DEALING WITH MERITOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY
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with other peoples into a nation-state, like the Welsh and Scots, the
Basques, Flemings, Burgundians, Bavarians, and so on.
The nation-state as such has come under so severe an attack that its
achievements tend to pass unrecognized: it has been the one structure reliably
expressing while also restraining national identity, through the drafting of
constitutions, the rule oflaw, enfranchisement, and civil rights. Every guar–
antee for minority and civic rights exists in the emerging Europe, but on
paper only, and without regard to events unfolding. The present refashion–
ing of nation-states into peoples each with their territorial basis leaves high
and dry anyone and everyone who has no claim to territory, and that is the
immigrants.
Fired as power devolves to them, territorially-based peoples mobilize,
and some of them further resort to terror, like the Corsicans, Basques, the
IRA, Flemings, and the northern Italians whom the Lombard League
claims to represent. Under the challenge to what has been settled identity,
the majority population of the nation-state correspondingly experiences a
nationalist backlash.
In Britain, the National Front, the local fascist movement, in all its
electoral campaigns has won just one single seat on a local council.
Continental Europe has a very different historic legacy, and there, in
response to politically enforced union-cum-regionalism, fascist move–
ments are growing fast. These parties are similar to their pre-war forbears,
and the most successful of them-in France, in Austria, in Belgium–
obtain 20 and even 30 percent of the votes in regional and national
elections. As the old nation-state loses its power to enforce compromise
and to protect all its citizens, immigrant minorities find themselves with
nowhere to turn except their original identity, tribalism, Islamic funda–
mentalism, separatism of whatever sort. The politicians of this new Europe
are creating scapegoats and outcasts. Immigrants who believed themselves
to be integrated are attacked and vilified, often killed, on account of their
race or religion. A utopian project, then, is reproducing ills that it aspired
to eliminate. We have been here before. Thank you.
Peter
Wood: Now, to Michael Meyers.
Michael
Meyers: First, I want to thank and congratulate Dr. Kurzweil and
Partisan Review,
as well as the Austrian Cultural Institute, and Boston
University, for sponsoring this urgent conference. We've had a couple of
days for reappraisal and renewal. And it has been an all-important under–
taking because the survival of a free, democratic society depends on an
informed, literate, and involved population that has more in common wi th
each other than our diversity. The American people, in the pursuit of more
