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PARTISAN REVIEW
sole serious punishment available to the authorities-than whites of the
same sex. Something cultural is in play, seemingly, which it is hardly plausible
to ascribe to society in general or teachers in particular. Wrapping themselves
up in multiculturalism, the authors of this report in practice deny the
specificity of each actual culture. The report stresses that figures for per–
formance are tentative, but seemingly Muslim pupils are steadily increasing
their exam scores and are sometimes over-represented in polytechnics and
under-represented in universities.
Integration is by its nature beyond measurement. As good a witness to
it as any is Henry Louis Gates,Jr., the distinguished American intellectual.
In the
NewYorker
in May 1997, he described amusingly how twenty-five years
ago in London, he couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. Then he
saw a black face, a "brother," who spoke only to sound like all the other
British. He had assumed, he goes on, that his black compatriots sounded
black because they were black, that "the shape of our African lips had some–
thing to do with our characteristic consonants and vowels." Dumbstruck by
this at the time, he was even more dumbstruck to discover
in
the London of
today "the social ease between most blacks and whites." There were Afro–
Caribbean artists, publications, shop owners, even peers of the realm.
Socio-bureaucratese can extend to Anglo-Afro-Caribbean. The same goes
for other minorities among whom are also peers and members of Parliament,
local councillors, industrialists and entrepreneurs, and artists and sporting
personalities. The thousand Muslim organizations have proved bridgeheads
into the society at large. Levi-Strauss jumped too soon to the conclusion that
context is unable to affect conditioning, and the fundamentalists are trying
to enforce the same conclusion too late. The allure of democracy and capi–
talism is overcoming what might have been a defensive separatism.
In its apparent death throes, however, separatism has received a
reprieve from quite an unexpected direction. Immigrants arrived in siz–
able numbers at a moment when French and German politicians were
beginning a drive to build common institutions under the heading of
Europe. The ideological impetus for this derived in the main from the
belief that war is the outcome of nationalism, and the nation-state must
therefore be destroyed if there is to be peace. Popular support has
always been and remains doubtful, but the politicians of one European
country after another have persuaded themselves that a historic under–
taking is at hand. Some type of supra-national entity is visibly in the
offing.
Each individual nation-state will supposedly become a region, duly
represented in common institutions at the center, which happens to be in
Brussels. Peoples are defined for this purpose as those with a territory of
their own, even although they may for centuries have been incorporated
