I don’t often find myself muttering “Hear, Hear!” on reading the articulations of Tony Blair, but a tiny little news segment the other day has Tony opining that multiculturalism in the UK is a failed experiment. And more: he said that some other EU folks felt the same way.

Well, how ’bout that?

Maybe I just fell prey to that delicious little feeling of vindication we sometimes get when someone “admits” publicly what we’ve said privately—especially when their causal analysis somewhat matches our own, at least in some ways. He contrasted the perceived failure of multiculturalism in Britain to its perceived success in America by saying that, in America, immigrants had traditionally placed their native identities and cultures second to the overarching American identity to which they aspired, whereas, in the UK, they had imported those cultures and made them primary, demanding that their new country accommodate them (paraphrased).

He said what was lacking was English national “pride”. His word, not mine. Indeed. Dirty word, that. It made me think of a term coined, I think, by Joseph Pearce in a StAR editorial a while back: ethno-masochism. That’s a more useful way of understanding the situation than the Dirty Word provides.

He also said that the U.S. is experiencing a decline in the world’s esteem for the same reason. Hear, Hear!

The decades after WWII, following the horrors of German nationalism, caused such an aversion to national pride that European countries descended into this ethno-masochism, England more than most, perhaps. Tony didn’t mention this, but I think also, an unconfessed envy of American economic power was a bit in the mix as well. Why couldn’t Europe have the same democratic ideal as that realized by the Yanks? (Also, more quietly, why couldn’t Europe have as much economic clout as the U.S.?) And the European Union was born.

Such an undertaking requires a change in the basic national ethos. So all things “English” were subverted in favor of all things “Other”. But—and here’s the rub: that’s not the way it works. A little history, now. From its beginning, the U.S. was a nation of immigrants. The fact that its birth as a nation was a consequence of its break from English rule does not mean that the U.S. was ever “English”, as the English often mistakenly believe. It was French, Spanish, Basque, Indian, Italian, etc., as much as English, despite the rabid righteous violence of the Puritan New Englanders. In fact, the lack of a single cultural identity has always been both the weakness and the strength of the United States. It was never culturally homogeneous as England always was. Sometimes, we were a bit embarrassed by our lack of pedigree. It’s not easy being mongrels. But somehow we maintained national identity as mongrels. (Being rich and powerful didn’t hurt, either.)

Ultimately, you have to be you. England cannot (nor can any other European country) survive its own oxymoronic self-annihilation. Why is that a surprise? For that matter, neither can America.

Love for one’s country doesn’t make one a Nazi, you know. Rather than just looking at the national sentiment that caused WWII, couldn’t they also look at that national sentiment which saved them?