Book review: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Mass immigration into Europe in the past 50 years has profoundly changed the continent and is likely to change it even more over the next half-century," said David Goodhart in the Observer. Yet it is a subject "so immersed in fear and wishful thinking" that it's hard to discuss it clearly at all.

In his bracing new polemic, the US journalist Christopher Caldwell asks direct questions that some may find shocking: "Can you have the same Europe with different people in it? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people wanted it? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?"

Like many right-wing Americans, Caldwell thinks that Europe is decadent and weak, said Martin Woollacott in the Guardian; he is prone to lurid fantasies about it being overrun by militant Muslims. Where he is absolutely right, though, is in his analysis of immigration as "an inherently unstable and dysfunctional system".

It was encouraged "by elites who took a ludicrously short-sighted view of its costs and consequences". The idea was to prop up declining industries and, later, to staff services such as health and transport, the full cost of which our societies refused and still continue to refuse to pay. Since established migrants soon either got better jobs or chose to depend on the welfare state, this arrangement could be maintained "only by a constant influx of new migrants".

No one doubts that migration is a big issue, said Mark Mazower in the FT. "But if you want a good guide to the debate, this is not your book: it is too unhinged, too doggedly provocative, for that." Caldwell paints a depressingly familiar picture of fast-breeding immigrants driving out the natives. In other words, he thinks that Enoch Powell was "more right than wrong".

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, 376pp (Allen Lane, £14.99) The Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl p&p) ·