For Europe, generosity to turn into nightmare?

"(The book) has moments of appalling power and occasionally a terrible beauty. ... It confronts the white West with dreads from its deep unconscious. It leaves a reader to ponder a haunting, 'What if?'" -- Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal, 1975

WASHINGTON -- In 1973, a prominent French writer, Jean Raspail, set forth on the French literary stage a novel that managed to fascinate even as it shocked the West.

"The Camp of the Saints" received praise from most of its reviewers. To them, apparently, this picture of a refugee fleet, appropriately called "The Last Chance Armada," which had sailed several seas bringing no-chancers-at-all(DESPERATE IMMIGRANTS?) from faraway India to the luxurious southern borders of Europe, was not so horrifying as it was to the average Frenchman or Spaniard.

When the displaced Indians in the book evacuated the ships and started walking inland, with every indication of intending to stay -- Biarritz is OURS -- all Europe was stunned; it saw itself being taken over by the brown and black peoples of the irredeemable south.

Time magazine reviewed the book with particularly clear thinking: "(The novel) shrewdly exploits a dilemma that the world may well face: the moment when the burgeoning Third World rises from misery and forces the West to share more of its resources."

And now, in the year 2015, just as we thought Europe had bound itself into one solid Western unity (despite obvious problems), is this frightening fictional saga coming to pass?

It seems that every other day, we hear of torrents of lost or displaced human beings searching the world for work, for food, for safety. The watery passages across the Mediterranean Sea have become the new "roads to Damascus." Europe's best thinkers search for answers, but find only the dilemma: Either give up your own country and lose your way or life, or destroy the interlopers and lose your morals.

On one day this early spring, some 900 boat people drowned in the worst Mediterranean shipwreck in living memory as their ship struggled and then sank attempting to land on European shores. Two weeks later, about 4,800 migrants were "plucked from boats off the coast of Libya over the weekend," according to Reuters. The private Migrant Offshore Aid Station reported on Twitter that it had saved 369 migrants, mostly from Eritrea, from "a single overcrowded wooden boat."

European Union officials, horrified by what these numbers could mean to a Europe already unable to integrate hordes of Third World foreigners seeking refuge on the continent, now were being faced, as never before, with the task of attempting to save as many at sea as they possibly could.

Ideas are already being brought forward at E.U. meetings as to how to deal with the refugee tsunami that many see coming. Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann says the E.U should set up a quota system for member states to take a number of the displaced. This would relieve the pressure on Italy, Greece and Malta.

But Austria has strong opposition from other E.U. states like Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban said recently that Hungary did not want any refugees at all.

The newest factor in the equation is unquestionably the formation of the Islamic State or ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and al-Qaida from Libya to the Yemeni coasts -- and the sobering threats they pose to the ordinary person who only wants to live an ordinary life. But environmental factors, other violent conflicts and increasing food shortages also bedevil the region.

The media coverage of Yemen, for instance, is one of constant warfare among tribes like the Houthis and movements like al-Qaida. But it is arguable that far more important to that impoverished country is that it has water for only another 25 years! Many low-lying countries like Bangladesh or the Pacific islands will soon be threatened by rising waters. Indeed, the United Nations has already been posing the question of which countries may be expected to take in dispossessed peoples from countries washed out of existence.

A person studying these problems eventually comes to the most difficult question of all: Is it possible that these large groups of migrants could actually become so overwhelming that they could change the historic culture of the countries they choose to live in?

It seems unlikely now, except for the fact that some very specific refugees, particularly religious extremists, already are talking among themselves about such an eventuality. And there we face the single most dangerous threat to European heritage today.

Previously:
• 04/29/15: Both sides must work to end our season of killing
• 04/01/15: Our next president should be a homebody
• 03/04/15: Japan's sun poised to rise on world stage
• 01/21/15: Rumors of a new Cold War have real roots in history
• 01/21/15: It's time to be practical about multiculturalism
• 01/07/15: Tension mounts against Muslim immigration in the West

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Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years.