Well before Athens triggered the Euro crisis, there was no shortage of warning signs that something was fundamentally amiss. In the face of persistently high levels of unemployment in Germany, regular outbreaks of violence in the banlieues of Paris, or the rapid ageing of Italy’s population, only the incorrigible optimists still believe that Europe would dominate the twenty-first century, as Jeremy Rifkin argued less than a decade ago.

A number of books dealing with different aspects of the phenomenon have appeared in the last five years, of which these three are the best: Italian economists Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi’s The Future of Europe, which mercilessly exposes the weaknesses of European economy; US historian Walter Laqueur’s melancholic The Last Days of Europe, which details the disappearance of European society as we know it; and the Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe— Immigration, Islam, and the West, which analyses the Islamisation of the European Union (EU).

Now Theodore Dalrymple, the cultural pessimist par excellence of our times, has added his own observations. The New Vichy Syndrome bears the endorsements of Caldwell as well as friendly words from Andrew Roberts, Claire Belinski, and Bruce S. Thornton, all of whom have made distinguished contributions to the burgeoning Euro-decline literature.