Europe’s debt crisis has breathed new life into the secessionist Northern League of Umberto Bossi, who sees autonomy first, then independence for Padania, the five regions of Italy centered on Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, and Trentino-Alto Adige (the old South Tyrol).
Mr. Bossi’s central claim is that natives of Padania, an ambiguous area around the Po River that includes the cities of Milan, Turin, and Venice, descend from the northern Celtic tribes. The Celts, Mr. Bossi regularly reminds his fans, were a hard-working people unlike the Romans, warriors whose productivity was based on slave workers. His supporters often show up at rallies with Celtic-inspired swords and horned helmets.49
Bossi sees himself as a latter-day “Braveheart.”
The greatest cause of alienation from Europe’s governments is the mass immigration that stirs the ethnic consciousness of the native-born who are turning to populist parties. “Radical anti-immigration parties are gaining ground across the continent,” the Financial Times warned in 2010, alerting politicians that “ignoring the warnings sent by the rising far-right would be far more dangerous” than addressing their concerns.50
The latest evidence came in last week’s Italian regional elections, where the xenophobic Northern League won 13 percent of the vote. In France, the far-right National Front has also made a comeback in recent regional elections—polling well over 20 percent of the vote in parts of the country. The British National Party may do well in next month’s general elections. And anti-immigrant themes will also play a big role in the June election in the Netherlands.51
Alarmed at the threat to their ethnic identity, the anti-immigration parties are striding toward respectability and power. Austrian nationalists scored a triumph in 2008 when the Freedom Party and Alliance for Austria’s Future together won 29 percent of the vote. In 2010, two weeks after doubling its vote in Styria, the Freedom Party under Heinz-Christian Strache, its leader since Jörg Haider’s death, won 26 percent of the vote in Vienna’s municipal elections, almost doubling its strength there. Strache is talked of as a future chancellor of Austria. Who is he, and what does he stand for?
His Freedom Party is anti-EU and anti-foreigner. During their [2008] campaign, senior party members complained that immigration had brought an end to the good old days when Austrians ate Wiener schnitzel and sausages instead of “kebabs, falafel and couscous, or whatever that stuff is called.” At rallies, Mr Strache pledged to set up a government ministry with the sole task of deporting unwanted foreigners.52
The National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen humiliated Paris in 2009, winning more than half the vote in a suburb of Marseilles. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, largest in Bern, was behind the referendum to change the constitution to outlaw new minarets and wearing of burkas. Fifty-eight percent of the Swiss voted with Blocher. “More than half the voters in the five biggest European economies believe women should be banned from wearing the burka.”53 When the center-right Fidesz Party ousted the socialists in 2010 in Hungary, the shocker to the FT was that the Jobbik Party of “right-wing extremists,” which “sits squarely in Europe’s most repulsive arch-nationalist tradition and which blames Jews and Roma for the hardships of other Hungarians,” pulled 17 percent and entered parliament for the first time.54
In a Washington Post essay on a dying EU, Charles Kupchan, of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote,
Elsewhere [in Europe], rightwing populism is on the upswing—a product, primarily, of a backlash against immigrants. This hard-edged nationalism aims not only at minorities, but also at the loss of autonomy that accompanies political union.… Hungary’s Jobbik Party, which borders on xenophobic, won 47 seats in elections this year—up from none in 2006.55
Three weeks after Kupchan wrote, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats captured 6 percent of the vote and entered parliament for the first time with 20 seats, joining right-wing folk parties in Norway and Denmark. In April, 2011, the True Finns, nationalist, Euroskeptic, and anti-immigration, stunned Europe by capturing 19 percent of the vote and raising their representation in the 200-seat parliament from 5 to 39.
Nick Griffin, of the British National Party, who wants to “take back Britain” by providing incentives to nonwhite immigrants to go back home, appeared on the BBC’s late-night Question Time. As John Burns of the New York Times wrote, the show normally attracts “a modest pre-bedtime audience.”56 Griffin drew 8.2 million viewers, on a par with World Cup games, as demonstrators excoriated the BBC for giving him a forum.
Censorship is grounded in fear. And the European establishment has begun to betray its fear of the ethnonational parties. Vlaams Blok, the most popular party in Flanders in 2004, was banned by the courts for portraying some immigrants as “criminals who take bread from the mouths of Flemish workers.”57 Vlaams Blok disappeared, and Vlaams Belang was born.
Griffin was prosecuted for inciting racial hatred for calling Islam a “wicked and vicious faith.”58 The Austrian Freedom Party’s Susanne Winter was given a three-month suspended sentence and a 24,000 euro fine “for incitement to hatred and degradation of religious doctrines.” Observing that one of the Prophet’s wives was only nine, Winter called Muhammad a pedophile and warned that Europe faces a “Muslim immigration tsunami.”59
Geert Wilders, a rising figure in Dutch politics and a member of the European Parliament, was charged with hate speech for equating Islam and Nazism.60 In June 2010, his Freedom Party became the third strongest, surpassing the ruling Christian Democrats, who lost half their parliamentary strength. “More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam—that is what the Netherlands has chosen,” said Wilders.61 A prominent Australian Muslim cleric, Feiz Muhammad, called for the beheading of Wilders, “this Satan, this devil.”62
That same June 2010, the disastrous performance of Les Bleus, the French soccer team in the World Cup that failed to win a single match, ignited a raucous, racially tinged debate that “focused on lack of patriotism, shared values and national honor on a team with many members who are black or brown and descended from immigrants.” President Sarkozy, who called Les Bleus’ performance on and off the field a “disaster,” was echoed by his education minister, Luc Chatel, who denounced its Senegal-born leader. “A captain of the French team who does not sing ‘the Marseillaise’ shocks me.… When one wears the jersey, one should be proud to wear the colors.”63
The 1998 French team that won the World Cup had been praised for its multiracial character—black, white, and Arab—and seen as a symbol of a new diverse France. But the 2010 team, thirteen of whose twenty-two players were men of color, was denounced by French leaders and legislators as “scum,” “little troublemakers,” “guys with chickpeas in their heads instead of a brain,” and “a gang of hooligans.” The Algerian-born minister for the banlieues criticized Sarkozy for emphasizing “national identity” and warned that the “tendency to ethnicize” the attacks on Les Bleus was “building a highway for the National Front” of Le Pen.64
That same summer of 2010 saw North African youth go on a rampage in Grenoble, causing President Sarkozy to declare that France was “seeing the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently controlled immigration, which have ended up in the failure of integration.” Sarkozy proposed a law to strip North Africans of citizenship if they attack police officers. Critics saw the French president as “pandering to racists and xenophobes” to win back support he was bleeding to Le Pen’s National Front. Said former socialist prime minister Michel Rocard of the new Sarkozy hard line, “We haven’t seen this sort of thing since the Nazis.”65 Such charges did not deter Sarkozy, his eye on 2012, from deporting 18,000 Roma Gypsies, despite their EU citizenship and their right to travel the continent.
When EU Justice commissioner Viviane Reding compared the Sarkozy expulsion of Gypsies to Vichy’s expulsions of Jews, Sarkozy exploded: “The comparison with the second world war and what happened in our country—it is an insult. It is a wound. It is a humiliation. It is an outrage.”66 He vowed to c
ontinue breaking up the illegal camps and deporting the Roma.
Yet, by spring 2011, in a poll of voter sentiment in the presidential election of 2012, Sarkozy was running behind Marine Le Pen, who had taken over the National Front from her father in January.67
Italy, with 800,000 Romanians, most of them new arrivals since 2007 and many of them Gypsies, is following France’s lead. Milan is dismantling its authorized Triboniano camp as a den of thieves, said the Washington Post, and “bulldozing hundreds of small impromptu camps inhabited by newer arrivals and issuing mass eviction notices to Roma families.” “Our final goal is to have zero Gypsy camps in Milan,” said vice mayor Riccardo de Corato, “These are dark-skinned people, not Europeans like you and me.… They prostitute their wives and children.”68
Germany, too, in the summer of 2010, played host to an ethnic row. In Germany Does Away with Itself, Thilo Sarrazin claimed his nation was being “dumbed down” by Turks and Kurds with higher birthrates but lower intelligence than Germans and Jews. “Hereditary factors” play a role in the disparity, wrote Sarrazin.69 His book sold 300,000 copies in seven weeks. By early 2011, it had sold 1.2 million. Polls found 31 percent of Germans agreed that Germans are “becoming dumber,” while 62 percent called Sarrazin’s comments justified. Merkel denounced him, but half of Germany opposed the move to oust Sarrazin from the Social Democratic Party.
A few years ago, Sarrazin’s book would not have been published. Now, concedes a New York Times headline, “Long Dormant After Wartime, German Pride Begins to Blink and Stir.”70
In ways large and small, Germany is flexing its muscles and reasserting a long-repressed national pride.… There are fears of emerging (or resurgent) chauvinism, seen recently in broadsides against Muslims by Thilo Sarrazin, who is stepping down from the board of the German Central Bank, after publishing a divisive best seller saying that Muslim immigrants are draining the social-welfare state and reproducing faster than ethnic Germans.71
A month after the Sarrazin affair, Merkel told young CDU members in Potsdam that Germany’s attempt to build a multicultural society where Turks, Arabs, and Germans live side by side had “utterly failed.” Thirty percent of Germans said in a survey that their country was now “overrun by foreigners,” while an equal number believe the foreigners had come for the social benefits.72 Within a few months of Merkel’s repudiation of multiculturalism, David Cameron had seen the light, declaring “state multiculturalism” a failure.73 He was instantly parroted by Sarkozy.
After New Year’s Day, 2011, Greek Interior Minister Christian Papoutsis announced the building of a 128-mile wall on the Turkish border after more than 100,000 people had crossed over in 2010. Greece has become the main entry point into the EU for Asian and African migrants. “The Greek public has reached its limits in taking in illegal immigrants.… Greece can’t take it anymore,” said Papoutsis.74
Ethnonationalism within nations manifests itself in tribalism. Belgium, created by the Great Powers in 1831, is likely the next nation in Europe to split—into a Dutch-speaking Flanders tied to Holland by language and culture and a French-speaking Wallonia.
Flanders is conservative, capitalist, wealthy. Wallonia is poor, socialist, statist. Flanders’s 60 percent of the population generates 70 percent of GDP and 80 percent of the exports. The Flemish grow weary of seeing their taxes—the top rate is 50 percent—going to sustain Wallonia where unemployment is three times as high. Flanders also seethes over a government decision to bring in French-speaking North Africans to give Walloons control of Brussels. The capital, though in Flanders, now has a French-speaking majority. By one poll, 43 percent of Flemish wish to secede.
“The enmity is everywhere,” writes the New York Times of this last binational and bilingual country in Western Europe, save Switzerland.75 Belgium, writes Muller, is “close to breaking up.”76 Bismarck was right, after all: “Whoever speaks of ‘Europe’ is wrong. It is a geographical expression.”77
The disintegration of the nations of Old Europe will likely be a nonviolent affair. Aging countries of an old and dying continent are not going to fight to prevent people from going their separate ways. But nonviolence is not likely to be the way the Asian and African nations come apart.
SECESSIONISTS IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
So grave was the crisis that Hu Jintao canceled his meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8, and flew home. Hundreds had been killed and over a thousand injured, mostly Han Chinese, in ethnic street battles with Uighurs in Xinjiang, the huge oil-rich western province that extends deep into Central Asia. The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who seek to create a new nation: East Turkestan. The surge of Chinese troops into Xinjiang bespoke Beijing’s fear that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen here. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the Chinese, as they have demonstrated in Tiananmen Square and Tibet, will not blanch at bloodletting to crush secession.
China’s anti-Uighur policy, writes Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, “encourages Han Chinese settlement and employment in the western Xinjiang region while jobless Uighurs, especially young women, are recruited to work in factories in eastern China. The focus on women is not accidental.” Said exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, “We believe it is part of the authorities’ effort to threaten our continuity as a people,” as the Chinese “are taking these women out of their communities at the time they would be getting married and starting families.”78
Beijing has sought to ensure permanent possession of Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Tibet by swamping the indigenous populations with Chinese settlers. This was Stalin’s way in the Baltic states: flood them with Russians and drown their culture, language, and identity. In July 2010, a front-page story in the New York Times, datelined Lhasa, Tibet, began:
They come by the new high-altitude trains, four a day, cruising 1,200 miles past snow-capped mountains. And they come by military truck convoy, lumbering across the roof of the world.
Han Chinese workers, investors, merchants, teachers and soldiers are pouring into remote Tibet. After the violence that ravaged this region in 2008, China’s aim is to make Tibet wealthier—and more Chinese.79
Beijing’s need to emphasize ethnic solidarity has been made more acute by the death of Maoism. Under the Great Helmsman, China had proclaimed herself vanguard of the world Communist revolution—the land of the true believers. Unlike the Soviet Union of Khrushchev and Brezhnev that had lost the faith, China had an ideological identity. Today, China has no ideology to hold the nation together. On the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution, Professor Zhang Ming of Renmin University in Beijing told the New York Times, “There is no ideology in China anymore.”
The government has no ideology. The people have no ideology. The reason the government is in power is because they can say, “I can make your lives better every day. I can give you stability. And I have the power.” As long as they can make people’s lives better, it’s O.K. But what happens on the day when they no longer can?80
Excellent question.
What the Chinese do have is five thousand years of history and pride in their rise from European and Japanese subjugation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to world power in the twenty-first. Most critically, though there is no one language, 90 percent of her people are Han Chinese—but 100 million are not.
What holds China together if a time of troubles begins?
On the sixtieth anniversary of Mao’s triumph, Michael Wines wrote that in China, “Patriotism is a staple of the education system, and citizens are exhorted to equate the state and the homeland.… [but] none of the Chinese narrative bears on the communists and their government.”81
[T]he official ideology of socialism and the revolutionary struggle against capitalist roaders, though still taught in universities and factory halls, is treated as dull propaganda by all except a dwindling number of true believers.
Historians and sociologists say that socialist ideology
once was a bedrock of Chinese patriotism and support of the government. Paradoxically, it was killed by the reform and the opening of China that began thirty years ago and brought the economic miracle of today.82
China’s Communist rulers face an inevitable crisis of legitimacy.
By abandoning Maoism and revolution, the party built a mighty nation, but destroyed the rationale for its monopoly of power. As long as China succeeds, the Communists can say: our party is indispensable. But what does the party fall back on should China begin to fail? How do they answer if the people say, “China is failing. It is time for you to move on and for us to find new leaders with new ideas, and try a new road”? What is the justification for a Communist Party retaining absolute power if that party no longer delivers the capitalist goods the Chinese people have come to expect?
Patriotism is said to be the last refuge of the scoundrel. Patriotism and the race card may be the last refuge of the Chinese Communists. This could mean trouble for the Taiwanese and the ethnic neighbors with whom Beijing has border and territorial quarrels: Russia, Japan, India, and the other claimants to the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.
Yet, the contrast between a serious China and an insouciant America on this issue of national identity is startling. Beijing floods its borderlands with Chinese and smothers religious and ethnic diversity to keep China whole and one. America, declaring, “Our diversity is our strength!” invites in the world to swamp her native-born. China sees ethnonationalism among its unhappy minorities as an existential threat. The U.S. elite regard ethnicity as the obsession of the underclass.
THE GLOBAL BALKANS
Ethnonationalism is on the boil across what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls the global Balkans. And India, the other emergent great power in Asia, is even more vulnerable than China, as she is more diverse. In Kashmir, India’s Muslim-majority state, a separatist movement is entrenched and the summer of 2010 saw some of the worst violence in years. Since independence in 1947, India has fought three wars with Pakistan, with Kashmir always at issue. New Delhi is also erecting a 2,500-mile fence around Bangladesh to keep arms smugglers and Muslim extremists out.83 Though a Hindu nation, India is also the world’s third largest Muslim nation with an estimated 150 million believers. In recent decades a rising Muslim militancy has called into being a Hindu party, the BJP, which is now India’s second largest.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 31