Is the West Disintegrating?

From Pat Buchanan, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Is the West done?":

On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and bank notes entered into circulation, my column “Say goodbye to the mother continent” contained this pessimistic prognosis: “This European superstate will not endure but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.”

The column described what was already happening.

“Europe is dying. There is not a single nation in all of Europe with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive except Muslim Albania.”

What was predicted 14 years ago has come to pass.

Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015. EU bribes to the Turks to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands, thence into the Balkans and Central Europe, are unlikely to stop the flood.

My prediction that European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies” looks even more probable today.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession, is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU sufficient to satisfy his countrymen, who have been promised a vote on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.

Marine Le Pen's anti-EU National Front ran first in the first round of the 2015 French elections. Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round of the next presidential election in 2017.

Anti-immigrant right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe, as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.

Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations to put up checkpoints and close borders. The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people is being ignored or openly violated.

Then there is the surge of sub-nationalism, as in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and Veneto, where people seek to disconnect from distant capitals that no longer speak for them and reconnect with languages, traditions and cultures that give more meaning to their lives.

Moreover, the migrants entering Europe, predominantly Islamic and Third World, are not assimilating as did the European and largely Christian immigrants to America of a century ago. The enclaves of Asians in Britain, Africans and Arabs around Paris, and Turks in and around Berlin seem to be British, French and German in name only. And some of their children are now heeding the call to jihad against the crusaders invading Muslim lands.

If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015, the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it, the EU...

Still more.