The muddied waters of identity

Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Boston Globe

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2005

BATH, England Here are two happy and hopeful snapshots of modern Europe: In 1998, the French soccer team beat Brazil in the final of the World Cup thanks to two brilliant goals from Zinédine Zidane, the sublime "Zizou" who was born in Marseilles the son of Algerian immigrants. Then in 2002 the English cricket team was led to victory against India by Nasser Hussein, himself born in Madras but brought to England as a boy.

Heart-warming stories of successful immigration and assimilation, these might be thought; tributes to Europe's own melting pot. But there's another side to the story, and there are much bleaker snapshots.

Last July young English-born Muslims carried out devastating suicide bombings in London, killing scores of innocents. Then this autumn the dismal outer suburbs of Paris were swept by riots that sent shockwaves through the whole country. Those British Asians come from a community that is passionate about cricket, and many of those riotous French boys of North African or black African descent are soccer fanatics who must have dreamed of emulating Zizou.

So for one thing, sports are not quite the healing balm we had once hoped for. And for another, it looks at the moment as though a sour wisecrack applies more aptly in Europe than in America: The only thing that melted was the pot.

Events such as these have stimulated a debate on the British liberal left. Although there is a liberal tradition of sympathy for third-worldliness, racial equality and multiculturalism, the left's touchstone is above all the welfare state. Writing in the London magazine Prospect, which he edits, David Goodhart has argued that his fellow social democrats should recognize a contradiction between the welfare state and the "diversity" beloved of progressive opinion.

It can be summarized as "Sweden versus America": a universal welfare state based on a homogeneous society with intensely shared values, or, as in America, a much less homogeneous and more individualistic society that believes in self-worth and lacks the same sense of obligation between citizens.

America has always been a land of immigration - and of cheap labor. Its explosive industrial development was fueled by the labor of immigrant peasants from all the corners of Europe, and to a remarkable degree these newcomers accepted the American gospel of equality through toil and dignity through reward.

Unlike America, Europe had until recently no experience of large-scale immigration from outside the continent. Just as the British were said to have acquired their empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, so postwar Europe acquired a large new immigrant population without really thinking about it. In the case of England, France and Holland, it was a legacy of empire.

This highlighted the different attitudes to the idea of nationhood in different countries. German identity was founded on the Volk, while the French republican version was founded on the patrie. German immigration law, dating back a hundred years, is well-nigh racial in inspiration. Anyone can claim German nationality who can prove German descent, but it was has been very difficult indeed for anyone else to become German.

And it was Germany that notoriously coined the name "guest workers" to describe the immigrants who began arriving from Turkey in the 1950s. The phrase unambiguously intended that these workers would go home like other guests - but they didn't.

In France the official attitude was quite different. France had a long history of migration and assimilation, and also believed in a mission civilisatrice, which meant among other things that little boys from Martinique to Senegal to Indochina might achieve the highest honor of all by becoming Frenchmen.

Another French republican ideal was laicism: not the passive secularism of the First Amendment but an active hostility to religion. France may at least be said to have been even-handed about this - forbidding Muslim girls to wear head scarves to school is no harsher than closing monasteries and expelling Catholic religious orders, as the Third Republic did early last century.

If the British Empire never quite preached its civilizing mission, it did in fact successfully assimilate in some ways. An Englishman who visits Antigua and Barbados finds things now quite unknown in our own damp little island - large crowds at cricket matches and packed Anglican churches.

And yet there has been another factor, what the columnist William Pfaff calls "ghettoization through political correctness." People were encouraged to think of themselves as members of a specific community, black or Muslim, rather than as citizens of the country in which they lived.

That was the exact opposite of the American tradition, whereby immigrants were taught to identify with flag and constitution. It is highly significant that the Blair government has now deliberately adopted the American model. Those seeking British citizenship are for the first time expected to show some knowledge of British history and culture, and then take a pledge of allegiance to crown and country.

We all have multiple identities and mixed loyalties, national, religious, political, social. Yet radical Islam has muddied the waters of identity, along with that PC ghettoization, which evaded the truth that anyone can be assimilated to the basic values of an adoptive country.

Games like soccer and cricket are among England's greatest gifts to the world, but not as great as what George Orwell called the defining characteristic of the English nowadays: We don't kill each other because of our beliefs. Is it really racist or repressive to suggest that anyone living among us should accept that principle?

(Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include ''The Controversy of Zion'' and, most recently, ''The Strange Death of Tory England.'' A version of this article first appeared in The Boston Globe.)