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Guest Essay

By Anton Jäger

Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and a lecturer in politics at Oxford University. He wrote from Brussels.

Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are all not only tourists in our own country, but also willing participants in tourism.”

Today, Mr. Houellebecq’s comments sound darkly prophetic. Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with........

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