The American Spectator

We have heard all that before, of course. It is the message of the socialist internationals, the message with which the Communist Party once seduced the intellectuals of Europe, so that they would lend their weight to the Soviet conquest of their continent. It is the message propounded by the Italian Eurocommunists, who played their own important part in working for a transnational European Union. Like all messages devoted to “the future of an illusion,” it needs an enemy in order to recruit its friends. That this enemy should be America, the latest and greatest example of the nation-state, lies in the logic of the case. We should not be surprised, therefore, if anti-American attitudes now occupy the place in European debates that were previously occupied by the anti-bourgeois posture of the French and Italian leftists, and the anti-Semitic posture of their rightist opponents.

WHERE DOES THIS leave American foreign policy? The first conclusion to draw is that America is destined to be increasingly alone in the world. The “democracies” with which the U.S. is allied in Europe are no longer true democracies, since their law, their domestic policy, and — if things go according to plan — their foreign policy will soon be dictated to them by committees which they can neither elect nor reject. Those committees will be programmed according to a transnational ideology that is completely at variance with the American vision. Their policy will not be to spread democracy beyond the borders of the European Union, but to extinguish democracy within them. As for the Middle East and Islam, the European machine will continue to appease the Islamists, by denying the religious and cultural tradition of Europe, and abasing itself before the ongoing invasion.

The second conclusion is that the loss will not be America’s but Europe’s. The European project has imposed upon the nations of Europe a policy of “free flow” of peoples, which has made it impossible to ensure that the people living in its territories share the loyalty of their immediate neighbors. The inexorable movement towards ethnic, religious, and racial conflict has begun, and — without the nation-state and a strong ideology of nationhood — there is little hope of preventing it.

The third conclusion is that if, as I have argued, nationhood is a precondition of democracy, it would be better for America to build alliances with genuine or emerging nation-states — with Japan, South Korea, Australia, India — than with the European powers. It would be better to work for the democratization of China than for the democratization of the Islamic world. It would be better still to retreat from too much involvement in a world of lunatics, and to build up defenses — at home. For home is how a nation-state defines itself.