A long second look at the returns from Great Britain reveals a
sobering truth: Either
the conservative parties of the West find a way to accommodate a
resurgent
nationalism, or they move off stage.
In Scotland and Wales, where the idea of independence has taken
root,
Conservatives lost every seat. And unable to decide whether to keep
the British
pound or yield sovereignty to the New Europe, they lost more than
half their seats in
Parliament. The Tory rout mirrors the 1993 debacle of Canada's
Progressive
Conservatives, who lost the western provinces to the populist
Reform Party and
every seat in Quebec to a nationalist party bent on secession. This
June's election
should confirm 1993, taking Canada toward breakup. French President
Jacques
Chirac has gotten the message and called an election for June.
His fear is that anti-European sentiment is rising to the point
where if he held off
another year, opposition to giving up the French franc could
dynamite the European
Union. Whatever one thinks of the National Front and Jean-Marie Le
Pen, he has
defined the stakes in this election: "What is being hidden from
you," he told a Paris
audience of 10,000, "is that France is threatened with extinction,
not in 10 years but
before the turn of the century, in less than four years. Who would
have believed that
the year 2000 would have sounded the death knell of a country? What
Chirac is
asking today is to be an accomplice to this national suicide."
Nationalism has heretofore been an ally of Germany's Helmut Kohl,
who brilliantly
managed reunification when the Wall came down and who has supported
the
ingathering of the German people. But Kohl's party is now driving
to give up the
German mark for a single European currency, an idea that appalls
proud Germans.
What relevance has all this for American politics? A great deal.
Just as ethnic identity,
militancy and loyalty are tearing Quebec from Canada and Scotland
from England, so
ethnic militancy among blacks and Hispanics in America is tearing
at the fabric of
national union. And just as British and French conservatives are at
sword's point over
whether to surrender further control over their national destinies
to Europe, the
Republican Party is rancorously divided over sovereignty, free
trade, immigration and
NATO expansion -- the claims of the nation-state vs. the commands
of globalism.
At its heart, the GOP is nationalist and populist. Evidence can be
found in the party
platforms of 1992 and 1996, in the sentiment of younger members of
Congress and in
surveys showing support for a "timeout" on immigration and an end
to foreign aid.
A
recent poll by the Dole campaign's Tony Fabrizio found all elements
of the GOP
agreeing that trade deals such as NAFTA "send jobs overseas" rather
than "grow our
economy and create jobs" in the United States. Yet, the Republican
establishment
remains faithfully wedded to a Woodrow Wilson-FDR vision: free
trade, arms control
and steady subordination of sovereignty for the greater global
good.
The party
nominees of '92 and '96 stand with Clinton on NAFTA, foreign aid,
accession to the
World Trade Organization, the Mexican bailout, intervention in
Bosnia, expansion of
NATO, the Chemical Weapons Convention and extension of
most-favored-nation
trading privileges for Beijing.
The followers of the establishment may be dwindling, but it
continues to soldier on in
the name of internationalism. The conservative parties of the West
are in crisis
because they have failed to make the transition to the
post-Reagan-Thatcher era,
while the liberal parties have.
Tony Blair in England and Bill
Clinton in America have
given their militant minorities what they demand. In Britain, it is
a vote on a new
autonomous parliament in Scotland and Wales. In America, it is
support for continued
high immigration, and resistance to any repeals of preferential
treatment and
"affirmative action." Indifferent to the claims of nationhood and
sovereignty,
Clinton and Blair echo the internationalism of George Bush and Bob
Dole. This leaves
nationalists in both parties in both countries out in the cold, but
the situation will not
long endure. The issues are too momentous, the stakes too high, the
pull of
nationalism too strong. Both Britain and Canada could break up.
Both are in danger
of losing their independence -- the British to Europe, the
Canadians to the United
States.
These are graver matters than anything discussed in the
British election or the
'96 American election. Such matters need to be debated, and western
nationalists
need parties of their own. "Euroskeptics" in Britain are moving to
capture the
remnants of the Conservative Party.
In the United States, the best candidate for takeover is the
Republican Party. And the
issue on which present leadership might best be challenged is
whether it opposes
Clinton's decision to extend trade privileges to his friends in
Beijing.
