As the boat on which we were having dinner bobbed gently up the busy Bosphorus, it struck me that this was not a bad place from which to contemplate the latest European crisis. The waters that mark the very end of Europe provide a useful historical context in which to consider, what is for some, the End of Europe.

Out here, beyond the lights winking from the grand mansions that hug the Asian shoreline, begins the vast land mass into which the founders of Western civilisation poured in search of treasure and conquest. Millennia later, to the demoralised successors of those same enterprising Europeans, the traffic seems all the other way. Asia offers only threat, not promise; the future one of outsourced telemarketers in India and offshore manufacturing in China.

From here, too, at a more mortal crisis in Europe’s history, the Ottoman Empire stretched to every point of the compass, around the Black Sea, across the Middle East, into North Africa and deeper and deeper into a collapsing Europe. Today, it seems that the Caliph’s successors are reclaiming that territory, only this time moving more or less unopposed towards their goal.

These twin threats — the economic challenge of fiercely competitive globalisation and a political challenge to the culturally deracinated, splintering societies — are driving Europe into debilitating turmoil.

Interestingly, these threats converge again today in modern Turkey, an economically dynamic nation of 70 million Muslims, whose hopes of ending centuries of geographical ambivalence and joining the European club were dealt a final shattering blow this week. More important, though, it was these two forces, which lay directly behind respectively the French and Dutch “no” votes, that have intensified the mood of crisis.

In their different ways, the two referendums were surely symbolic events, marking the culmination of a decade or more of European disintegration and decline.

It is probably no accident that this process began just as Europe reached the pinnacle of its achievements. Forty-five years after the Second World War, continental Western Europe could plausibly claim to have created a kind of postmodern nirvana — a half-continent-wide zone of unparalleled prosperity, cushioned by an apparently permanent peace among some of the most historically murderous peoples on Earth.

Under its expensive welfare programmes, paid for by a high level of productivity in traditional manufacturing industries, Europeans enjoyed a pampered life. With the Soviet threat gone, this accelerating prosperity further encouraged them to renounce the idea of war and military coercion, and they settled down to enjoy an assured future ascendancy.

By the beginning of the 1990s, with America in apparent decline, it seemed a reasonable bet that this extraordinary model of economic and political success would become an example to the world. But external and internal forces were already undermining this paradise.

In economics, the forces of globalisation unleashed by an emergent Asia and an information technology revolution were reviving the American eco-nomy and giving birth to new, dynamic competitors. This speed-of-light competitive world of the microchip and flexible capital markets would require nimbleness, and an end to the protections that seemed to have helped Europe to become the success story of the 1980s. The Anglo-Saxon economies, in response to their own economic crises of the 1970s, had prepared themselves for this new world with painful but necessary reforms.

But Europe looked inward, not outward. Instead of focusing on what was needed – American and British-style labour reforms, tax cuts and deregulation — Europe embarked on a quix- otic exercise. It sought to weld a dozen or more disparate countries into an unbreakable economic union, all settled snug and warm under the fraying comfort blanket of expensive welfare systems.

In the political field too, even at its zenith, Europe had been surrendering the tools that had given it peace and harmony. It owed its years of peace not to some solemn intra-European comity but to the hard steel of US firepower, primed to defend Europe from the Soviet Union. But by the early 1990s, having shed its bloody past, Europe had lost the moral will as well as the capacity to face down new threats at home and abroad to the freedoms it cherished. European governments cut defence budgets and embraced peace as a strategy. This malaise was clearly evident in the Balkans in the early 1990s, where murderous inter-ethnic strife was cheerfully tolerated for years.

When its American ally was attacked in September 2001, Europe gamely offered to reciprocate for US protection in the Cold War, but most European nations lacked the military resources to turn that promise into anything more than tokens.

Then in Iraq in 2003, confronted with a tyrant who had repeatedly thumbed his nose at the international system that Europe supposedly revered, it instinctively recoiled, and a softened-up intellectual elite turned on the Americans instead.

At home, the same moral relativism, bred by years of pampered prosperity, was creating its own destructive forces. Again, egged on by intellectual elites, Europeans were encouraged to despise the civilisation that had nurtured them. The nation state was pronounced a hateful anachronism that had to be replaced by a pan-European superstate. The West’s defining values of enlightened tolerance and freedom were not superior to anyone else’s. Crime was the fault of its own unfair societies.

Immigrants who came to its countries were not to be forced to live by its own rules but by theirs, even if that meant “honour” killings and jihad. The effort to produce tolerant, multicultural societies resulted in the paradox of radical liberal democracies such as the Netherlands enthusiastically nurturing forces at home that sought to destroy the freedoms in which they were being incubated.

This week, voters in France and the Netherlands sounded the alarm. Characteristically, while the Dutch seem to have got the message about the social costs of its ruinous ultra-liberalism, the French have got the wrong end of the stick and want to escape from globalisation behind high walls of social protection.

But the challenge is now upon Europe. The longer it puts off the inevitable reforms — economic, social and political — the harder it will get. And if it chooses to defer a real response for ever, the greatest civilisation in the history of the planet will simply continue to sink beneath the waves of its own economic irrelevance and moral ennui.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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