DRIVER PAPER: SOCIAL IDENTITY

**The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC
2020 project are those of individual participants. They are posted for
discussion purposes only and do not represent the views of the US
Government.**

DRIVER PAPER: SOCIAL IDENTITY

an issues paper

commissioned by the National Intelligence Council of the CIA

for the Budapest Seminar of the 2020 Study

28-30 April 2004

The brief for this paper asks for views on trends for social identity to
2020 under three principal headings:

-   ***How will religious and other social identity issues be
    manifest***

    a.  ***in public policy and***

    b.  ***Europe\'s relationship with the US?***

-   ***To what extent will the EU become an identity for the average
    European?***

A volatile moment: three assumptions are reversed or confounded

The paper wishes to propose that in each of the three perspectives, it
looks already likely that future trends will be systematically different
from those of the recent past, by which I mean the period up to 2002:
two actually reversed, and one confounded. Working assumptions of the
inter-regnum decade which followed the implosion of the USSR were three.

The first was that **toleration, interpreted as "multi-culturalism,"
would increase**. Relativism would continue to be seen as a virtue in
civil societies whose load-bearing cultural structure was forged from
the post-war welfare commitments on health, social security payments,
education and pensions. These provided a robust, shared, secular social
democratic vision for the generation who had learned in the 1960s that
God is Dead. Therefore religious identities could be as distinct as they
liked because they were amusingly quaint to the vast majority of
disinterested worshippers in the super-markets. Formal, received
religion was a hobby like any other, and as such decreasingly
politically potent. The fate of the cosmopolitan and much inter-married
Yugoslavian elite in Sarajevo was the first storm warning on this issue,
but ignored because the Balkans were considered to be outside the core
of western Europe and so not felt to be strictly relevant to it. What a
pity that Europeans so slackly forgot the role of the Balkans in their
own history of the July Crisis of 1914.

It is already plain that, in the face of Islamist unconditional
terrorism, toleration in open societies is returning to a more
traditional, less soggy formulation. The January 2004 all party
parliamentary report on the condition of immigrants in The Netherlands,
itself a response to the assassination of Pim Fortuyn (who was in turn
the most exciting and disturbing thing to happen in Dutch politics for a
generation), concluded that the multicultural interpretation of
toleration has failed. Immigrants were "at the top of all the wrong
lists" for social exclusion, educational and economic failure.
Henceforth they must learn Dutch, and make practical efforts to
integrate into Dutch culture and society, and submit to the primacy of
Dutch political values in public life. It was a watershed marker. Since
then, Trevor Phillips, epitome of political correctness and the Chairman
of the British Commission on Racial Equality has declared
multiculturalism a failure in preventing racialism. The Chief Rabbi has
since endorsed the view that all faith communities should operate with
"two languages" -- meaning cultural as well as spoken languages. In
France, the fragility and prominence of Republican symbols has led to
the decision to forbid the wearing of the *hijab* (woman's head-scarf)
in schools and other public institutions.

The second assumption was that **whereas there were clearly**
**distinctions between American and European goals and values, these
were reducing** to amicable jokes about food and pronunciation within a
continuing shared political concept of The West which NATO had expressed
during the Cold War -- the thing to which the former Warsaw Pact peoples
yearned to return. The angry and noisy wave of popular protest from the
active Left and anti-Israeli groups about American military
interventions, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, was accompanied by a
quieter and probably broader unease about these actions. This was
especially so in a Germany now three generations socialised into the
idea that force plays no role in international politics. However, this
potent and widespread political anti-Americanism, which has luridly
etched the differences between Europeans and Americans in this one
narrow segment of life, fracturing the political resolve of The West, is
not the whole story, for this assumption is confounded; for the reversal
on the political agenda, especially on what to do about the Middle East,
is not matched by a reversal of trend in socialisation. So what we
witness is a European schizophrenia about America which does not exactly
equate with, but does track, Rumsfeld's mercilessly accurate distinction
of "Old" and "New" Europe. This tension will not quickly resolve. It may
be expected to be a source of sudden upsurges of emotion and of
unsteadiness in strategic direction. Therefore it may be expected to be
actively destabilising in Euro-American relations to 2020.

The third assumption was that as, like lovers, the European political
elite flitted from Summit tryst to Summit tryst -- from Maastricht to
Amsterdam, from Laeken to Nice to Brussels -- **the European "project"
inexorably took on substance** and, in is own strange language,
"competences" (*ie* power). The name changes from "EEC" to "EC" to "EU"
told us this. The 60,000 -- and counting -- regulations of the *acquis
communautaire* continued to gobble up new areas of power to over-rule
national legislatures, and never disgorged any. The Euros in everyone's
pockets showed the daily reality of the European identity. And all the
blue flags with stars, were plastered all over the place. Yet,
surprisingly, by early 2004, it is now evident that the dream of "ever
closer (federal) union" and the abolition of the constituent
nation-states of Europe, first conceived on the battlefield of Verdun
and pursued consistently ever since, will shortly face its Waterloo (the
analogy being deliberately chosen since it is more than a literary
conceit). In 2003 there occurred a fundamental change in American policy
towards the European "project" -- the first in fifty years - which will
reliably have consequences long into the future. We are near the end of
the "European Union" -- a graft which never took onto the western
European body politic any more than did the other *grand project* of
social engineering, also conceived in those first years of the last
century, but applied more brutally to the body of Russia, and rejected a
decade earlier.

Why has this happened? A perfect storm

I suggest that the common underlying reason why none of these
assumptions holds now, whereas they previously seemed to be plausible,
is because the period 2003-4 marked the functional end of the
inter-regnum that followed the failure of the summer coup of 1991 in
Moscow. A central aspect of this was American assumption of active
power, which involved the change towards Europeans reflected in
Rumsfeld's historic distinction between "old" and "new" Europe. In fact,
as will shortly be explained, I suspect that the "tipping point" that
has been tipping in terms of social identity across all of Europe (from
the Atlantic to the Urals, as we were once fond of saying), is part of
an historically unusual confluence of forces -- a perfect storm.
Although not strictly part of the brief for this paper, one should
mention in passing that the era of "globalisation" as a dominant
economic ideology seems also to have been blown away. The useful
practicalities of global networking and outsourcing should not be
confused with anything deeper. Few economic ideologies last for more
that thirty years or so, unless assisted by state Terror (in which case,
in the USSR for near-by example, a fake federation and command economy
-- you pretend to pay us and we pretend to work - was keep on its feet
like the living dead gerontocrats of the Politburo, for sixty).

Framing considerations

Since 2002, I suggest that we can see three framing trends whose
essential natures are decreasingly contentious and whose effects upon
the identity questions to hand, have been already profound, and show all
signs of continuing to be so:

-   Arrival of the American imperial "moment" (the adjective is employed
    descriptively, merely; and it is a period of time, not a structure)

-   Advancing erosion of the post-World War post-colonial state
    settlement, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of former
    Austro-Hungarian east/central Europe and of the former Ottoman
    west/central Asia. The crisis of governance in Arab and Islamic
    lands is especially acute.

-   Draining of power from *all three* of the post 1945 multilateral
    institutions, *viz*, NATO, the United Nations and the European
    project (currently badged as "Union").

In a few words, the implication of the conjunction of these forces in
the perfect storm of our times is that I see our moment as being one of
General Crisis: the first since that of the 18^th^ Century which gave us
the unfinished conversations about the relative importance and strengths
of rights and obligations that was prematurely curtailed by the success
of the French Revolution. Asked once (some versions say, asked by Henry
Kissinger) what he believed to be its significance Chou en-Lai replied
that it was too early to say, which was indeed true in the 1970s. But
after the cold war and inter-regnum, we can hazard a view. It was a
technical success as a *coup d'état*, but not a settled outcome, as
Edmund Burke presciently warned would be the case, at the time, and as
the succession of two Empires, five Republics, an absolutist Presidency,
and the military defeats of 1757, 1815, 1871, 1914, 1940 (and
occupation), 1953, 1955, 1957, have subsequently shown. This is one
practical reason why confronted with a collapsing domestic regime the
French instinct is to write another constitution. They did it
domestically, routinely, and in 1991 as the European project went into
crisis, decided to do the same to it. These conversations about rights
and obligations and the construction of a social contract now reopen
again - really for the first time since that time.

Our general crisis is one where identity questions are central, for it
has the responsibility to protect human rights at its very heart, for
the reasons which Kofi Annan eloquently expressed in his seminal essay
on the two sovereignties in *The Economist* on 18^th^ September 1999.
"State sovereignty in its most basic sense is being redefined ... States
are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their
peoples and not vice versa. At the same time, individual sovereignty --
by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in
the Charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties -- has been
enhanced by renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights.
When we read the Charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its
aim is to protect individual human rights, not to protect those who
abuse them".

At once we notice how the arrival of the sovereignty of the individual
at centre stage has two effects. First, it rebukes the relativist
orthodoxy of the period 1960s-1990s. Human Rights are Universal; so if
they are supreme, then they quash the special pleadings of cultural
relativism. In particular the collision with traditional Islamic values,
especially in respect of the disadvantaging of women, cannot but be
bitter. The UNDP's *Arab Human Development Report 2002*, prepared by a
team of Arab economists, which documented the self-inflicted wounds from
lack of freedom, lack of female emancipation and lack of contemporary
innovation in the knowledge economy across the Arab world was as
heartening -- by the fact of being done - as it was depressing -- in
what it showed.

In western Europe, this "tipping point" is the apotheosis of the
soixante-huitards; and we see their (our, let's be frank, I was at
school in Paris in 1968), conversion occurring both with the zeal of the
lapsed jesuit and with immediate leverage on social discourse and on
political power; for now is our moment on the throne. Let Joschka
Fischer stand emblematic for his age cohort. I return to the practical
implications below. Secondly, the sovereignty of the individual asks
troubling questions about Agency: who/what is competent and legitimate
to act for whom?

This contention between the "two sovereignties" is occurring in a crisis
where four other features are of importance. First, it seems to me, as
indeed to many other analysts, is that in both rich and poor societies
-- and for very different reasons in each -- we are moving into 'low
trust societies', as the industrial sociologist Alan Fox was first to
describe. (The concept has more recently been popularised by Frank
Fukuyama.) The forces which are driving people back into themselves and
reducing their confidence in public space and public probity cross a
spectrum, from the spectre of unconditional terror which can blight
public transport and city life, to the demonstrated and shared secular
trend across most of the mature democracies of citizens to decline to
participate voluntarily in formal political processes by voting: what is
often described by sociologists as "engaged abstentionism". It fuels the
contradictory demands for instant gratification, for instant service and
for universal and faultless infrastructure. Why? Because there is an
eroded sense of common obligation or of *res publica.* (Why should I
wait for anyone else? I have no responsibilities except to my dominating
sense of my own self worth.)

This is in many ways one of the most interesting and powerful of trends:
one deeply connected to the arrival of the information society and the
emergence of the new type of citizen who is wired, informed, potentially
phenomenally empowered but often, indeed perhaps usually, lives a
physically isolated and politically passive life in which the
expressions of political preference are more made at the supermarket
till than at the ballot box. As the sociologist Anthony Giddens was
among the first to notice, such people have unprecedented control over
their own self-presentation -- who shall I be today? Their identities
are truly cosmopolitan because IT and the jet 'plane have abolished,
indeed pulverised, time and space. Everywhere looks the same to this
elite, because it is: a Hilton is a Hilton is a Hilton. But these
autistic Anglophone post-moderns demonstrate only one response to what
Giddens usefully but excruciatingly calls the "disembedding" of
identity.

Move across the spectrum a little and we find an embattled and
confounded sub-group: French intellectuals. Whenever a nationalism is
linguistically rooted, and it is more so the case for France than
anywhere else in Europe, retreat in the language is quickly amplified
into a more generalised cultural *anomie*. On every objective indicator
of the world-wide advance of English and the Anglo-American business
model, especially in Europe, the French elite have reasons to be afraid;
and that fear has expressed itself with increasing vigour and rancour in
recent times by what the commentator Dominique Moisi has named
"aggressive defeatism". It has expressed itself especially through the
politics of the "European Union", of which more in the final section of
this paper. It was seen illuminatingly in the United Nations speeches of
the previous Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, during the 2003
Iraq crisis, in subdued fury when claiming ownership of the concept of
*le droit de l'homme* which the British and Americans refused to
concede.

Move to the far other end of the spectrum of reaction to post-modern
dissolution of embedded identities and we encounter the flourishing
fields of Christian revivalists and evangelicals in America, of
fundamentalist rabbinical literalists in Israel and eventually the
revived medieval desert of Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden that demands
the rectification of "the tragedy of Andalucia" (*ie* reversal of the
loss of Granada in 1492 heralding the defeat of Moorish Spain.[^1])

All these fiercely reactive belief systems have encapsulation in common.
Encapsulation is that social quality of any self-consistent belief
system which can resist falsification by excluding external reality.
They do this efficiently to the point where they break, which they
always do catastrophically. Incidentally, all these developments imply a
need for a fundamental renovation of political discourse that those
presenting themselves at a formal democratic election offer to their
electorates.

Thinking during a period of remission 9/11- 3/11: unconditional
terrorism

Co-incident with the declaration of these trends has come a great
cultural shock. One of the encapsulated belief-systems reacting to
post-modernity dug deep into the fertile ground of the Qur'an. While it
was the failure of President Bush the First and Colin Powell to complete
the mandate of resolution 678 in 1991 by removing the Saddam regime at
that time, which meant that US forces had to remain in Saudi Arabia to
police the No Fly Zone, which pushed Bin Laden over the edge, and while
it was President Clinton's "wag the dog" encumbrances in 1996 which may
have deterred him from pre-empting when he could and should have done
so, it was neither president who created Bin Laden's view of the world.
That, the *salafiyya* tendency, is expressed insofar as there is one
convenient and powerful source, in the thinking and writing of the
terrifying Egyptian Qutb.

> The reasons for jihad are these: to establish Allah's authority on
> earth; to arrange human affairs according to the true guidance
> provided by Allah; to abolish all the satanic forces and satanic
> systems of life...there are only two ways and not a third, either
> submit to Allah and his Messenger..or else to follow *jahiliyya*.[^2]
>
> Islam cannot accept any compromise with *jahiliyya*, either in its
> concept or in its mode of living derived from this concept. Either
> Islam will remain, or j*ahiliyya*: Islam cannot accept or agree to a
> situation which is half-Islam, half-*jahiliyya*. In this respect,
> Islam's stand is very clear. It says that the truth is one and cannot
> be divided: if it is not truth then it must be falsehood..."
> (quotations from Sayyid Qutb, *Milestones*, American Trust
> Publications, 1990, p.57, pp 112-13)

This remorseless Manicheanism is classically encapsulated and as such,
hugely reassuring to those within its shell. Inside this shell, one can
move through and defy *jahiliyya* even as it forces you to compromise
with it because it shapes all aspects of your daily life. Such is the
world-view which underpinned the unconditional terrorism of 9/11. The
terrorism which we now encounter from these jagged shards of
fundamentalist Islamist cannot be bribed, negotiated with or capitulated
to (except by the prostrate self-abnegation of the *dhim* whose infidel
life is lived only at the Caliph's gracious whim. Jews, by the way, can
never be saved). It can only be contained, which is perilously
difficult, as the Spanish recently discovered, or pre-empted: arrested
if possible, killed if necessary.

I have spelled out a little of the nature of these beliefs in order to
underscore two points, which answer the NIC's examination question.
First, that those who enter the encapsulated world-view not only become
capable of unconditional acts ("you love life, we love death" etc), but
actively promote circumstances which will precipitate a clash of
civilisations in which all Muslims are flung into their hands. Secondly,
to suggest that in the no-go areas of the tawdry and barren slums of
Algerians near Paris, and in other ghettoised pockets of unemployed
Muslim youth (in the Netherlands, in the post-industrial wastelands of
the British midlands), one can see the latent potential for huge and
sudden rupture, with consequently commensurate impacts in public policy.

To date, this has not occurred. This is because we are in remission
after 9/11, not for want of trying. 3/11 in Madrid was a partial end of
the remission and a return to virulence. Its effects have been so
surreally perverse that they merit a short section in a moment. But 3/11
was not the terminal end of remission. However, were the London
Underground to be successfully attacked, I can imagine that the British
State would be unable to avoid giving the Islamists exactly what they
want; for Islam would have to become a proscribed religion, and mass
internment of young Muslims would have to occur. This "wildcard" is
depressingly easily to predict for some point before 2020. Eliza
Manningham-Buller, current head of MI5, has done as much by stating that
a major attack in Britain is "inevitable."

There is a converse of such acts, which may also be a trend to 2020;
indeed, I rather expect it. The arising of the challenge of alienated
and encapsulated fundamentalists may engender an equal and opposite
reaction. It might precipitate more quickly the trend to rediscover
old-fashioned identities, national -- even patriotic -- of which there
is already real if still fragmentary evidence in many parts of the
post-modern spectrum. Perhaps modernity isn't quite dead in Europe, yet?
In this regard, we might anticipate a *rapprochement* with American
cultural values even as divergence with political approaches to the
Middle East, and the use of force, continue.

3/11 as a wildcard: bombing out a government; bombing out the EU

The confounded assumption about Euro-American relations -- pulling in
opposite directions - seems to me to be an especially significant one to
watch. Recent events have shown the sort of dynamics we may expect. The
Madrid bombings had two indisputable consequences. Al Qa'eda changed the
result of a West European election: the Aznar Government was, without
any doubt, bombed out of power and the Socialists, bombed in. Among the
defeated Popular Party supporters, acid jokes were shared about how Bin
Laden would be offered the Foreign Ministry as a reward for his
assistance. Zapatero's precipitate leap back into the arms of M Chirac
then revived the passionate anti-American, anti-Israeli and -- by a not
very long step -- anti-Semitic currents which had coursed through
European public debate about "the Iraq war", placed in inverted commas
because it was so evident that it was valued and stimulated more as a
vehicle for these deeper emotions than from concern for Iraqis.

Yet here lies the irony. For at the same time that the formal political
disputes of transatlantic relations have shattered the notion of a
united West - Americans really are from Mars and Europeans from Venus if
we believe the opinion polls about how to deal with unconditional
terrorism -- the social behaviour of Europeans seems to be moving much
more consistently in an American direction.

A British diplomat and celebrated enthusiast for European integration,
Robert Cooper, became known to the public for an article (now amplified
into a short book, *The Breaking of Nations*), which offered a
superficially attractive tri-partite taxonomy of societies. "Pre-modern"
societies described the chaos and poverty of much of the post-colonial
world. "Modern" states were those like America and China where citizens
still felt their personal identities strongly in patriotic terms, often
seeing the Other as an enemy; but some "post-modern" societies had
transcended that state-bound frame of reference. Archetypically, the
peoples of the "European Union" had done this. Never again would the
French and the Germans fight wars.

The General Crisis of 2002-4 has served to question this taxonomy, as we
wonder how different Europeans really are; and 3/11 has also bombed this
issue to the foreground. For better or worse, and thanks to Al Qa'eda,
Cooper's suppositions about a transcending European identity are about
to be put to an unexpected (and for European Federalists, dangerously
exposed) test.

To what extent will the EU become an identity for the average European?

The lesson which Jean Monnet and his friend Arthur Salter, the two true
fathers of the European Union, learned from the failure of Aristide
Briand's frank attempt in the late 1920s to form a European federal
state which subsumed and superseded the pre-existing independent states
of Europe was that this shared goal could only be achieved by stealth:
by an indirect approach. The consequent three generations' long history
of the *grand projet* has therefore been a game of Grandmother's
Footsteps: each move really being about something else, namely advancing
to the ever closer union without saying so*.*

But suddenly, the "EU" is falling victim to the too hasty and
overreaching ambitions of the policy elites who subscribe to that
project. Witness the profound troubles of the Euro, which will only
increase for simple structural reasons, the rancorous attempt to write a
federal constitution and the puzzling difficulty, even impossibility, of
extending new suzerainty over the recently liberated and restless
eastern Europeans, whose entry to the EU was Britain's rear-guard
diplomatic triumph over the French. But more fundamentally than in these
specifics, the "EU" has fallen victim to its failure in the last 50
years to achieve anywhere in its existing core a place for a
transcending European identity in the hearts and visions of the citizens
of European countries. Now that cold winds blow, in increasing numbers,
and in many countries, they spurn it. The open borders become a problem,
not a solution. Witness the general stampede to erect barriers against
free movement of the new entrants. Being "European" is not the same as
having an "EU" identity.

Before 3/11, the EU was already fracturing. Just as Colonel Nasser had
been the recruiting sergeant for the Treaty of Rome in March 1957, so
Saddam Hussein was its disintegrator, as the 2003 Iraq crisis laid bare
the irreconcilable differences of world-view among Europeans, and
demonstrated the weakness of the "Old" European core. But underlying the
trigger event was a longer run trend: its continuing -- indeed
deepening - lack of democratic legitimacy. The European Union is an
elite project which has never been assented adequately in any state. The
ponderous EU *directoire* is like a veneer lying upon but not stuck to
the table. And on past record, it does not deserve trust. One Commission
(Santer) has had to go in disgrace; the mounting evidence on the
Eurostat debacle is that members, at the least, of the present
Commission (Prodi) will have to go too. The temptations to lazy
corruption in such an expansive and opulently funded bureaucracy, in
surreally grand buildings -- the latter-day Versailles parachuted onto
Brussels -- and staffed by political patronage, are too great for
ordinary mortals to resist.

The public are increasingly unimpressed and show it. Eurobarometer polls
show a decade-long increasing disenchantment with "Europeanness". Fully
two thirds of the British cannot see the point of the European Union,
and, if Blair offers (is forced to offer) them a referendum, will say
so. But significantly for this study, it is not just the usual suspects
who feel this way. Across the continent, the younger age cohort is *far
less* enthusiastic than its parents, the soixante-huitards, who in turn
are less enthusiastic than the war-time generation. All this despite the
sluicing of public money and pro EU propaganda into schools and
universities where the EU's "Departments of European Studies" with their
Jean Monnet Chairs, simply fail to attract students.

Europeans consistently refuse to vote for (*ie* confer legitimacy upon)
the European Parliament. The two key referenda of the 1945-2003 period
were the French Maastricht vote, approved by barely 1% - this in the
country for whose benefit the whole thing was set up, as de Gaulle
candidly once explained: "Europe is a means for France to regain the
stature she has lacked since Waterloo as the first among the world's
nations.."

\- and the 2003 Swedish rejection of the Euro. This was important for
the quality of the vote in one of the most socially cohesive and
successful societies, 2^nd^ in the UN Human Development Index, as well
as the nature of the vote -- a deeper rejection than of the Euro only.

That demands a comment. The Euro has become the first major strut to
break. There is no unified "Euro-zone" that will map onto that of the
political project and there is unlikely to be in the next decade. So
this indispensable actuator of the Project has been vitiated. It is a
predictable consequence of the too-hastily accelerated introduction of a
shared currency for reasons openly stated by the President of the
Commission Prodi, to be not economic at all, but deeply political. All
the key economic pre-requisites (labour mobility, convergent economic
cycles, convergent taxation and property owning traditions) were,
therefore unsurprisingly, absent. The political deal by Kohl to allow
the launch rate to be set knowingly against German need in order to let
the southern tier in, was, of course, a great risk; a risk that has not
paid off. There are now three (and only three) choices: a switch to
German-favouring interest rates with dire consequences for the southern
tier and Ireland; German denunciation and a return to the Mark and an
independent Bundesbank -- likely to be electorally popular given that
2/3 of Germans would have rejected the Euro had they been asked (which
is why they weren't), but presently deemed inconceivable - or busting
the Growth & Stability Pact rules, which is what is being done:
debauching of the currency. But look at the long view. The Euro might
well fail; and in the long view, that is neither unexpected nor
particularly important. In history, currencies come and currencies go.
Far more significant from the Swedish vote has been the lesson to the
Accession states that "inevitabilism" is not inevitable, after all. They
may have signed all sorts of agreements as a condition of entry; but
they may decide to follow the constant French and more recent German
lead and simply ignore them.

Dutch fury at the French and German wrecking of the Euro Stability Pact
is now thought likely to turn into a rejection of the Giscardian federal
constitution at referendum. The original Six are breaking. Were they to
be given a chance, the British would vote heavily against, also.
Europeans, in short, have not and never have had, consistently, the
fabled *ésprit communautaire*. The Dutch did, for a bit, and gave up the
second strongest European currency after the Swiss Franc, in that
spirit, which they now repent. Europeans are what they are: Dutch,
Danes, Germans or Greeks, Italians and, especially, French in the terms
with which former Prime Minister Bérégevoy, echoing De Gaulle, commended
the Maastricht Treaty to the Assemblée Nationale to "make Europe without
un-making France." The British remain what Winston Churchill said they
were: "with but not of" Europe. Ever since they joined, they have been
unhappily part of the French project. De Gaulle was of course right to
veto the British application. If they joined, they would eventually rain
on his parade. Indeed, had Nasser not nationalised the Suez Canal and
had Eisenhower not cut off Eden at the knees, quite probably, Britain
would never have joined. A key index of the untransformed nature of
Europe is the tiny percentage of EU citizens living outside their native
countries. Basically the very rich and the very poor. The other is the
interesting evidence of how unimportant the EU has been to the current
success of the most energetic (British) economy -- except as a negative
drag though over-regulation, destruction of its agriculture, fisheries
etc.

All this is an aspect of the deeper malaise of late modern, alienated
electorates as well as the structural flaws in the Brussels
*directoire*. In short, this over-badged Project simply is not grafting
into the natural frame of reference of Europeans. At best it is a nice
gravy train (in Dublin or Athens) while it lasts. And why should it? It
has recently been calculated that in real terms, Germany has now paid as
much in support for the EU since the end of the Third Reich, mainly
flowing into support for French agriculture via the CAP, as was
extracted as reparation after the First World War. This is unlikely to
continue much longer. There is no accident in the skewed benefits of the
CAP, nor that the Netherlands, with one third of the population,
contributes six times the amount of France to EU funds. Aware of the
threats to their creation, the French elite have actually hastened its
undoing.

Given that the strategic objective remains that (in de Gaulle's, as ever
memorable, image) "the skilful French rider shall ride the sturdy German
horse", unseated by reunification and the German return to active
foreign policy over the Balkans, the rider needed a new strategy to
re-mount and re-gain control. This was the French 1990s policy of
acceleration, (accelerated monetary union, the rush to the Giscardian
federal constitution etc). The non-French elite, often superannuated
national politicians and the raft of Eurocrats, whose jobs and pensions
now depend on the merry-go-round going round, assented and they have
driven the federal agenda forward in *inverse* relationship to the
evidence of public assent and support, which is a very precarious thing
to do in democracies. To the evident relief of the non-federalist
majority, the Poles and Spanish blocked Giscard's botched constitution
at the Brussels IGC last November. Then came 3/11.

Al Qu'aeda has bombed the Constitution back onto the immediate agenda.
Zapatero having capitulated on voting weights, the Poles will do a deal
and the whole thing returns during the Irish Presidency. Blair, who
needs to think about his next job, quickly decided to sign,
appropriately enough on 18^th^ June -- Waterloo Day. But whose Waterloo
will this be? If we are to use battle imagery, this latest extravagant
federal *démarche* breaks Monnet's basic rule -- the Rule of Stealth.
The federal project is openly exposed for what it is, and Europeans in
increasing numbers do not like what they see. As such, the push for the
constitution is likely to bring Europeans to a tipping point, of which
the Swedish referendum was a pre-figuring. It is, in short, a bridge too
far.

I see no serious reasons to think that by 2020 Europe will be other than
what it has always been, namely Europe (not the "European Union"). And
if Islamist unconditional terror strikes again, as I assume that it will
before its time is over, I think the chances rise that the combination
of Western cultural common cause and Eastern European political
preference will produce rapprochement with the USA.

The result of Waterloo, in short, will not be reversed. The worse the
visible evidence of terrorism becomes, the more extreme becomes the
tension within European schizophrenia about the USA and the more likely
the defeat of the hopes of swan-song Gaullism. However, as the Iron Duke
found to be the case in 1815, it may be "... a damned nice thing - the
nearest run thing you ever saw in your life."

[^1]: ^^ the video-tape left by the Madrid train-bombers reportedly
    referred to al-Andalus as "the land of Tarik bin Ziayd" -- the first
    Arab leader to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in AD 711. For
    Islamists, as for quite different reasons, for Chinese, time and
    memory move much more slowly than for amnesiac westerners.

[^2]: ^^ the form of government, beliefs and ways of life of
    non-Muslims. Broadly *dar al-harb* (the realm of war/unbelief)