Premise: A course on the intellectual history and nachleben of the notion of a “European decline”…

Trigger warning

Involves critical readings of literature and politics of European alt-right and New Right movements in Europe

Reading List

Ur-Texts

Some history

The Post Cold-War Era

  • Fukuyama 1992, The End of History and the Last Man — Yay, the Cold War is over. Western liberal democratic ideals for the win! (as a counterpoint to what follows…)
  • Barber 1995, Jihad versus McWorld. “No, no Fukuyama: Tribal forces are going to rebel against your globalized neoliberal order.”
  • Huntington 1996, The Clash of Civilizations. “No, no Fukuyama: Not every ethno-pan-national bloc is compatible with western values.” There’s a vast critical literature for students to select from to create in class presentations/debates.

Political motivators

(probably too much to assign all of these, so just have students pick one and discuss in class. Bonus points if they can use their language requirement pre-reqs to read in the original)

Demographic shifts and population decline

  • Raspail 1973, Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints) — the classic dystopian migrant crisis/failure of the western ideals narrative
  • James 1992, The Children of Men — what does a country look like when it doesn’t have any more children
  • Houellebecq 2015, Soumission (Submission) — like all Houllebecq novels, deliciously depressing misanthropy. Notice how the protagonist’s escape route from Paris travels echoes the Camp of Saints, involves a stop at the shrine of Charles Martel, etc.
    • This (or Sarrazin’s book, vide supra) could also be used as a launching point into critical discussions of Eurabia conspiracy theories, and tracing out how these ideas spread through social media.

A review by Claude Sonnet 4.6

(included as an experiment for the author and the reader.)

Prompt: Be a helpful critical editor. Take a look at the blog post on "fading europa" and identify other resoures that should be included.

Critical omissions

  • Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement (2011) — Camus coined the phrase “The Great Replacement,” which became the defining slogan of contemporary European and American far-right movements, directly cited in multiple mass-shooting manifestos (Christchurch 2019, Buffalo 2022). The course mentions Eurabia conspiracy theories but omits the book that generated the most real-world violence. Essential.

  • James Burnham, Suicide of the West (1964). — A clear precursor to Buchanan, Sarrazin, and Zemmour — Burnham’s thesis that Western liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction is the direct ancestor of the “Political motivators” section, and predates the post-Cold War frame entirely.

  • Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (2017). — A major, widely-read contemporary entry in this genre — British perspective on immigration, identity, and the failure of multiculturalism. Rounds out the national perspectives alongside Buchanan (US), Sarrazin (DE), and Zemmour (FR) with a UK voice.

  • Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite (GRECE). — The French New Right intellectual tradition is entirely absent. De Benoist’s Vu de droite (1977) and related writings are foundational to the European New Right referenced in the trigger warning. Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism (1998) is also relevant. These texts bridge between Spengler and the contemporary political motivators.

  • Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) — As an even earlier ur-text — Spengler is explicitly in dialogue with Gibbon. Worth a brief note in the Ur-Texts section to show the longer genealogy of decline narratives.

Structural suggestions

Add countervailing scholarly analysis

The course currently lacks academic work that contextualizes the decline narrative from a non-polemical standpoint. Consider:

  • Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (2007) — sociological vocabulary for analyzing these movements
  • Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger (2017) — argues the “decline” narrative misdiagnoses a global crisis of modernity
  • Tony Judt, Postwar (2005) — historical grounding for what actually happened in post-WWII Europe

Add a section on media and radicalization pathways

The post notes these ideas spread on social media but offers no readings on how. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies (2017) traces the online culture that carried these ideas into the mainstream and would pair well with the Eurabia/Houellebecq discussion.

Expand the Children of Men film note

Director Alfonso Cuarón’s deliberate shift from P.D. James’s novel toward migration as the central theme is an interesting authorial decision worth noting explicitly — it makes the film almost a separate argument from the book.