McNair Paper Number 49 Chapter 3, March 1996

The 20th century has witnessed the ebb tide of European dominance in the world. The great European overseas colonial empires, notably the British and French, have dissolved. Many of the states they created in Africa are being torn apart by ethnic, tribal, or clan conflict (no longer rationalized by the veneer of Cold War ideology). Multinational continental empires like Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Soviet Union have failed. The end of the Cold War has led to the demise of several multinational states, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The collapse of empires and multiethnic states is part of a broader process. In its heyday, Western Europe created a world in its own image, imposing artificial boundaries and often alien political regimes on Third World peoples and sometimes on East European peoples as well. The Cold War tended to preserve these structures. The end of the Cold War has unleashed centrifugal forces that tend toward the disaggregation of multiethnic or multireligious states where a sense of nationality did not gel.

There is nothing astonishing about the decline or breakup of artificial states, but what does that imply for old established nation-states? Presumbly, there is some reason for complacency in historic European nation-states, but where is the nation-state that does not show fault lines in its historical past? What nation-state did not assimilate heterogeneous groups? In what state was this process not incomplete or somewhat defective? What nation-state is truly "natural" living within "natural" borders? In the last decade, many European states have felt the pain of history mercilessly probing along their developmental fault lines. This is not all. Each former imperial state received immigration from its former colonies, which was welcomed when cheap labor was needed, but which is certainly not welcomed now. The existence of large populations of Third World immigrants, especially Moslem, tends to raise feelings of vulnerability about national identity at a time when other factors have also called into question the model of the nation-state.

There is no mystery about the primary reason for the decline of the nation-state in Europe--it has gradually ceased to be a largely independent unit for the economic life and security of its populations. What was once true for smaller states is now true for all European nations. After World War II, West European states, with the exception of France, abadonned their independence in matters of defense and relied on the United States via NATO. The rise of the European Union has meant that basic economic decisions are made in Brussels and financial decisions made de facto in Frankfurt.

With the decline of the nation-state as a self-determined economic unit, the rationality of economic cooperation among regions of contiguous European states becomes greater, further undercutting the economic necessity underlying the nation state. Economic geography regains priority over old political geography. At a time of economic stagnation, prosperous regions may also become unwilling to subsidize poorer ones within their own country especially when there are ethnic or cultural or linguistic differences or where they feel that these poorer regions are simply on a permanent dole.

Even in the important domain of cultural life, the autonomy of each nation has been overwhelmed by the flood of sounds and images from abroad, either from European neighbors or from the U.S. The rise of popular culture has contributed to the loss of self-confidence and prestige of national cultures that were traditionally elitist and based largely on the printed word and unique object.

At the very moment when national cultures are thus at risk, they are in turn challenged by immigration, which raises questions about the validity or feasibility of former models of assimilation. The industrial economy, which assimilated workers to a common national culture, has been replaced by a service economy, which emphasizes individuation. The growth of consumerism is bolstered by a more sophisticated advertising approach no longer directed at everyman but appealing to particular interests. At the very minimum, the result is a widespread sense of anxiety concerning the relevance of national identity.

At the same time, the end of the Cold War eliminates the national mobilization against the Soviet threat, which had tended to freeze sociocultural change and around which political life had focused. The decline of other traditional sources of political conflict, namely class and religion, spotlights latent ethnic and national issues. The result is a "return of history" in Western Europe.

What is striking, however, is that while the development of the European Union and what it represents has undermined the economic reality on which the nation-state is based, that very devaluation of the nation-state has also undermined separatism. It is one thing to seek independence from a powerful state that refuses to accept your "difference" and ties you to its institutions. Such an independence was meaningful when states were really autonomous. It is quite another to seek independence from a state whose role is continually being undercut, where you have access to a European market and often to structural development funds and where, to an increasing degree, you think of yourself as European. Thus the existence of the Europe of Regions may simultaneously increase regional consciousness and defuse separatism.

Belgium is an excellent example. If the European Union did not exist, it is easy to imagine that the loveless marriage of convenience between Flemings and Walloons could lead to a divorce, nasty or otherwise. Belgium was an artificial state created in 1830 and eventually given its international statute by the Great Powers. It was created as a marriage of convenience by two groups both on the rebound from a divorce with the Netherlands: French-speaking liberals who resented the dominance of the Dutch lanaguage, and Dutch- speaking Catholics who opposed the Netherland's Protestant orientation. The former dominated the latter until after World War II, when the balance shifted. Belgium could have found itself in a civil war and been divided in two, were it not for the phlegmatic temperament of the population, the good sense of its politicians, the impossibility of dividing Brussels, the slow but inexorable process of devolution, and finally the rise of the European Union. Why divorce when the power of "Brussels, capital of the Belgian State" was being eclipsed by the growth of "Brussels, capital of the European Union?" Why divorce when the many powers of the state were being devolved on the Walloon and Flemish regions and the linguistic communities?

Recent progress toward a beginning of a solution to the Northern Ireland question may not have been possible without the rise of Europe. The Republic of Ireland, by becoming part of Europe, has become less distinctively a provincial Irish Catholic state. It is unlikely, for example, that without EU membership the Republic would have enacted divorce in l995. Ulster and Ireland can no longer be defined purely in terms of opposition to each other, since each is also part of the EU. Devolution for Scotland and Wales may happen if Labour comes to power. Spain, now a member of NATO and the EU, has been far more successful in containing Basque separatism than the Franco regime; moreover, giving autonomy to the Basques and Catalans has isolated the violent extremists. Of course, the rise of democracy after Franco's death was probably the key reason why accommodations between Madrid and the regions could be found.

The end of the Cold War not only produced a crisis in Italian political institutions but reopened the question of Italy's existence as a nation state. Italy came into existence between 1859 and 1870; just after unification, one Italian political leader declared, "We have created Italy, now we must create Italians." This enterprise has only partially succeeded. As Metternich said, Italy was only a geographic expression. It had never existed as a political entity, because the Roman Empire was a world empire based on a city-state and one of the last things the Roman Catholic Church wanted in the 19th century was an Italian state. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the focus of patriotism in Italy was the city-state. The risorgimento was an ideal of the intellectual elites, but was given faint support by the masses. In the end, southern Italy was taken over by the kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy just as the GDR was taken over by the FRG. Italian unification produced some enthusiasm, but the aftermath witnessed reactions similar to those in East Germany today--only they have persisted for almost 150 years. The north complained about the burden of the Mezzogiorno, the south retorted that unification had undercut its own industrial development.

The collapse of the Christan Democratic Party in the elections of 1994 allowed the Northern League to receive 117 out of 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the neo-fascist National Alliance to win large numbers of votes in the South. The Northern League opposes the unitary Italian state but was divided between those who wanted a federal Italy and a minority who wanted independence. The main complaint of League voters was that a prosperous north was forced to finance an expensive central government in Rome and support a backward, mafia-ridden south.

It is ironic but true that the same governing coalition that included a party that is not sure whether it believes in Italian unity (or at least whether it believes in a unitary state) also included a party some of whose leaders have unfurled the banner of irredentism. For example, National Alliance leader Mirko Temaglia, president of the Italian parliament's foreign affairs commission, raised irredentist claims with regard to Istria, Dalmatia, and Fiume. Other Alliance members do not support changing boundaries but raise questions about the treatment of Slovenia's Italian minority. The two are consistent in the sense that the end of the Cold War has raised basic questions about Italy's identity as a nation-state.

In a curious way, both the League and the National Alliance are regionalist parties. The League, as a regional party of the rich north, objects to Rome's redistributing of its taxes to the south. The National Alliance, which receives most of its votes from the south, and which is the de facto regional party of the south, must support the unitary state to maintain the flow of largesse from Rome.

The end of the Cold War has also raised new identity questions for Germany. Germany had a unique history in the early modern period, in which sovereignty was shared between princes and the decentralized institutions of the elective Holy Roman Empire. The empire declined for centuries but did not disappear until 1806. From 1806 to 1866, the German Confederation maintained some of the supranational aspects of the old Empire. Following 1866, Prussia unified Germany "by blood and iron"; Bismarck's Kulturkampf was an attempt to impose Prussian Protestant rule on an ambivalent Catholic south. But even the Wilhelmine Empire was not a unitary state, because the old princely rulers reigned in Bavaria and elsewhere. The only experience of a truly unitary state in Germany occurred under Hitler. This explains why the democratic successor state in the West rejected that model and returned to a non-Prussian, federal tradition, almost as if it were determined to replay the Revolution of 1848 and produce a happy outcome to the Frankfurt Parliament.

Postwar Germany's willingness to abandon many traditional attributes of national sovereignty to Europe may thus be based in part on a residual tradition of divided sovereignty dating back to the experience of the Holy Roman Empire and German Confederation. It is certainly also based on the experience of reconciling German interests and European interests in the postwar era. Since after World War II, Germany recovered only some of the attributes of sovereignty as a member of the WEU, NATO, and the EU rather than as a nation state, Germany has greater experience than more traditional nation states in functioning successfully in the new European environment.

With the end of the Cold War, the FRG acquired the old GDR. Ironically, the FRG is now engaged in a kind of Kulturkampf in reverse, attempting to impose its postwar culture on an east that retains aspects of Prussianism and communism! The old FRG showed more sensitivity to the other European states than it is showing to the former GDR, perhaps because it wants to deny repressed aspects of itself incarnated by the latter. In any case, the cultural/psychological question of German identity will continue to trouble Germany far longer than the problem of economic integration of the two Germanies.

It may be useful to compare the crisis of the federal system in Canada with what we have seen in Europe. Since the rise of modern Quebec consciousness during the 1960s, there has been a series of efforts to resolve the uncomfortable relationship of Quebec to English-speaking Canada. These have included Jean-Pierre Trudeau's efforts to create a bilingual Canada with its own repatriated constitution, subsequent attempts at negotiating a new constitutional accord between Quebec and the rest of Canada (which has become further complicated because of the rise of other forms of regionalism and ethnic identities); and finally, the Parti Quebecois' two unsuccessful efforts to initiate the process of Quebec independence through referendum.

But differences of opinion both within Canada and within Quebec have thus far stymied all these projects, with the result that Canada's energies are being sapped by continual constitutional crises. It can be argued that if Canada were part of the EU, a solution closer to that of Belgium would have been worked out between Quebec and anglophone Canada. If the Quebecois were less modern in their outlook, less secure about their identity and less concerned about their standard of living, perhaps they would have taken the same route as Slovakia.

In conclusion, then, the development of the European Union has been a major factor in undermining the traditional nation-state. At the same time, it has provided a soft landing for the nation-state by providing a place for regional identity within European institutions. Without the European Union, and given a high level of economic distress, especially if unevenly experienced within European states, the problem of regionalism could become acute. Even with the existence of the EU, serious economic difficulties could exacerbate separatist or extremist sentiments. At the same time, the growth of regionalism has complicated the already complex equilibrium of a Europe that has ceased to be a Europe of States without arriving at a federal Europe (and which may never arrive there), thereby making decisive action even more difficult.