The Berlin wall may not be the only casualty of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Recent elections in several European states have given evidence that nationalism is reemerging as the dominant political force in the West. Of course, “nationalism,” which in the broadest sense includes any assertion of tribal or national identity, is already the spark for revolution and civil conflict all over the Third World and more recently in the former dominions of the Soviet Union, but Western Europeans thought that they had gone beyond all that and that they could indulge a smile for the few fanatics in lederhosen who danced strange dances and gabbled ancient songs in dialects that had not been spoken for centuries. Only a dinosaur like Mrs. Thatcher would oppose Britain’s full participation in the European Community, and little was to be feared from a few dozen Cornish-speakers who entertained the tourists with their fantasies of independence.

However, recent events in Britain, Sweden, Germany, France, and Italy suggest that the snake is only Scotched (whatever that means), not killed. I say Scotched advisedly, since the Scots may play a key role in determining the future of the United Kingdom.

Nobody except John Major thought he was going to win an election on his own, and the head of the Liberal Democrats (the United Kingdom’s third largest party) was already demanding proportional representation as the price of his cooperation. In the end, however, the average English voter decided he really could not stomach Neal Kinnoch. The campaign was remarkably devoid of issues. Labour had hoped to make health care their rallying cry but were soon bogged down in a debate over a campaign film in which they attempted to exploit a little girl’s long wait for an ear operation.

In the end, I suspect, the election was a referendum on Mr. Kinnoch and his principles. Kinnoch had, over the years, opposed virtually every measure to defend Britain against the Soviets or to assert the national will. His bright vision for Britain’s future was of a happy little socialist province of the European Community. That may be exactly where Britain is headed under Mr. Major—try to imagine an articulate and intelligent version of George Bush. I took my 12-year-old daughter to the Tower of London about two weeks before the election, and we listened to one of the warders pointing out the usual attractions. “Are there any Americans here,” he asks. Seeing the hands rising up between the herds of Japanese, he bellows: “Welcome home.”

It is an old wheeze, and I wonder how many American visitors do regard England or even Britain as a kind of home. Before I left, my wife—an Anglophile hardened in her vice—assured me that no American could escape a nostalgia for England. It is true that we cannot escape seeing our oldest friends, everywhere we go in the country. Every chapel in Oxford contains the bones of a poet that has delighted us or a scholar that has wracked us in our student days. In the churchyard at Swinbrook, Nancy Mitford is buried. The church at Burford is a great monument to the maternal grandfather of Viscount Falkland who is portrayed in a kneeling figure. At Chichester cathedral, in addition to its poet-bishop Henry King, we see the Arundel tomb commemorated in one of Philip Larkin’s most beautiful poems, while Winchester is home to a procession of worthies from Alfred the Great to Jane Austen.

If we cease to be English, we Americans are compelled to live in a state of arrested adolescence. Being English, if only by adoption, we are compelled to sympathize with our mother country in its national struggles. The Tower is as good a place as any from which to contemplate English history. Like all the tower warders, our guide is a retired sergeant major and expresses himself with the bluntness of an American marine DI. He explains to the group that the Tower was one of a series of fortresses built to keep the French out, “And if you ask me, we still feel the same way, despite all this talk about the Chunnel.”

I heard similar (albeit more cautious) expressions from some of the Tory journalists I spoke with, but-the enemy was no longer France or even Russia. It was Germany, the state that was using the European Community as a front group for its program of economic and political domination on the continent. America had saved Europe from the Germans twice already in this century. Were we willing to do it again?

One editorial writer was very candid with me. He had been a correspondent in the States for several years and had concluded that Americans, unlike Europeans, had no settled national identity and were, as a consequence, free of all the jealousies and animosities that made it impossible for Britain to accept immigrants with good grace. “When I’m in America, I feel just as if I am American and that I am accepted as one. That would never happen to a foreigner here.” I suggested that this might have more to do with the essential kindness and friendliness of Americans, which is one of the characteristics of our national identity.

He disagreed and went on to argue that only Americans now had the guts to stand up to aggression, and that it was still our destiny to take up the white man’s burden. The English, unfortunately, have never been able to shake off their imperial attitudes. One English-American journalist told me recently that he opposed the imperialism of his adopted country, the United States, because he had grown up under the shadow of lost empire and seen the disastrous effects on English morale. But I wonder if it is only in decline that empires sap the national vigor.

If you can push through the crowds at Westminster Abbey, you will be treated to as gaudy a display of imperial vulgarity as you could ever hope to imagine. It is the real Euro-Disney. Of course there are the tombs of Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, but almost cheek by jowl with the patriots and tyrants are memorials to plutocracy and power. The “poets’ corner” ought to be a refreshing change from all the ostentation, but the English have not been content simply to bury a few notable poets. They are clearly embarrassed by the preponderance of second-raters whose reputations have not endured. History must, therefore, be corrected, and memorial plaques have been installed to commemorate writers who have not actually been buried in the Abbey.

The crypt at St. Paul’s is almost as garish as Westminster Abbey. What kind of crypt is as clean, organized, and bright as the athletic facilities of a Big Ten university? It is good for a nation to remember its heroes, and my daughter pitied Americans who, no matter what they might achieve in their lifetimes, what sacrifices they might make for their country, will be forgotten within a generation of their death. I was, nonetheless, disturbed by the tendency toward national self-glorification.

But if the Tories are nationalists when it comes to the United Kingdom, they feel quite differently about the Scots. Recent opinion polls indicated that a majority of Scots wanted a new deal within or without the United Kingdom. Most Tories put this down to greed and treachery. The Scots merely want to hog the North Sea oil and are looking for a better deal with the European Community than they think they can get from London.

Despite the evidence of widespread nationalist sentiment in Scotland—and a series of very effective ads with Sean Connery—the Scots National Party was not able to convince the voters to break with Labour. But John Major’s success may, somewhat paradoxically, have the effect of driving voters in the northern kingdom into the arms of the Scots Nats.

In Italy, the picture is somewhat clearer. Plagued by debt, financial scandals, and rumors of ties to organized crime, the governing coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and two smaller parties failed to secure a parliamentary majority in the March elections. In a symbolic sense the big winner was Umberto Bossi and the Lega Lombarda, which has gone from less than 2 percent in 1987 to almost 9 percent in 1992. In northern Italy they went up to the high teens and even succeeded in capturing Milan. Bossi now heads the second largest party in the north and the fourth largest party in Italy. What his Lega Nord coalition wants is a new constitution modeled on Swiss federalism in which the various ethnic regions of Italy will be able to express their cultural identity and control their economic and political life.

The part of Bossi’s program that has attracted the most negative publicity is his strong stand against immigration. In the Land elections in Germany surprising gains were registered by right-wing/anti-immigrant parties, particularly by the Republicans who polled almost 11 percent in Baden-Württemberg. In France Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, although it failed to do as well as the leader had predicted, went from 9.7 percent in 1988 to 14 percent on the strength of a single issue.

I put the question of Le Pen’s significance to a variety of French intellectuals. One member of the Catholic right explained to me that Muslims now enjoy religious privileges in the work place that are not granted to Catholics. While taking issue with many particulars of the Le Pen program, he told me that it was the duty of every patriotic Frenchman to support his efforts.

This view is not widely shared. France’s leading political intellectual insisted that Le Pen’s failure to capture Nice meant that his party had run out of steam. “What about the immigration issue,” I asked. That, I was told, is a different matter. The French are neither xenophobic nor racist, he explained, and they have successfully absorbed waves of Spanish, Italian, and even Polish immigrants. Muslims are a different story. They don’t want to be assimilated. On the contrary, they want all the advantages of French citizenship along with special privileges as members of a minority. Under Mitterrand, the hypocrisy has become insufferable. “Suppose someone steals your bicycle. The police say they can do nothing. When you tell them, ‘but it was an Arab; I know where you can get him,’ the police call you a Nazi. It is absurd.”

These sentiments were echoed by everyone I spoke with, including one distinguished editor who declared the problem was insoluble. The Muslims could not, in all likelihood, be deported, and they did not wish to be assimilated. In the old days, France could take in large numbers of immigrants, because the three great institutions of national life—the Church, the army, and the schools—could be relied upon to Frenchify the children in short order. But none of these institutions has retained its sense of purpose. French schools are now almost as bad as American schools, and the Church? Well, as I explained to the Catholic rightist, the worst elements of Protestantism now appear to be controlling the Catholic Church, at least in the United States, and I predicted that the successor to John Paul II will take the irony out of the expression, “more Catholic than the Pope.”

E Finito il Dopoguerra (“It’s over, the Postwar”) took up the whole of an April cover of Il Sabato (a prominent Catholic weekly from Milan). Anticommunism was more than the glue holding together social democrats (in the U.S. this includes so-called liberals and neoconservatives) with classical liberals and conservatives. Anticommunism was the principle that gave legitimacy to the postwar regimes of the West. The coming age is going to require new principles of legitimacy and new measures of national identity and national purpose. If we can judge from what is going on in Italy, France, Germany, and Austria, it will not be either democracy or capitalism that will supply the glue, either in the East or the West.

One perennial source of political unity is conflict, the need to put up a united front against a common enemy. Herein lay the strength of anticommunism as a bond within and among Western nations. In some European countries the common enemy appears to be the immigrants, particularly those who arrive from the most exotic cultures. As Christians we must deplore any manifestation of unreasoning hostility toward outsiders, but as members of a nation we may be prepared to tolerate a little xenophobia if the only alternative is some sort of cosmopolitan helplessness. As civilized men and women we turn up our noses at the lower orders who engage in Jap-bashing or Paki-bashing, and we are right to hold ourselves to the highest standards. However, Western societies, as we all know, are far from aristocratic. America, in particular, is a peasant culture that can hardly be expected to display patrician virtues.

Lower-class xenophobia is the price we pay for patriotism. It cannot be helped. We boast much of the toleration that now exists between Catholics and Protestants, but is this the fruit of a deepening faith that is willing to overlook minor differences among Christians, or rather a fungus growing on the decaying stump of Christendom? When simple people believe in something, they are willing to die and to kill for what they believe, and no one who regards patriotism as a virtue can afford to shed crocodile tears over the increased level of xenophobic “incidents.” If responsible statesmen can take the lead in solving the problems of immigration, it will be possible to avoid the violent solutions that will inevitably be imposed by demagogues. Otherwise we may soon come to feel nostalgic for the amiable and moderate Jean-Marie Le Pen or the cosmetologized klansman, David Duke.

The French (like the Germans and the. Italians) are beginning to ask themselves several important questions: Who is and who is not a Frenchman? Who can become one and how? The answers to these questions will be embedded, ultimately, in immigration and nationalization codes. The more generous we are in admitting strangers into our midst, the more rigorous we must be in defining the moral and cultural characteristics of citizenship. The French and, to a still greater extent, the Byzantines were generous in admitting strangers to residence and citizenship, but both.held up strenuous requirements for assimilation. France and the Byzantine Empire both defined themselves more by culture than by race, and so long as a man absorbed the language, practiced the religion, and fought for the nation he might be considered a citizen.

In America as in France, neither church nor army nor schools can unite our divided nation, and here we are not even sure that we have English as a common bond. Most ancient city-states were jealous of their citizenship rights, but even so they defined full citizenship largely in terms of shared educational experience. Athenian boys, starting in the late fourth century, had to go through a two-year period of military training and service in preparation for their lives as citizens, but it was in Sparta where such a system was taken to extreme lengths. The Spartan agoge was a rigorous survivalist course that was among the wonders of the ancient world. They occasionally admitted the sons of distinguished foreigners, and those who survived could become Spartan citizens.

If the Spartans went overboard in the direction of severity, we have gone in the opposite direction with softness. If ours must be, as we are always told by. our betters, a multiracial and multiethnic society, then we have no choice but to impose a common culture. But what sort of a culture should this be? Am I recommending that we set up a national curriculum, based on “Western values” and democratic principles? This is the suggestion of Bill Bennett, Diane Ravitch, and Checker Finn, who think that a few dozen good books combined with the celebration of Mr. King’s birthday can be made to inculcate the virtues of a new world order. The content of their curricula is never more than a half-inch deep, because their point is not to introduce our young barbarians to civilization but to indoctrinate them into universal principles. Oh, they say they, will include Macbeth and Huck Finn along with Mayan epics and African work songs, but all of their proposals amount to little more than liberalized versions of leftist multiculturalism.

To describe this curriculum as neofascist, as I have done in the past, is accurate only up to a point, since the architect of Mussolini’s education reforms was the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and our own reformers could scarcely read one of his books, much less write them.

The only curriculum that will do us any good is a curriculum that will turn Mexicans and Japanese into Anglo-Americans. Setting aside the importance of the classical curriculum—which is essential for our leadership class—every potential citizen, domestic or imported, ought to be given a thorough course, year after year, of English history and English literature as preparation for the comparatively short period of time in which we have played a part in the civilization of English-speakers. It is only our common Englishness—in my case, mostly assumed rather than innate—that can tie us together, but if the multiculturalists of left and right have their way, there will be nothing but the power and wealth of the state that binds us together in the iron chains of servitude.