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Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe George Friedman Doubleday, 2015
George Friedman is the founder and CEO of Stratfor, "the world's leading private intelligence company." As a man of extensive travel and learning, his background enables him to write a book that the general reader will find both informative and stimulating. The more discriminating reader is likely, however, to find the book limited. It is regrettable to say it, but Flashpoints comes across as an extended essay that features some awfully good writing by a man who knows quite a lot and is highly accomplished, but who relies too exclusively on his own wisdom and knowledge. The book has unquestionable strengths, but these are mixed with contradictions, a scattering of emphases, overstated aphorisms, unquestioned premises, and crucial omissions. There are no endnotes, index or bibliography, and their absence makes it clear that Friedman thinks of the book as one for a general audience and not as a scholarly work. Where Friedman is best is in his ability to relate his intimate knowledge of geography to an account of a region or country's history.
It is surprising, in light of the book's subtitle pointing to an "emerging crisis in Europe," that Friedman has only the most limited grasp of the implications of the long-continuing and accelerating demographic invasion of Europe from the Third World. The influx threatens so drastic a recasting of the European population that it has caused the many writers who do see the cultural and demographic implications to warn of an impending "death of the West." To Friedman, however, the problem lies not the obliteration of Europe as we have known it, but in the prospect that "the Right will exploit anti-immigrant feelings." The damage, to him, comes from those who want to retain Europe's identity.
We will start by recapping Friedman's main themes, and will go from there into a discussion of several issues suggested by the text. The book's first two parts provide historical context that lays a foundation for the third part, which discusses Europe's current plight, which Friedman sees as consisting mainly of its reverting, at least potentially, to the contentious cauldron that Europe has been for much of its history. He says this about that plight:
Europe's history...