Europeans are standing up for their national identities at the
risk of being labeled “extremists” by the Eurocrats.
The True Finn Party in Finland has broken through the
left-liberal consensus to take second place in the polls, reminding
voters that Finland is not just a geographical area but a country
defined by language, culture, and history, a country that has been
defended at great cost against the Soviet desire to absorb it and
which is now, thanks to the European Union, being robbed of its
savings in order to replenish the pockets of Mediterranean
kleptocrats. Finns have revealed that they don’t like being
manipulated by political elites outside the country. They want to
show the world that Finland is not just a quaint survival, defined
by a weird language and a romantic folklore, but a real and
self-governing nation-state, whose resources belong to its
citizens, and whose citizens wish to claim their ancestral
territory as their own.
A comparable feeling has made itself manifest in France, with
growing support for the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and
for Le Pen’s dynamic daughter, who is now likely to lead the party
to positions of power and influence across the country (see Joseph
A. Harriss, p. 54). The Dutch have rallied to the cause of Geert
Wilders, whose outspoken attacks on Islam and calls to restrict
immigration have brought a new spirit of national defiance to the
politics of the Netherlands. Belgium is unable to form a
government, on account of the nationalist aspirations of its
Flemish majority, while in Italy the Lega Nord is pressing for a
redefinition of the Italian settlement, one that will acknowledge
the distinction between the law-abiding north and the Mafia-ridden
south of the country.
All across Europe the nations are beginning to boil with
frustration, at a political straitjacket that prevents them from
asserting their ancient rights. The causes of this are many, but
two in particular stand out: immigration and the European Union.
The two are connected, since it is the EU’s non-negotiable
insistence on the free movement of labor that has prevented the
nation-states from exerting meaningful control over their borders.
At a time when unemployment in Britain stands at more than 2
million, more than a million immigrants from Eastern Europe have
come to take what jobs there are. It is impossible that such a
situation should endure without strong sentiments of national
entitlement among the indigenous people, and our governing elites
are struggling hard to prevent those sentiments from emerging into
the light of day.
Equally provocative, however, has been the debt crisis within
the European Union. At a time when the people of Britain are being
told that they must face cuts to public services that will cause
widespread hardship, they are also being told that taxpayers must
contribute 4 billion pounds — roughly 200 pounds each — to pay
for the extravagance of Portuguese politicians, who have been
lining their pockets and robbing their people in the traditional
way, and relying on the euro to protect them. The subtle economic
arguments with which this move is justified fail to persuade people
that they are not being robbed. And it is one appeal of the
nationalist parties elsewhere in Europe that they honestly declare
that the people are being robbed, in order to subsidize the
lifestyle of elites who have no historical connection with them,
and that when people are being robbed they have a right to defend
themselves.
JUST WHERE ALL this is going it is hard to know. One thing is
certain, however: nationalist sentiments are once more prominent in
the cultural landscape of Europe. And they are the more prominent
for the attempt by the Eurocrats to forbid them. I doubt that this
situation was foreseen by those who first set the European process
in motion. It seemed reasonable, even imperative, in 1950 to bring
the nations of Europe together, in a way that would prevent the
wars that had twice almost destroyed the continent. And because
conflicts breed radicalism, the new Europe was conceived as a
comprehensive plan — one that would eliminate the sources of
European conflict, and place cooperation rather than rivalry at the
heart of the continental order.
The architects of the plan, who were for the most part Christian
Democrats, had little else in common apart from a belief in
European civilization and a distrust of the nation-state. The
éminence grise, Jean Monnet, was a transnational bureaucrat,
inspired by the vision of a united Europe in which war would be a
thing of the past. His close collaborator Walter Hallstein was an
academic German technocrat, who believed in international
jurisdiction as the natural successor to the laws of the
nation-states. Monnet and Hallstein were joined by Altiero
Spinelli, a romantic communist who advocated a United States of
Europe legitimized by a democratically elected European Parliament.
Such people were not isolated enthusiasts, but part of a broad
movement among the postwar political class. They chose popular
leaders like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, and Alcide De Gasperi
as the spokesmen for their ideas, and proposed the European Coal
and Steel Community (the Schuman Plan) as their initial goal —
believing that the larger project would acquire legitimacy if it
could first be understood and accepted in this circumscribed form.
At the same time the long-term goal was kept secret, on the
justified understanding that, if the people got wind of it, they
would make sure it never happened.
When the first instruments of European cooperation were being
devised, the continent was divided by the Iron Curtain, with half
of Germany and all of the Slavonic countries under Soviet
occupation and fascist regimes installed in Portugal and Spain.
France was in constant turmoil, with a Communist Party commanding
the support of more than a third of its electorate; the free
remnant of Europe was critically dependent upon the Atlantic
alliance, and the marks of occupation and defeat were (except in
Great Britain and the Iberian peninsula) everywhere apparent. Only
radical measures, it seemed, could restore the continent to
political and economic health, and those measures must replace the
old antagonisms with a new spirit of friendship.
As a result, European integration was conceived in
one-dimensional terms, as a process of ever-increasing
unity under a centralized structure of command. Each
increase in central power was to be matched by a diminution of
national power. Every summit, every directive, and every click of
the ratchet has since carried within itself this specific equation.
The political process in Europe has therefore acquired a direction.
It is not a direction that the people of Europe have chosen, and
every time they are given the right to vote on it they reject it —
hence everything is done to ensure that they never have the chance
to vote on it. The process is moving always toward centralization,
top-down control, dictatorship by unelected bureaucrats and judges,
cancellation of laws passed by elected parliaments, constitutional
treaties framed without any input whatsoever from the people — in
short, the process is moving always toward imperial government. And
only one thing stands opposed to this result, and that is the
national sentiments of the European people.
For this very reason national sentiments have been demonized.
Speak up for Jeanne d’Arc and le pays réel, for the
“sceptred isle” and St. George, for Lemmenkäinen’s gloomy forests
and the “true Finns” who roam in them, and you will be called a
fascist, a racist, and an extremist. There is a liturgy of
denunciation here that is repeated all across Europe by a ruling
elite that trembles in the face of ordinary loyalties. But the fact
is that national sentiment is, for most ordinary Europeans, the
only motive that will justify sacrifice in the public cause.
Insofar as people do not vote to line their own pockets, it is
because they also vote to protect a shared identity from the
predations of those who do not belong to it, and who are attempting
to pillage an inheritance to which they are not entitled.
WHAT WE ARE NOW seeing in Europe is that yesterday’s radical
visions cannot translate into today’s political needs. The imperial
project has entered into conflict with the only source of sentiment
upon which it could conceivably draw for its legitimacy. The
nation-states are not equally stable, equally democratic, equally
free, or equally obedient to the rule of law. But they are all that
we have. They alone inspire the loyalty and obedience of the
European people, and without them there is no way that the
machinery of the Union can act. By replacing national
accountability with distant bureaucracy, that machinery has left
people disarmed and bewildered in the face of the current crisis.
The euro, invented and imposed without any proof that the people of
the “eurozone” had any desire for it, was immediately understood,
by the kleptocrats of the Mediterranean, as a way of enlarging the
national debt, and transferring it to the hard-working Germans. And
the people of Greece, Spain, and Portugal agreed, since nobody
alerted them to the cost — the national cost — that will
be paid, once the eurozone breaks up, as surely it must.
Now that the day of reckoning is approaching, people all across
the continent sense the need to prepare themselves for hard times.
In a crisis people “take stock,” which means that they retreat to
the primary source of their social identity, and prepare to defend
it. They do not do this consciously. But they do it nevertheless,
and the futile attempt by the comfortable elites to denounce the
“extremism” of the people whose inheritance they have stolen merely
exacerbates the reaction. But the situation is not a happy one. Not
only are there nations like the Flemish and the English that have
no nation-state of their own. The half-century of peace and
prosperity has fed upon the European cultural inheritance without
renewing it. The constitutional treaties and transnational courts
of the Eurocrats have made a point of granting no favors to the
Christian faith, and the spirit of multiculturalism has ensured
that national cultures receive no subsidies either from national
governments or from the European Union. A “cult of the minority”
has been imposed from above.
This cult is painfully apparent in England, where I am writing.
English schools that refuse to celebrate Christmas will
nevertheless insist on a day devoted to Diwali and another to Eid;
“diversity” is the theme of our official festivals, and the Arts
Council of England even refuses to support the English Music
Festival, on account of the offensive word English in its
title. At the same time, here as elsewhere in Europe, people no
longer accept the cult. All across Europe “multiculturalism” is
being rejected, both by ordinary people and by many of their
elected representatives. For, while multiculturalism has done
nothing to reconcile immigrant communities to their new
surroundings, it has destroyed the frail remnants of national
cultures that survived the Second World War.
This is one reason why people who stand up for their national
identity can so easily be made to look like “extremists.” You don’t
look like an extremist if you express your national sentiment in
the idiom of a Péguy, an Orwell, a Lampedusa, or a Sibelius. But
when you have no national icons besides the flag and the football
team you find it difficult to display the most important aspect of
national sentiment, which is that it is an invocation of peace, and
not a cry of war. That is why culture matters, and why its loss, in
times of crisis, is a loss to the whole community, and not just to
the educated minority who are aware of the fact.
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