Return of the European tribes

Ralph Peters:

TODAY, the Dutch vote on the proposed European Union constitution. They're expected to reject it, as the French did Sunday. But whatever the result of the referendum, something's happening in Europe that international elites swore was impossible.

Tribes are back.

In Europe, they're called nations, which sounds more distinguished. But the French voters who refused to submerge their identity in a greater European state behaved as tribally as any Hutus or Tutsis in central Africa — or any Arab clan in Iraq.

Certainly, there are practical issues at stake. The French fear an invasion of their welfare state by hardworking East Europeans. They dread hints of a market economy and Turkey's prospective membership in the EU. The Dutch are still reeling from the failure of their multicultural experiment and the grisly rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

But the underlying cause of the voter shift from continental integration to the nouveau chauvinism erupting from Paris to Moscow is far cruder and more explosive: the undiminished importance of group identity, of primal belonging.

If anything should strike us about this turn from Greater Europe back to a Europe of competing parts, it's how wildly the intellectuals were wrong and how ineffectual elite power monopolies proved in the end. For a half century, Europe's approved thinkers insisted that a new age had begun, that historical identities were dying. The wealth and power of a borderless Europe would rival, if not exceed, that of the United States.

Instead, we see a squabbling, grasping continent. Far from feeling solidarity with their Polish or Hungarian counterparts, French farmers view them as the enemy. Labor unions in Germany and France have turned Slavic job-seekers into bogeymen who'll rob the daily bread from the native-born.

The Dutch feel doubly under siege, invaded by an immigrant community that rejects their values, while simultaneously in danger of being gobbled up by a leviathan Europe that would seize control of their destiny.

For Europe's political elites — accustomed to docile, bought-off populations — the turn against further EU integration has been an enormous shock.

The German vote that thumped Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder last month was a vote against globalization and a European meta-identity. In his first public appearance after Sunday's "Non!" vote, President Jacques Chirac looked like a walking corpse.

Satisfying to watch? You bet. But the pleasure we can take in the humiliation of Schroeder and Chirac masks the fact that, for all their rhetoric and anti-American posturing, they were do-nothing, status-quo leaders whose authority never rose above the nuisance level. We may come to miss their fecklessness and gourmet-level pandering as nationalism swells among their electorates.

Whenever Europe's nationalist tide flows back in, the innocent drown.

The EU is far from Europe's first attempt at integration. The medieval church exercised transnational authority until the Reformation galvanized German identity. The multicultural Habsburg empire split in two, thanks to primitive nationalism. After the Great War, its Austro-Hungarian remnant shattered under nationalist pressures.

Group identity is indestructible. Despite genocide, Armenia rose again. Poland's back. The phony Yugoslav identity died in a storm of bullets, leaving behind antique nations. The Soviet empire dissolved into bloody nationalism. Irish pubs have conquered the world, but it's hard to find an EU-themed watering hole.

Forget the genetic arguments against racial purity. Ignore the historical facts. What matters is who men and women think they are. Belief is always stronger than truth. It certainly would appear rational for Europeans to bury their differences and subscribe to a greater, unified identity. But humankind isn't rational. That's been the crucial lesson of our time.

What man or woman on that old, bloodstained continent says, "I'm a European" with the same conviction he or she says "I'm French" or "I'm Polish" or "I'm Russian"? The last time we heard that Europe had overcome its national identities was on the eve of World War One.

France may not invade Germany this summer, but we need to escape the illusion of a new, pacifist Europe too sophisticated to repeat past errors. This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the source of history's grimmest wars.

Europe may be good for some ugly surprises as its states struggle with faltering economies, declining birthrates, angry Islamic minorities and a lack of opportunity for the young that resembles the plight of the developing world. Expecting Europe's nationalities to behave is as foolish as hoping to beat the house in Vegas.

We may discover that Europe has changed less than any other part of the globe, that all the bureaucrats in Brussels can no more suppress the local tribes than could the Roman legions. For all of our concern about a European super-state, we may live to regret the return to a Europe of nations.

The really amazing thing about the reactions of journalists and intellectuals to the French and Dutch votes is that there seems to be so much surprise at the fact that humans are a tribal species who will put their own groups interests above those of other groups.

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