Europe these days looks like a dead continent walking — or maybe more like a decadent heir who, having squandered the family fortune, now roams the halls of a dusty old mansion, cursing the greatness of his ancestors.
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A century ago — a long time for Americans; the blink of an eye for Europeans — despite the war that nearly shattered the continent, Europe’s great powers still ruled most of the globe. The old Russian Empire had assumed a sinister and ambitious new guise under the Bolsheviks, and both the British and French empires had grown at the expense of the Turks. The Germans, despite the losses and humiliations of the First World War, weren’t finished. Another stab at global power was soon in the works.
Good Lord, even the Italians were gobbling up bits of other people's real estate, however meager the pickings.
The world had never seen such a concentration of wealth and power, but already the seeds of decline had been sown in the blood-soaked fields of Belgium and France.
The world wars bled Europe of more than just men and treasure: they destroyed confidence — in its culture, in its political institutions, in the very idea of European supremacy.
And Another Thing: I've enjoyed and been greatly informed by Collin McEvedy's European historical atlases for Penguin Books, going all the way back to high school. But one particular volume taught me a lifelong lesson right on the cover. His "New Penguin Atlas of Recent History" says it starts in 1815. "Recent." "1815." When does even a well-read American think that recent history began? Maybe the 1990s? Surely, no further back than the 1960s. For all our commonalities, we are different peoples with different worldviews.
It might be an exaggeration to say that innovation was invented in Europe, but if so, it isn't much of one. I'd also add that if Europe invented innovation, Americans perfected it. But I digress.
Europe's self-confidence was well-earned. The modern world — even the idea of modernity — was born in Europe, beginning with a transformation so profound that historians call it "the miracle." Three centuries ago in England and the Netherlands, something strange happened: for the first time in history, ordinary people began to grow steadily richer. Living standards that had hardly changed in centuries rose. Markets expanded. Innovation flourished. Capital accumulated. Europeans burst forth across the globe with unprecedented reach and in staggering numbers.
Who were these remarkable people?
Norman Davies, who wrote "Europe: A History" almost 30 years ago, took on a nearly 1,400-page task few historians would dare. How does one write a one-volume history of a continent that stretches from Gibraltar to the Urals, and from Neolithic cave paintings to nuclear power stations? Davies gave it a go.
First, Davies had to define what Europe is — a continent? a shifting region? a set of (mostly) shared beliefs? — which was no easy task. "Europe" as we know it, he argued, is a recent concept, compared to the homo sapiens' 45,000-year habitation there. I'd add that Europe shouldn't be confused with "Europe," the agglomeration of formerly sovereign nation-states under the E.U.'s increasingly heavy thumb.
Yet it is largely the Brussels-dominated "Europe" of the elites' imagination and desire that looks increasingly like the walking dead.
Perhaps nothing makes Europe’s decline more undeniable than a report in the Wall Street Journal this week headlined, "The Tech Industry Is Huge—and Europe’s Share of It Is Very Small."
"Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to the likes of Google, Amazon, or Meta," the Journal began. "Apple’s market value is bigger than the entire German stock market."
A few cynics might argue that nobody really needs Google, Amazon, or Meta — and that Apple isn’t the company it was under the late Steve Jobs. I might even be one of those cynics.
But let’s take a deeper look into Europe’s economic malaise — and its real-world consequences for everyday Europeans.
The Journal told the story of German-born tech entrepreneur Thomas Odenwald, who returned to Europe after three decades in Silicon Valley — but almost immediately went back to California. He’d hoped to build a European rival to OpenAI, but found that his "colleagues lacked engineering skills" and that "none of his team had stock options, reducing their incentive to succeed."
"If I look at how quickly things change in Silicon Valley… it’s happening so fast that I don’t think Europe can keep up with that speed," he told the paper. Even dedicated European entrepreneurs end up leaving because, as the Journal put it, "everything moves so slowly" in Europe.
Europe’s postmodern inhibition to move quickly is a recurring theme in the report, which also noted that while the U.S. has created 241 new companies with market capitalizations above $10 billion in the last five decades, Europe has produced just 14. That’s a 17-to-1 advantage for the U.S. — despite our smaller population.
Italian entrepreneur Fabrizio Capobianco is building a Silicon Valley-style “startup factory” in the Alps to find small tech firms — and give them “a one-way ticket” to the real thing in California. “What is different in America is the speed of almost everything,” he told the paper.
One line from the report was especially revealing: "The typical company in the top 10 publicly traded U.S. firms was founded in 1985, while in Europe, it was in 1911."
What that means for Europeans is this: since "the late 1990s, when the digital revolution got under way, the average EU worker produced 95% of what their American counterparts made per hour. Now, the Europeans produce less than 80%."
Europe has few real growth prospects — and even those are eyeing the exits because the continent moves too slowly to compete.
As a result, "The poorest US state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than that of Europe’s top five economies — except for Germany," EuroNews reported earlier this year. "However, Mississippi competes closely with Germany, with a difference of just €1,500."
The only European country where personal wealth compares favorably to the U.S. is tiny Luxembourg. But, as I never tire of reminding people, Luxembourg is basically an international investment bank parked on choice wine country real estate.
The explosion of living standards that began with the 17th-century “miracle” didn’t just peter out — it was squashed by Brussels.
Economic malaise is bad enough, but the continent that gave us two world wars can now barely muster a decent parade.
I covered Europe's military atrophy a few weeks ago ("Europe Just Proved Trump Right About NATO"), so I'll keep this section limited to the highlights.
Last month, British defense chief Admiral Sir Tony Radakin asked European defense ministers “if they could put together a 64,000-strong force to send to [Ukraine] in the event of a peace deal.” Britain offered up to 10,000 personnel — but even then, “defense ministers across Europe said there was ‘no chance’ they could reach that number,” and that even 25,000 would “be a push for a joint effort.”
NATO’s major militaries — I’m looking at you, Britain, France, and Germany — are both atrophied and sclerotic. The European members of the alliance, in aggregate, would wheeze and likely fail at supporting a mere 25,000 troops in Ukraine after the fighting stops.
What the hell would NATO do in an actual war? Aside from keeping America on speed dial, that is.
No offense to the tiny Baltic states, doing the best they can, but the only exception worth noting is Poland. Warsaw launched a rearmament campaign almost as soon as the Russo-Ukraine War lit up, aimed at doubling the size of the Polish Army — and increasing its lethality even more.
Even the Russians, for all of the Kremlin’s nationalistic chest-thumping, don’t fight like they once did. From the surrender of Germany’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Red Army took just 20 months to clear the Wehrmacht out of southern Russia and all of Ukraine — a distance of nearly a thousand miles.
After 39 months of heavy fighting in today’s Ukraine, Russian forces have, at best, made it 130 miles into the country.
Some might argue that Hitler’s forces weren’t receiving Western aid. Fair enough. But Ukraine’s army is no Wehrmacht, and Western support — particularly from the U.S. — has been halting and incomplete. Putin’s military is a pale shadow of his hero Stalin’s.
To be fair, though, at least Putin’s army can and will fight — if poorly.
Would the Germans fight today? The French? The British? I only ask because it might come to that.
And I don't necessarily mean against the Russians.
The greatest threat to the countries of Western Europe comes from within.
And Another Thing: A deep look into the causes of Europe's decline is outside the scope of this week's essay, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give it at least a passing mention. The modern world was invented in Europe, but sadly, so was Leftism. Leftists first seized power in Revolutionary France, leading directly to the guillotine and the Terror. The Left reached new heights of deadly efficiency in Lenin’s Soviet Union, where millions perished in forced labor camps and man-made famines. Germany’s National Socialists took power with genocidal fury in the 1930s, unleashing both the Holocaust and the most savage war ever fought. The idea that Europe had anything worth conserving or protecting seems to have gone up in the smoke of Auschwitz and Sobibor.
Having missed out on the first digital revolution and its productivity increases, Europe brought in millions of Muslims to do the work that keeps the continent's lavish welfare states funded. But many ended up being welfare cases instead.
Instead of repeating the litany of news reports of Europe's slow-motion Islamification, let me show you this brief video clip, courtesy of "Gender Madness" author Oli London:
🏴🇬🇧New Mayor of Sheffield, England inaugurated.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 21, 2025
According to the BBC, Safiya Saeed “made history as the first black woman wearing a hijab to be appointed to the role.”
Her family traveled from her homeland of Somaliland to attend the ceremony. pic.twitter.com/M6w6Po4SKs
Sheffield is just the latest British city with a Muslim mayor, after London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale. Islam's power in Britain belies its numbers — just four million out of a population of 68 million.
"When King Charles III finally issued a statement celebrating Easter," Logan Washburn wrote in April, "he couldn’t keep himself from mentioning Islam. Before he even described the Christian meaning of Easter, he praised Islam and other religions."
Having given up their guns, "knife violence" is up in Britain — including high-profile attacks like the Streatham stabbing, the Reading stabbings, the murder of MP Sir David Amess — largely driven by men who pray five times a day facing Mecca.
Not all of Britain's recent violence is driven by Muslims, of course. Then again, the most notorious example is Axel Rudakubana. He murdered three girls and injured 10 more in a vicious knife attack last year — but the British-born Rwandan Tutsi hardly looks or acts like your typical British teen.
Crime, particularly religiously motivated crime (fewer and fewer in Europe dare call it terrorism), rises as Britain becomes less British. But instead of dealing with the root cause, as an American leftist might say, Britain is considering banning "pointy knives," right out of a Monty Python sketch.
Really: "The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper previously told The Times that a ban on kitchen knives with a pointed end was being considered in a bid to tackle knife crime."
In 2024, Sweden averaged nearly one bombing each day. While the local papers prefer to use euphemisms like "criminal networks," the perpetrators, by and large, aren't exactly fair-haired Viking types. Sweden, like so much of the rest of Europe, imported its crime problem wholesale.
To its credit, the government under Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is considering measures like stripping dual nationals of Swedish citizenship if they've been convicted of a violent crime and making foreign nationals serve their sentences in foreign prisons.
But those are just proposals and, even then, Sweden is more of the exception than the rule.
By 2017, there were Muslim-majority no-go zones in all of France's major cities:
In the heart of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, Grenoble, Avignon, districts here and there have been "privatized" by a mix of drug traffickers, Salafist zealots and Islamic youth gangs. The main victims are women. They are – Muslim and non-Muslim — sexually harassed; some are sexually assaulted. The politicians, as usual, are fully informed of the situation imposed upon women.
Unchecked immigration continues because French elites want it to continue, even though "figures reported by the Paris Police Headquarters, show that 77% of solved rape cases in 2023 were committed by foreign nationals." You can find similar statistics in Spain, Germany, and other European countries.
Inviting foreigners in to rape your women ought to be intolerable, but the attitude of Europe's elites seems to be, "We deserve this, after all we've done."
But the elites don't pay the price — ordinary Europeans do. That's why so-called "far-right" parties like Germany's AfD and France's National Rally have surged since 2015. It's also why Europe's elites have pulled strings and locked doors to keep those parties out of power.
It's why I asked earlier if Europe's armies can fight. In my darker moments, I wonder if those armies — atrophied and sclerotic as they are — might be called upon to drive "migrants" back to their homelands... or turned against Europe's increasingly put-upon and restive Europeans. What might people do when the ballot box is denied them? What might Europe's elites do in response?
Please remember that these are merely dark imaginings and not predictions.
That said, an American watching Europe today feels an apprehension familiar to an observer from the 1930s. Something bad is coming.
Whatever Europe was, it no longer is. What it's becoming, we can only guess at.
Last Thursday: What's a Journalism?
