How deep is the decline of the West?

Douglas Murray’s bestseller The Strange Death of Europe claims mass immigration is to blame for the continent’s “suicide”. But it is hubris, not Islam, that is dismantling the liberal world order.

By John Gray

(Photo By Stefan Zweig lamented the loss of a world without borders and passports)

In the last chapter of his autobiography The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European (1942), Stefan Zweig lamented a lost world of freedom:

“Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned… The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich… I, a case-hardened creature of an age of freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every impression of a rubber stamp in my passport a stigma…”