Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University, reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West:

A “guilt-based moral order” took root in Europe, according to Caldwell, when shame and remorse about both the Holocaust and colonialism threw Europeans into spasms of “moral self-flagellation.” Ashamed of their past persecution and oppression of non-Christian peoples, European elites began to espouse an “ideology of tolerance.” You might suppose that an “ideology of tolerance” would be ethical and principled, but in Caldwell’s telling, it is actually an expression of unprincipled self-disgust.

Supposedly, it is this self-loathing that has led Europeans to see the admission of Muslim immigrants as “a moral duty.” In other passages, Caldwell argues more reasonably that Europe opened its doors to immigration in a fit of absentmindedness, when its own work force had been decimated by war and the reconstruction of a devastated continent required laborers from abroad. So why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience?

The second idea is important to him, it turns out, because it helps him unmask humanitarian universalism. He wants to reveal to the world the ugly reality hidden behind the pretty ideology of universal human rights. His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants. After World War II, Europeans abandoned their traditional intolerance of non-Christian peoples in the name of universalism. Their inability to turn away immigrants who “present themselves in suffering humanity’s name” may look like a moral choice, but it is actually a refusal to defend their own values and traditions.

Read the full review here.