Whether the debate is occasioned by a polemical book or a movie like last year’s “Civil War,” I consistently take the negative on the question of whether the United States is headed for a genuine civil war.
In those debates it’s usually liberals warning that populism or Trumpism is steering the United States toward the abyss. But with European politics the pattern is different: In France and Britain and among American observers of the continent, a preoccupation with looming civil war tends to be more common among conservatives.
For years, figures associated with the French right and French military have warned of an impending civil conflict driven by the country’s failure to assimilate immigrants from the Muslim world. (The great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” imagines this war being averted by the sudden conversion of French elites to Islam.) Lately there has been a similar discussion around Britain touched off by an essay by the military historian David Betz that argues that multicultural Britain is in danger of tearing itself apart and was lately taken up by the political strategist, Brexit-campaign architect and former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings in an essay warning that British elites are increasingly fearful of organized violence from nativists and radicalized immigrants alike.
When I’ve written skeptically about scenarios for an American civil war, I’ve tended to stress several realities: the absence of a clear geographical division between our contending factions; the diminishment, not exacerbation, of racial and ethnic polarization in the Trump era; the fact that we’re rich and aging and comfortable, not poor and young and desperate, giving even groups that hate each other a stake in the system and elites strong reasons to sustain it; the absence of enthusiasm for organized communal violence, as opposed to lone-wolf forays.
Does the European landscape look different? On some fronts, maybe. Tensions between natives and new arrivals are common on both sides of the Atlantic, but ethnic and religious differences arguably loom larger in Europe than they do in the United States: There is more intense cultural separatism in immigrant communities in suburban Paris or Marseilles than in Los Angeles or Chicago, more simmering discontent that easily turns to riots.
At the same time, British and French elites have been more successful than American elites at keeping populist forces out of power, but their tools — not just the exclusion of populists from government but also an increasingly authoritarian throttling of free speech — have markedly diminished their own legitimacy among discontented natives. This means that neither underassimilated immigrants nor working-class white residents feel especially invested in the system, making multiple forms of political violence more plausible: pitting immigrant or native rebels against the government or pitting immigrants against natives with the government trying to suppress the conflict or, finally, pitting different immigrant groups against one another. (English cities have already played host to bursts of Muslim-Hindu violence.)
Then, too, Western Europe’s economies have grown more sluggishly than America’s for the past decade, reducing ordinary people’s stake in the current order and encouraging alienation and resistance. Finally there are arguably geographic concentrations of discontent — in the north of England or in immigrant-dominated cities that Betz warns could become ungovernable — that don’t exist in quite the same way in the United States.
All of this adds up, I would say, to a useful corrective to the progressive tendency to regard America in the Trump era as a great outlier, uniquely divided and deranged and threatened by factional strife, while liberal politics continues more or less as usual among our respectable and stable European allies. Not so: There are clearly ways in which Europe’s problems and divides are deeper than ours, with economic and demographic trends that portend darker possibilities, and the establishment attempt to keep populist forces at bay may end up remembered as accelerating liberal Europe’s downfall.
Yet many of the reasons to doubt the imminence of civil war in America still apply to Western Europe. The continent is more stagnant than the United States but still rich and comfortable and aged, there’s enthusiasm for rioting but rather less for organized violence, and for all the palpable disillusionment it is hard to glimpse any elite faction yet emerging — right or left, nativist or Islamo-Gauchiste — that would see violent revolution as an obvious means to its ambitions.
Meanwhile, there are distinctive European conditions that make civil war less likely there than in the United States: Smaller nations with more centralized political systems generally find it easier to police dissent, and there’s no Second Amendment or American-style gun culture to challenge the European state’s monopoly on force.
Ultimately I agree with the British writer Aris Roussinos, a pessimist but not a catastrophist, when he writes that the most likely near-future scenarios involve increasing “outbursts of violent disorder” but not the kind of collapse of central government authority, complete with ethnic cleansing and refugee flows, that the language of “civil war” implies.
And that imprecision matters: As I suggested before, if you use a civil-war framing to describe a world where rioting is more commonplace and assassination attempts and random forms of terrorism make a comeback, you’re describing realities that big, diverse societies often have to live with, using terms that misleadingly or hysterically evoke Antietam or Guernica.
I don’t think America in the 1960s and 1970s experienced a civil war, even though those were certainly chaotic decades. I don’t think modern France, with its long tradition of student protests and urban riots, has existed in a perpetual state of civil war. And as we face a future that’s clearly more destabilized than the post-Cold War era, it still behooves us to be realistic about the most plausible scenarios: We are still far more likely to be navigating a more chaotic landscape together as fellow citizens than shooting at one another across a sectional divide.
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