While I think that the Europeans will in the end go Mediaeval on this threat when push comes to shove, actions like this don't exactly fill me with hope:
In late April, if all goes according to plan, a resident of Kabul will fold up a paper ballot and push in into an empty box. It will mark the first time an Afghan citizen will have voted - for a candidate in the United Kingdom.
That's the idea behind an initiative called Give Your Vote, in which U.K. citizens will voluntarily give up their votes in the parliamentary elections expected to take place May 6 to residents in the developing world. The aim is less to tip the British elections one way or the other than to highlight the limitations of local decision-making in an increasingly interconnected world. "Right now, the people making decisions on things like climate change aren't getting their authority from the guy in Bangladesh whose house is being flooded," says James Sadri, one of the founders of Egality, the British activist group behind the project. "But what if the politicians did have to answer to these people? Would it change their position on climate change, poverty and war?" (See pictures of the presidential election in Afghanistan.)
Here's how the program, which launches on March 15, will work: British volunteers will pose questions from people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana to U.K. parliamentary candidates at town hall meetings or through party offices, and the answers will then be discussed on television and radio in each of the three countries. A week before the U.K. vote, Egality will hold an American Idol-style election in the countries, in which people will cast votes for their preferred U.K. party - Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat. The following week, British citizens who decide to participate in the program - organizers are hoping for a few thousand - will receive a text message from Egality telling them how to cast their ballot. The votes will be doled out based on the proportion each party received in the overseas elections.
Wow. Surrender your Vote, is more like it. The priceless right of electing their leaders, won over centuries of struggle, is to be surrendered in a game show format. How much more symbolic can the decline of the West get? Not exactly a "we will fight them on the beaches" moment for our British friends, eh?
You'd think that the British would understand--after wishing so hard that they could have a chance to vote in our 2008 presidential election--that such ideas don't work out as you hope.
While the people likely to turn over their hard-won vote to foreigners are likely to vote for the jihadi-friendly (or jihadi-appeasing) types, is it really a stretch to see this voluntary program extended as a right at some point in the future? Perhaps reserving a certain percent of the vote to foreigners? Or simply letting resident aliens vote since they are allowing non-resident aliens to vote from abroad? After all, they could argue, how fair is it to allow distant people to vote when some of your neighbors can't vote?
It isn't enough to worry that the British (and other Europeans) will wave the white flag of surrender when radical Islamic thinking rises to dominating levels. Now we have to worry that the Europeans will mail the white flag to the Third World, saving the jihadi types the trouble of actually coming to Britain to demand surrender.
This is not Britain's finest hour.
