includes the belief that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups," according to a guide for staff taking the "anti-radicalism" program.
Mass arrests are possible in the near future under Britain's expanded government powers against protests it disagrees with.
The Epping court decision has only inflamed opinion, leading to bigger protests, which include "hooligans" just wanting to start trouble. The protests are likely to spread to other countries as Europe's second migrant crisis in the last decade threatens to overwhelm governments and lead to crackdowns on protests.
The "Sick Man of Europe" can now describe most of the continent. The result will probably be the same thing that happened to the Ottomans in 1918.
