A question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago, is becoming ever more prevalent. In recent weeks, there have been anti-migration demonstrations from Spain to Ireland to Poland. There is no indication that they will not become more common in the months ahead.One person who has been sounding the alarm on this is not a populist firebrand or media demagogue but a professor of War Studies at King’s College London.Professor David Betz, a strategist by trade, has done the ideological arithmetic: The chance for civil war or civil war-like conditions in western societies is now above 50 per cent and he calls this a conservative estimate.
I had Professor Betz on the Brussels Signal Podcast a few weeks back and the entire conversation is worth watching.At first glance, these claims might seem alarmist. But Betz’s analysis is not speculation, it is estimation. He built it on decades of academic study into the anatomy of war and is simply looking at a probable sequence of events.What he, along with thinkers like Barbara Walter, has grasped is that the factors once reserved for forecasting civil war in “faraway lands” are now visible across Europe and North America.Contemporary Western societies, to borrow Betz’s phrase, stand in “an explosive configuration” with the roots of this volatility being what the research calls “fractionalisation”.
This phenomenon describes societies that are broken into self-defining blocs, increasingly segmented along ethnic, cultural, or ideological lines.Interestingly, in the West, this condition did not appear out of the blue but is the result of decades of political engineering by an out-of-touch, post-national elite, one that no longer shares its constituents’ concerns or understands them.If in some countries only 34 per cent of European citizens say they have benefited from European Union integration, yet 71 per cent of the elite claim the opposite, one can see an ever-widening gap between the elites and the majority of the population.At the heart of this crisis sits the “failure of the multicultural project”.
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