One of our surprises guests is Dave Schuler. Click here to read his guest post!

Dave Schuler is one of the bloggers we approached asking whether he would like to write a guest post for this special day and week. He quickly agreed - thank you Dave - and here is his post, the first of the guests posts of the week:

I’m grateful to Michael for extending me this opportunity to address his readership. Right off the bat I’d like to congratulate Michael on his splendid new digs at PoliGazette and tell him that sometime today I plan on adding it to my deliberately select blogroll. That’s about as much an honor as it’s within my meagre power to convey.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with me or my work, my name is Dave Schuler, my home base is The Glittering Eye where I’ve been posting on topics that interest me from American foreign policy and politics to dogs to cooking and opera since March of 2004. Recently a study by a scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University listed The Glittering Eye as #42 of 100 blogs that can be read to identify “an outbreak”, i.e. what’s going on.

I’m also an associate blogger at Dean’s World, Outside the Beltway, and Winds of Change.

Michael has characterized himself as center-right or rightwing by Dutch standards which, when you’ve performed the tricky conversion between European and American political standards, places him somewhere in the center of American political thought—an unusual position for a European. He’s distinguished himself by creating quite a following for himself and his blog in quite a short time with a rather unusual niche: he’s a continental European commenting on American politics and foreign policy in a reasonable and understanding way.

In my guest post I think I’ll turn the tables a bit on Michael by commenting on European politics and policies. I hope I can manage being as reasonable and understanding as Michael is when writing about us.

Quite a long time ago I lived and worked briefly in a medium-sized town in northwest Germany, one of a fairly small number of foreigners there. We were two Yanks, two Brits, an Aussie, one Dutch, and one Angolan. During that period I was fortunate enough to visit France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all on a work-related basis. Since that time I’ve also travelled a bit in the United Kingdom, in England, Cornwall and the southwest, Wales, and Scotland. I much prefer going into the corners where Americans and foreigners, generally, are rarely seen and getting the flavor of the countries and their people.

Europe is in the process of undergoing an enormous change. Historically, all of Europe’s countries, some of which like Germany and Italy are actually quite young as coherent states, have defined themselves ethnically. In England and Scotland there are many places in which you can still tell where a person is from by how he or she or speaks and looks. This has actually thrown people off in my travels. Once when I was in Cornwall a local came up to me and asked for direction. We were both nonplussed. When I looked closely at him I realized that my coloring and body type were much like his—I looked rather like a very large Cornishman although my American accent gave me away.

The establishment and growing power of the European Union has meant that Europeans are moving and working within Europe to a greater degree than at any other time in history. Eastern Europeans are moving to Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The Plombier polonais, the Polish plumber, even became part of the EU referendum debate in France in 2005. This has created more ethnic, religious, and political diversity than Europeans have been accustomed to.

But Europe’s changing diversity doesn’t stop there. The UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and Italy have all experienced immigration from farther afield, in some cases from their erstwhile colonies in Africa and Asia, in some cases, e.g. Germany, with their trading partners. It’s no longer a case of Protestant northern Europe adjusting to Catholic eastern Europe; now it’s post-Christian Europe dealing with Muslim immigrants. By the way, what I just called “post-Christian” Europe isn’t brand new. In that long ago when I worked in Germany I was younger than the rest of those attending Mass in the cathedral (one of Germany’s oldest) in that medium-sized German town by at least forty years and the only man.

I think the pain of the transition that Europe has experienced has scarcely begun. Will the historically ethnic states of Europe fully assimilate their new residents? The jury isn’t in yet.

Europe might think of looking to the U. S. experience for counsel in this. As great as the ferment about immigration has been in France, for example, the U. S. has had a higher rate of immigration and a higher percentage of immigrants in its population for nearly its entire history. We’re the world champs at assimilating new populations.

But that might be even more painful.

I have more confidence than many of my countrymen that the UK, France, Germany, etc. will enact the needed reforms and begin the slow process of incorporating the legislation into the actual fabrics of their societies, a significantly more difficult process than just enacting laws. But as the recent and ongoing unrest in the suburbs of Paris has suggested, they can’t wait forever. Shakespeare was wrong. Something can come of nothing and I believe that the consequences of inaction are likely to be more painful than the consequences of action.