After WWII, there was a massive reshuffling of ethnic groups throughout Europe. In a way, Hitler’s belief that racial “purity” was a good thing won the day. Everybody – including Jews – was more or less stuffed into a specific geographic area that was made as ethnically homogeneous as possible.
Europe stuck to this arrangement for decades, and the result was a lasting peace that was only broken in the areas where ethnic groups were not divided by national borders.
Now it seems that Europeans have decided they are ready to ditch the post-war state of affairs and venture into a greater ethnic diversity. But the historical memory of the war is still strong. Europeans are trying to retain many of the features of the post-war ethnic homogeneity even as they invite a growing number of immigrants.
The result is a creation of “states within states”, ethnic enclaves of disaffected, confused immigrants who are distrusted by the locals and feel alienated from both the old and the new countries. This is not A recipe for producing high crime rates. It’s THE recipe.
Half-measures only produce monstrosity. If you want ethnic variety, you need to embrace it completely and not try to control it through measures that belong back in 1948. There is a great example of the US and Canada where everybody is from someplace else but ethnic ghettos are diminishing, not growing.
Europeans are not managing to make a definitive choice between their post-war hangups and a desire to catch up with North America. Both the American and the post-war European models work. What doesn’t work is a clunky, artificial hybrid of the two. The hybrid model Europe is creating right now is, tragically, likely to lead back to some of the shameful experiences of the pre-1948 Europe.
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