Ferguson speech at the AEI. The Oxford and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson gave a speech a couple of weeks ago at the American Enterprise Institute titled "The End of Europe?". Andrew Sullivan was there and wrote about it at his blog. The transcript is up at the AEI website and it worth reading for anyone interested in the state of the European Union and its place in the world.

Ferguson describes Europe as an "impire": "a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes--when the energies come from outside into that entity." The European Union, he argues, is an entity on the brink of decline and perhaps ultimately even of dissolution."

The solution that he offers is immigration and expansion. Only that way will the EU be able to rejuvenate its shrinking and aging population. But he recognises that there is resistance from within the EU to the sort of expansion that Ferguson feels is necessary, i.e. an expansion that will have to include large numbers of Eastern European peoples, and that resistance is largely a cultural bias: "that Europe is fundamentally a Christian entity; that the European Union is a kind of latter day secular version of Christendom". But as he says, that distinction is becoming less and less and relevant: "The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society."

I am not sure if I agree with Ferguson's thesis, but it is an interesting argument that needs to be considered alongside those of Robert Kagan and Charles Kupchan, each of who have a different interpretation of Europe and its relationship with the United States and the rest of the world.