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"The news from Europe sounds grim."
"The ultranationalist, xenophobic right is manifestly on the rise, and not just in France. In the most recent national elections in Austria and Switzerland, anti- immigrant parties got 27 percent and 23 percent of the vote, respectively. In Antwerp, the hypernationalist Vlaams Blok won nearly 40 percent at the last local elections, in 2000. Last month one in three of the prosperous burghers of Rotterdam gave Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant gay populist, their backing: half of all Dutch voters under 30 support his proposal to ban Muslim immigration and say they'll vote for him and his party in the country's national elections next month."
"The antiforeigner Danish People's Party won 12 percent of the national vote last November. Even in Britain, there is similar sentiment. The anti-immigrant, ultranationalist British National Party scored an unprecedented 14 percent of the vote in some decaying industrial towns with large Asian populations."
"These groups have in common three interlocking obsessions: crime, immigration and the loss of national 'identity.'"
"'France' or 'Denmark' is a concept with which men and women can identify, for good and ill, and on whose behalf prejudices and fears may be mobilized. 'Europe' is not."
" . . . the European social crisis of which the far right is a pathological portent will not disappear, and on this score Americans have grounds for anxiety. It has for some time now been clear that Europe and America are drifting apart. On free trade, Iraq, the Middle East, international courts and many other post-cold war international issues, the Western allies are at odds. Yet the most important difference of all frequently passes unmentioned."
"Europeans today are being forced to weigh the social costs of abandoning the postwar welfare state. The far right offers one solution — close the borders against change and newcomers and confine state-provided social and welfare services to the 'native' community. The left would retain the ideal of the social democratic state, at the expense of profit and efficiency if need be. And both sides juxtapose their European understanding of the good society, the cohesive community, to the American market-driven variant. This widely debated contrast is the common, binding thread at the heart of European anti-Americanism, and it is set to grow, not diminish."
"Fair-weather or not, the Europeans are our closest friends. But many Europeans see the world very differently, and it is a dangerous illusion to suppose that the logic of globalization must needs bring us together. Recent events in Europe suggest that the opposite may be happening. And that would be grim news indeed."
Tony Judt is director of the Re marque Institute at New York University.
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