Matthew Carr wrote in '' Race & Class '' that " Niall Ferguson , the conservative English sic historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire , has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled ' Eurabia ? ' , in which he laments the ' de-Christianization of Europe ' and the secularism of the continent that leaves it ' weak in the face of fanaticism ' . " Carr adds that " Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his ( Oxford college ) as another symptom of ' the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom ' , " and in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled ' The End of Europe ? ' , Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note , conjuring the term ' impire ' to depict a process in which a ' political entity , instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery , exporting power , implodes – when the energies come from outside into that entity ' . In Ferguson 's opinion , this process was already under way in a decadent ' post-Christian ' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam . In 2015 , Ferguson deplored the Paris attacks committed by Islamic State terrorists , but stated he was not going to " stand " with the French as he argued that France was a lost cause , a declining state faced with an unstoppable Islamic wave that would sweep away everything that tried to oppose it . Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire , describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book '' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire '' . Ferguson wrote that : Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today ... Let us be clear about what is happening . Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century , Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble . As its wealth has grown , so its military prowess has shrunk , along with its self-belief . It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums . At the same time , it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith . Ferguson wrote the mass influx of refugees into Europe from Syria was a modern version of the '' Völkerwanderung '' when the Huns burst out of Asia and invaded Europe , causing millions of the Germanic peoples to flee into the presumed safety of the Roman Empire , smashing their way in as the Romans attempted unsuccessfully to stop the Germans from entering the empire . Ferguson writes that Gibbon was wrong to claim the Roman Empire collapsed slowly and argues that the view among a growing number of modern scholars is that the collapse of the Roman empire was swift and violent ; unforeseeable by Romans of the day , just as the collapse of modern European civilization would likewise be for modern Europeans
Paris attacks
November 2015 Paris attacks
Niall Ferguson