BRUSSELS — What will it mean to be European 25 years from now? Unlike the United States, whose history as a "melting pot" has given Americans a truly multiethnic character, native Europeans are becoming an endangered species. Europe badly needs immigrants, yet is not culturally prepared to welcome them.
The coming decades will therefore see substantially greater social change in Europe than elsewhere, although the nature of that change is far from clear.
At first glance, much of Europe's current debate is about political and economic integration — about how far its nation states should go in pooling resources and granting sovereign powers to the European Union. But beneath the surface, the real tensions are about immigration and fears that national "cultures" are threatened by the influx of nonnatives, both white and nonwhite.