Good article, even if it goes a bit too far in blaming EU bureaucrats for the loss of national identity. In reality, many Europeans, especially the young professionally employed, have transcended nationalistic identities pretty much on their own, and view themselves less and less in nationalistic terms. The Frenchman who marries an Italian and goes to work for a company in Belguim is obviously more likely to adopt a European identity.

The evolution from a traditional European understanding of "born-into" citizenship to the American "chosen and acquired" citizenship is in fact a good thing, not a bad thing, for Europe.

Understandably, there are lots of winners and losers in the tumultuous yet inevitable process of economic liberalization (in the European sense of the word) and modernization in the new Europe, and those who have difficulty adapting are more likely to turn to a Le Pen in a futile attempt to preserve traditional but outdated culture and identity.

Thus the fear of the loss of national identity is indeed concentrated in the lower classes, and goes together with the fear of unchecked immigration.

The Le Pen Surprise
23 April 2002

Summary

The surprise showing of National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of French presidential elections poses a profound challenge to the idea of a transnational Europe: a Europe without borders and a Europe of citizenship separated from nationality. The hard-right parties will not win the presidency, but if a group of essentially fascist parties can win 20 percent of the vote in a time of relative prosperity, what will happen when times get tough? A deep-seated unease has emerged in France and the rest of Europe about the decline of the nation. Since no centrist party wishes to speak to this issue, and since the left has failed miserably in dealing with it, the far right -- by default -- is becoming legitimized as the only political force that will address the concerns of Europeans who fear the consequences of Europeanism and an American concept of citizenship.

Analysis

The surprise of the French presidential elections on April 21 is not how well National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen did. Le Pen, who now faces a runoff with incumbent President Jacques Chirac on May 5, was nearly as successful in the last election.

There were, however, three real surprises in the vote. The first is how fragmented the French political system has become: Almost half of the voters cast ballots for someone other than Chirac, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin or Le Pen. The second surprise was how badly the left did. Le Pen and the other hard right-wing parties were essentially tied with the socialists and communists. That represents a profound collapse of the French left. Finally, there is the surprise that Le Pen, who has been seeking the presidency since 1974, has not gone away. Even with relative prosperity and peace, the deep passions that Le Pen taps into remain.

You can get a sense of the roots of the situation by considering the geography of the election. Jospin carried only one province, Midi-Pyrennees, Le Pen swept the entire Mediterranean coast and the eastern border of France and Chirac took the remainder of the country. There is great significance in this geography. The Mediterranean coast faces North Africa, where great waves of immigrants to France originate. The eastern frontiers are similarly inundated by immigrants passing through Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. It can be put this way: Chirac carried only a single borderland province -- Aquitaine, along the Spanish border -- and Le Pen carried every other border province save one, which went to Jospin.

The borderlands are not only the most vulnerable to immigration, they are also the place where the experience of the European Union is most striking. The French eastern frontier has never been stable: It was the subject of centuries of war, and its very instability has made it an important measure of national well-being. Today it is exceedingly difficult to experience the border. The European Union has not eradicated the frontier so much as turned it into an administrative convenience. Traffic passes back and forth as if the distinction between France and Germany is the same as that between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

That is, of course, the experience the Europeanists wanted to create, but there is a deep, historic anxiety built into this experience. The very ambiguity of the border raises the question of what France physically is -- where it begins and where it ends. The masses of immigrants raise the existential question of what it means to be French.

The United States was conceived to be a nation of immigrants: Its very identity is drawn from the journey from the old country to the new, and its culture is based on diversity. The same cannot be said of France. There, the nation was created out of a shared identity rooted in the villages, farms and cities of the nation. The United States defines citizenship as an elective affinity, an acquired and chosen identity. French laws have evolved to this definition of citizenship, but a deep segment of French culture has not evolved, continuing to see Frenchness as something one is born to.

Under the European Union, France is evolving a la the United States in two ways. National rights -- like American state's rights -- are being subsumed under a vague federalism. But more important, the new Europe is adopting a definition of citizenship that is much more American than European. Anyone can become an American -- that is the definition of America. That is not the definition of France, but today anyone can become French.

The French definitions of geography and nationhood are becoming blurred and with them, the French sense of self. This is frightening, but not only in the glib way in which centrists and leftists tend to dismiss the far right's concerns as mere neuroses. It is frightening because it is clear what is being lost, but it is not at all clear what is going to replace it. The European Union, which was created through a banal bureaucratic process, does not offer the intellectual grandeur that was part and parcel of the United States' creation. The EU offers an unsatisfying blend of bureaucratic management and the vague sense that all the blood shed over the centuries between European nations was mere foolishness.

The EU also promises prosperity. Whether Europe is prosperous today because of the EU or in spite of it is a moot question. That Western Europe is prosperous is certainly true, even though France is currently in a mild recession. The fact that a hard-right candidate emerged to win about 20 percent of the vote in a time of relative prosperity is what is truly stunning. All liberal theory argues that with prosperity comes contentment. France is prosperous by any reasonable historical measure, yet far from content -- it is throwing up a movement that challenges the very foundations of contemporary France.

Clearly, whatever the bureaucrats in Brussels might claim, Europe is not about prosperity alone. A human being needs prosperity but also needs to know about his horizons -- where the borders are, who his countrymen are and meaning of his history. In Europe today, the borders are vague, anyone can lay claim to citizenship and history is regarded as a vast, horrible mistake to be overcome.

Classical liberalism and socialism share an indifference to nationalism. To liberals, capital has no country and borders can't limit investment, which is what life is really about. To socialists, workers have no country. Both have terribly underestimated the power of nationalism -- and nowhere more profoundly than in the European experiment, where nationhood is the problem and economic prosperity is the solution.

Le Pen will not win the French presidency; mainstream parties will pull together and defeat him. But the problem is that no party speaks for the nation and against multi-nationalism in a moderate way. The left wing anti-globalists might attack EU policies, but they will not address the immigration issue. Only Le Pen has addressed both the question of the globalization and Europeanization of the French economy and the question of the globalization of French society.

Not surprisingly, leftist anti-globalists who regard internal anti-globalist sentiment as racist failed completely. Le Pen has driven home the point that the issue of immigration and the issue of economic sovereignty cannot be separated. Since the majority of French parties favor the EU, immigration and globalization, they obviously cannot address these issues. So the center and center-right oppose the 20 percent of France for whom this is an issue. The anti-globalist left will address only part of the issue, and Le Pen gets to adopt the whole issue unchallenged.

The insensitivity of the center to the nationalism issue is not confined to France. It is a general tendency in Europe, and it also is a class issue. The upper classes, which benefit the most from the mobility of capital and who are culturally mobile as well, are great advocates of the EU. The poorer French, living on the periphery geographically, economically and culturally, have been given no place in the center. We therefore have the extraordinary phenomenon of a genuine fascist movement coming in second during a time of relative prosperity.

All of this will pass for now. Le Pen will be swamped in the general elections, and Chirac's center-right will win. But what Europeans and Europeanists should consider is this: If Le Pen can do as well as he has in a time of prosperity, how will his party do when there are serious economic problems and the ranks of the discontented swell? The usurpation of the center by internationalists means that nationalists must move to the margins. All this works well while the center holds. But if Le Pen is in second place during a time when the stress on the center is trivial, how much stress will it take for the center to fold under the pressure of nationalist sentiment?

The EU has no answers for these questions. Its officials worry about fishing quotas, and make bromides about human rights. But the contradiction between the anational EU and Europe's historical, robust nationalism should not be trivialized: The collapse of the left and the geography of Le Pen's victory represent the underlying weakness of the entire notion of a non-national Europe.