Latest news with #DavidBetz
New York Times
2 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Is Civil War Coming to Europe?
Whether the debate is occasioned by a polemical book or a movie like last year's 'Civil War,' I consistently take the negative on the question of whether the United States is headed for a genuine civil war. In those debates it's usually liberals warning that populism or Trumpism is steering the United States toward the abyss. But with European politics the pattern is different: In France and Britain, and among American observers of the continent, a preoccupation with looming civil war tends to be more common among conservatives. For years, figures associated with the French right and French military have warned of an impending civil conflict driven by the country's failure to assimilate immigrants from the Muslim world. (The great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq's 'Submission' famously imagines this war being averted by the sudden conversion of French elites to Islam.) Lately there has been a similar discussion around Britain touched off by an essay by the military historian David Betz that argues that multicultural Britain is in danger of tearing itself apart, and lately taken up by the political strategist, Brexit-campaign architect and former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings in an essay warning that British elites are increasingly fearful of organized violence from nativists and radicalized immigrants alike. When I've written skeptically about scenarios for an American civil war, I've tended to stress several realities: the absence of a clear geographical division between our contending factions; the diminishment, not exacerbation, of racial and ethnic polarization in the Trump era; the fact that we're rich and aging and comfortable, not poor and young and desperate, giving even groups that hate each other a stake in the system and elites strong reasons to sustain it; the absence of enthusiasm for organized communal violence as opposed to lone-wolf forays. Does the European landscape look different? On some fronts, maybe. Tensions between natives and new arrivals are common on both sides of the Atlantic, but ethnic and religious differences arguably loom larger in Europe than they do in the United States: There is more intense cultural separatism in immigrant communities in suburban Paris or Marseilles than in Los Angeles or Chicago, more simmering discontent that easily turns to riots. At the same time, British and French elites have been more successful than American elites at keeping populist forces out of power, but their tools — not just the exclusion of populists from government, but an increasingly authoritarian throttling of free speech — have markedly diminished their own legitimacy among discontented natives. This means that neither under-assimilated immigrants nor working-class whites feel especially invested in the system, making multiple forms of political violence more plausible: pitting immigrant or native rebels against the government, or pitting immigrants against natives with the government trying to suppress the conflict, or, finally, pitting different immigrant groups against one another. (English cities have already played host to bursts of Muslim-Hindu violence.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mirror
Military expert gives chilling British 'civil war' warning over 'feral cities'
British cities are at risk of becoming 'feral' and could even descend into civil war over the next few years, a military expert has warned A military expert has warned that British cities could fall into a state of 'civil war' within five years because a breakdown in law and order. David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, cautioned that the UK and France are among the nations likely to struggle to maintain peace in the years ahead due to a multitude of social and economic issues - creating the risk of so-called "feral cities". It follows the shocking riots that gripped Paris after PSG's victory in the Champions League at the weekend, which left two dead and hundreds injured. Distressing footage from the French capital showed frightened women cowering inside their cars as mobs of out-of-control football fans smashed windows and set fire to nearby vehicles. And in Britain, a report released last month cautioned that authorities must be much swifter in tackling misinformation on social media to avoid a repeat of last year's riots, which followed the murders of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. Writing in in the latest issue of Military Strategy Magazine, Professor Betz argued that governments across the Western world have been "losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies", leaving them open to mass disorder and potential civil war". He added: "The initial result is an accelerating descent of multiple major cities into marginally 'feral' status". In another part of the essay, Professor Betz predicted that the "countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict are Britain and France" - but said that other parts of Europe and the United States could also be at risk "It must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere", he added. Hundreds arrested after deadly PSG riots Clashes between police and supporters on Saturday began long before PSG's thumping 5-0 victory over Inter Milan had even finished, with officers deploying a water cannon on the Champs-Elysees at half-time. Ugly scenes later in the night saw drivers attacked in their cars, vehicles torched and shops looted, with over 200 people injured and two killed in gatherings connected to the post-match celebrations. A 17-year-old boy was stabbed to death in the western city of Dax during a street party after the final, the national police service said, and in Paris, a man in his 20s was killed when his scooter was hit by a car during PSG celebrations. A police officer was also hit accidentally by fireworks at a PSG fan gathering in northwest France, and placed in an artificial coma because of severe eye injuries. More than 500 people were arrested by police in connection with the disorder. Reacting to the initial reports of rioting Saturday night, France's Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau labelled the rioters "barbarians" and not "true PSG fans", adding: "It is unbearable that it is not possible to party without fearing the savagery of a minority of thugs who respect nothing." Smaller clashes between gangs of youths and police continued in the centre of Paris on Sunday.
Daily Telegraph
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Telegraph
‘Feral cities': Western countries face civil war within five years, military expert warns
Don't miss out on the headlines from Innovation. Followed categories will be added to My News. Britain, France and other western countries are dangerously close to collapsing into violent civil conflict characterised by 'feral cities' where authorities can no longer maintain rule of law, a military expert has warned. In a sobering essay in the latest issue of Military Strategy Magazine, David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, argues governments across the west have 'squandered their legitimacy'. He warns they are 'losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies' that are 'terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics' and increasingly gripped by riots, terrorism and unrest. 'The initial result is an accelerating descent of multiple major cities into marginally 'feral' status,' he wrote. The concept of 'feral cities' was defined by US Navy commander Richard Norton, in a 2003 article for Naval War College Review, as 'a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system'. 'As of 2024, a list of global cities exhibiting some or all the characteristics of amber and red ferality, such as high levels of political corruption, negotiated areas of police control if not outright no-go zones, decaying industries, crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, two-tier policing, and the burgeoning of private security, would include many in the West,' Prof Betz said. Riots erupted in France after PSG's Champions League victory. Picture: Lou Benoist/AFP 'The direction of the situation, moreover, is decisively towards greater ferality. In short, things are manifestly worsening right now. They are, however, going to get very much worse — I would estimate over not more than five years.' He bases this belief on the combination of two other key factors. One is the 'urban versus rural dimension of the coming conflicts which, in turn, is a result of migrant settlement dynamics'. 'Simply put, the major cities are radically more diverse and have a growing mutually hostile political relationship with the country in which they are embedded,' he said. Prof Betz points to recent election results in France, the UK and US which highlighted the deepening split between left-wing voting urban centres and right-wing rural areas. The second factor, is 'the way in which modern critical infrastructure — gas, electricity, and transportation — is configured'. 'Again, simply put, the life support systems of cities are all located in or pass through rural areas,' he said. 'None of this infrastructure is well guarded, indeed most of it is effectively impossible to guard adequately.' Prof Betz predicts the likely trajectory of 'the coming civil wars' based on these factors. 'First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement,' he said. Britain and France are 'most likely' to face civil conflict. Picture:'Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.' Any civil war would be 'long and bloody' — using casualty figures from height of the Northern Ireland conflict as a guide, Prof Betz estimates more than 23,000 per year killed in the UK. He urges politicians, defence leaders and the public to avoid falling victim to 'normalcy bias' and begin planning for the very real possibility of civil conflict, including by the identification of suitable 'secure zones' for displaced populations, and the protection of important cultural property. 'At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France,' he said. 'The conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States; moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere.' Prof Betz has previously outlined how 'the conditions which scholars consider to be indicative of incipient civil war are present widely in Western states' — namely 'a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems'. Anti-racism counter protesters after the Southport riots. Picture: JeffThese factors have long been applied to the analysis of countries outside the west, but he says politicians must accept the danger internally is now 'clear and present'. 'According to the best guess of the extant literature, in a country where the conditions are present the chances of actual civil war occurring is 4 per cent per year,' Prof Betz said. 'With this as an assumption, we may conclude that the chances of it occurring are 18.5 per cent over five years.' Assuming there are at least 10 countries in Europe that face the prospect of violent civil conflict, 'the chances then of it occurring in any one of these countries over five years is 87 per cent'. Prof Betz notes both France and the UK have experienced 'precursor incidents' targeting critical infrastructure. In July 2024, co-ordinated arson attacks disabling Paris' rail network were followed by a major sabotage on the long-distance fibre-optic cable network. In London, vigilantes known as 'Blade Runners' have damaged or destroyed more than 1000 surveillance cameras intended to enforce the city's ultra-low-emission-zone (ULEZ) scheme. 'The precariousness of contemporary urbanity is a thing which geographers have worried over for at least a half century,' Prof Betz said, noting the viability of large cities 'has always been contingent' on the supply of resources from the surrounding country. 'Their apparent stability is, in fact, an astonishing balancing act requiring constant and competent maintenance. On current trajectory, that balancing act is going to fail.' It comes as France was again gripped by rioting over the weekend, with two people killed and nearly 200 injured as violent mobs took to the streets following Paris Saint-Germain's (PSG) Champions League victory. Fireworks explode over riot police on the Champs-Elysees. Picture: Aurelien Morissard/AP One distressing clip on social media showed two young women in a car being surrounded by young men before the passenger window was smashed open. Far-right politician Marine Le Pen said on Monday that the 'atrocities committed last night throughout France' were 'the result of 40 years of laxity and renunciation'. 'Today in France, it is no longer possible to have moments of popular fervour without thugs coming to smash and burn everything and deprive the French of the serenity to which they should be entitled,' she wrote on X. A growing number of European leaders have sounded warnings about political unrest in increasingly fractured multicultural societies. British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month announced a surprise crackdown on immigration, warning the UK risked 'becoming an island of strangers'. In 2023, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the country was being gripped by a wave of violent crime the likes of which it had 'never seen before'. 'Irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration have brought us to this point,' he said. Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's centre-left Prime Minister, said in March that 'I consider this mass migration into Europe as a threat to the daily life in Europe'. 'If I ask people about security and their security concerns, many of them will reply that Russia and defending Europe is top of mind right now,' she told Politico. 'But security is also about what is going on in your local community. Do you feel safe where you live? When you go and take your local train, or when your kids are going home from school, or whatever is going on in your daily life?' Originally published as 'Feral cities': Western countries face civil war within five years, military expert warns
News.com.au
2 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
‘Feral cities': Western countries face civil war within five years, military expert warns
Britain, France and other western countries are dangerously close to collapsing into violent civil conflict characterised by 'feral cities' where authorities can no longer maintain rule of law, a military expert has warned. In a sobering essay in the latest issue of Military Strategy Magazine, David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, argues governments across the west have 'squandered their legitimacy'. He warns they are 'losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies' that are 'terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics' and increasingly gripped by riots, terrorism and unrest. 'The initial result is an accelerating descent of multiple major cities into marginally 'feral' status,' he wrote. The concept of 'feral cities' was defined by US Navy commander Richard Norton, in a 2003 article for Naval War College Review, as 'a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system'. 'As of 2024, a list of global cities exhibiting some or all the characteristics of amber and red ferality, such as high levels of political corruption, negotiated areas of police control if not outright no-go zones, decaying industries, crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, two-tier policing, and the burgeoning of private security, would include many in the West,' Prof Betz said. 'The direction of the situation, moreover, is decisively towards greater ferality. In short, things are manifestly worsening right now. They are, however, going to get very much worse — I would estimate over not more than five years.' He bases this belief on the combination of two other key factors. One is the 'urban versus rural dimension of the coming conflicts which, in turn, is a result of migrant settlement dynamics'. 'Simply put, the major cities are radically more diverse and have a growing mutually hostile political relationship with the country in which they are embedded,' he said. Prof Betz points to recent election results in France, the UK and US which highlighted the deepening split between left-wing voting urban centres and right-wing rural areas. The second factor, is 'the way in which modern critical infrastructure — gas, electricity, and transportation — is configured'. 'Again, simply put, the life support systems of cities are all located in or pass through rural areas,' he said. 'None of this infrastructure is well guarded, indeed most of it is effectively impossible to guard adequately.' Prof Betz predicts the likely trajectory of 'the coming civil wars' based on these factors. 'First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement,' he said. 'Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.' Any civil war would be 'long and bloody' — using casualty figures from height of the Northern Ireland conflict as a guide, Prof Betz estimates more than 23,000 per year killed in the UK. He urges politicians, defence leaders and the public to avoid falling victim to 'normalcy bias' and begin planning for the very real possibility of civil conflict, including by the identification of suitable 'secure zones' for displaced populations, and the protection of important cultural property. 'At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France,' he said. 'The conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States; moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere.' Prof Betz has previously outlined how 'the conditions which scholars consider to be indicative of incipient civil war are present widely in Western states' — namely 'a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems'. These factors have long been applied to the analysis of countries outside the west, but he says politicians must accept the danger internally is now 'clear and present'. 'According to the best guess of the extant literature, in a country where the conditions are present the chances of actual civil war occurring is 4 per cent per year,' Prof Betz said. 'With this as an assumption, we may conclude that the chances of it occurring are 18.5 per cent over five years.' Assuming there are at least 10 countries in Europe that face the prospect of violent civil conflict, 'the chances then of it occurring in any one of these countries over five years is 87 per cent'. Prof Betz notes both France and the UK have experienced 'precursor incidents' targeting critical infrastructure. In July 2024, co-ordinated arson attacks disabling Paris' rail network were followed by a major sabotage on the long-distance fibre-optic cable network. In London, vigilantes known as 'Blade Runners' have damaged or destroyed more than 1000 surveillance cameras intended to enforce the city's ultra-low-emission-zone (ULEZ) scheme. 'The precariousness of contemporary urbanity is a thing which geographers have worried over for at least a half century,' Prof Betz said, noting the viability of large cities 'has always been contingent' on the supply of resources from the surrounding country. 'Their apparent stability is, in fact, an astonishing balancing act requiring constant and competent maintenance. On current trajectory, that balancing act is going to fail.' It comes as France was again gripped by rioting over the weekend, with two people killed and nearly 200 injured as violent mobs took to the streets following Paris Saint-Germain's (PSG) Champions League victory. One distressing clip on social media showed two young women in a car being surrounded by young men before the passenger window was smashed open. Far-right politician Marine Le Pen said on Monday that the 'atrocities committed last night throughout France' were 'the result of 40 years of laxity and renunciation'. 'Today in France, it is no longer possible to have moments of popular fervour without thugs coming to smash and burn everything and deprive the French of the serenity to which they should be entitled,' she wrote on X. A growing number of European leaders have sounded warnings about political unrest in increasingly fractured multicultural societies. British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month announced a surprise crackdown on immigration, warning the UK risked 'becoming an island of strangers'. In 2023, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the country was being gripped by a wave of violent crime the likes of which it had 'never seen before'. 'Irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration have brought us to this point,' he said. Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's centre-left Prime Minister, said in March that 'I consider this mass migration into Europe as a threat to the daily life in Europe'. 'If I ask people about security and their security concerns, many of them will reply that Russia and defending Europe is top of mind right now,' she told Politico.
Gulf Insider
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Insider
Is Britain On The Brink Of Civil War?
According to David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London, many of the preconditions for civil war exist in Britain today. Using academic studies on social cohesion, civil war causation theory and social attitudes surveys, he argues that the following preconditions are in place: elite overreach, factional polarization, a collapse in trust, economic pressures, and the perceived downgrading of the majority population in a previously homogeneous society, are all present in contemporary Britain. The current dynamics, he continues, point to an emerging conflict between radicalized factions within the Muslim community and an incipient nativist white nationalism. Professor Betz goes on to claim – using the Maoist model that divides insurgencies into three phases – that the nativists are in phase one, the so-called defensive phase in which the group begins to organize, disseminate propaganda and build a conscious community of followers. Islamists, on the other hand, are in phase two – when violent attacks occur on a semi-regular basis, a military structure is being developed, but they are not yet strong enough to challenge the state's monopoly on violence. (Professor Betz believes that, due to the absence of clear geographic divisions between the antagonists, Britain is unlikely to reach phase three – the offensive phase. This is when the insurgent groups are strong enough to challenge government forces.) It is an arresting and troubling thesis. It is also convincing. The preconditions outlined above undeniably exist in modern Britain. There has been a collapse of public trust in the state, for example. The 41st British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) report, published on 12 June 2024, concluded 'that people's trust in governments and politicians, and confidence in their systems of government, is as low now as it has ever been over the last 50 years, if not lower'. Indeed, a record high of 45% 'almost never' trust governments of any hue (22 points above the figure recorded in 2020); 58% (another record high) 'almost never' trust politicians to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner, up 19 points on 2020; and a striking 79% of respondents said that the system of governing Britain could be improved 'quite a lot' or a 'great deal', matching a record high recorded during the parliamentary stalemate over Brexit in 2019 and up 18 points on 2020. Professor John Curtice, the Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, the organisation that carried out the BSA survey, says: 'The government… will… need to address the concerns of a public that is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country's system of government.' As Professors Curtice and Betz warn, public trust in governments of all stripes has collapsed and, with it, trust in the system of government that we have traditionally sacralised and encouraged others to adopt. That this trend, if left unchecked, could potentially shatter an already fragile social contract is a statement of the obvious. Trust in the state unites the disparate groups of a multicultural society, acting as what Professor Betz calls a kind of 'superglue'. Without it, the groups fracture and retreat into silos characterised by mutual suspicion and animosity. Click here to read more…
