The War Within the States

EVEN as a "new Europe" is trying to stitch itself together, an old one is doing its best to pull the Continent apart. For all the talk of unity, Europeans have not yet surmounted the chauvinistic prejudices that permit Belgians to think of neighboring Dutchmen as supercilious stuffed shirts, Germans to regard Italians as hopelessly unambitious and inefficient. As for the French, all too many are still reared with an overweening sense of cultural and linguistic superiority that Jean Cocteau once described with the confession: "When I was little, I believed that foreigners could not really talk at all, but were only pretending."

There is, however, an even greater threat to the realization of Charles de Gaulle's loftily imprecise dream of a Europe des patries--a Europe of the fatherlands. That is the persistence of myriad old tribal and regional interests and loyalties lying within and across the Continent's national frontiers.

Forgotten for much of the postwar era, Europe's sub-and transnational minorities have been making increasingly noisy claims for recognition and redress. Almost overnight, it seems, many if not most of Europe's central governments face what British Author Anthony Sampson describes in The New Europeans as a "long, untidy" period of internal struggles in "many different forms, from regionalism to anarchism to sheer eccentricity."

The phenomenon spans Europe from Britain, still grappling with Welsh and Scottish nationalism and the bloody war in Ulster, to the Soviet Union, troubled by ethnic unrest in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Yugoslavia, where uneasy equilibrium has been upset by a violent upsurge of Croatian nationalism, may be the only European nation whose existence as a single, unified state seems directly imperiled. But others have been rattled, to a greater or lesser degree, by a variety of unhappy minorities: Switzerland's Jura separatists, Sweden's Lapps, Rumania's Transylvanian Hungarians, France's Bretons and Corsicans, Spain's Basques, and myriad ethnic groups of Italy--the German-and French-speaking pockets in the north and the Sicilians and Sardinians in the arid mezzogiorno (southland).

No Sense. This tribal unrest has effectively shown that Europe's national boundaries no longer make much sense, if indeed they ever did. The present map of Europe was carved out by warring armies--and postwar diplomats--only in the past century and a half. In 1830 there were no such countries as Greece, Belgium or Norway. Italy and Germany are scarcely a century old, while Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia date back only to 1918. Underlying Europe's somewhat artificial frontiers is a patchwork of ancient tribal and economic enclaves divided by geography, culture and what Italian Sociologist Francesco Ferrarotti describes as "the greatest single non-unifying factor in Europe, an excess of history."

Ethnically, the Continent is a plexus of unassimilated minorities. Western Europe alone embraces 30 different ethnic communities, ranging in size from the 20,000 Slovenes of Austria to the 4,000,000 Catalans of northeastern Spain. They are re-emerging partly because of what the Italians call disten-sione--the easing of tension--removing the kind of external dangers that justify strong central government. Another factor is the advance of modern communications, which has brought the threat of cultural homogenization much closer to many once isolated peoples. The result is that such communities have renewed their insistence on maintaining their own languages, their own traditions and--all too often--their own archaic rivalries.

Ulster's warring Catholics and Protestants, who are still trying to write a final chapter to the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, are not the only Europeans with ancient scores to settle. Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons regularly take their differences to the streets. In the French city of Toulouse not long ago, TIME Correspondent Paul Ress got into a discussion about the brutal crusade led by Simon de Montfort, a northern baron, against the Catharist "heretics" of the Midi during the 13th century. The Toulousains seemed amiable, but Ress was told next day that they "didn't like you, though. They took you for a friend of Simon de Montfort."

With a few exceptions, Europe's isolated minorities yearn not so much for independence as for linguistic, cultural and economic equality. In any given office building in Brussels, a Belgian saying goes, the doorman speaks only Dutch, the secretaries are bilingual and the managing director deals only in French. In Italy's Alto Adige region, severed from Austria by diplomatic fiat after World War I, German-speaking Tyrolean terrorists committed some 200 bombings and other acts of violence in the 1960s before Rome agreed to a measure of autonomy. Still, streets are known as both via and strasse, and many towns are known by entirely different names to their German-speaking residents and Italian officialdom.

In their prospering industrial corner of north central Spain, some 2,000,000 dour, strong-willed Basques--"the alkaloid of the Spaniard," Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called them --fret that hard work and efficiency have not brought them the recognition and cultural elbowroom that they feel they deserve in a still-autocratic society. In France, which enjoys Western Europe's fastest-growing economy, young Bretons in search of a job and a future still gravitate to Paris. There they gather nightly, like so many expatriates, in the bars around Montparnasse to raise their glasses to a murmured Breiz atao--Brittany forever, in the harsh Celtic tongue of their impoverished home province.

The danger of such increasingly vocal unrest is that it could poison relations between states and thus slow down the pace of European integration. But many scholars argue plausibly that ethnic differences do not so much foreclose the future as point the way to it. Swiss Philosopher Denis de Rougement looks for a gradual emergence of new "communities of mutual interests" that transcend established frontiers. One such community might be the region bounded by Lyons and Grenoble in France and Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland--four cities already united by proximity, language (French) and common commercial interests. Says De Rougement: "Europeans are discovering that this is what brings them together, not borders."

Britain's Anthony Sampson forecasts a dramatically revised political map of Europe. It might shape up as "a world of multinational corporations, making a technological sweep through Europe as another Holy Roman Empire." Central governments would shrink; neglected provinces would return "to their historic roles as the heart of Europe. Alsace, as it once was, could become a separate entity equal to Paris." In this vision of provinces as power blocs, forgotten regions would become a kind of European Third World, playing off the central bureaucracy in Brussels against their own national capitals. The Scots, in fact, have already set up an office in Frankfurt, where staffers work to line up European investment for Scotland with all the zeal of commercial attaches in the embassy of a sovereign state.

When, if ever, might the European map begin to be redrawn along the lines that the regionalists envision? Some experimental steps have already been taken. The bulk of the loans granted to Italy by the Brussels-based European Investment Bank, whose funds come from the EEC countries, has been channeled into the Italian mezzogiorno--a model that might inspire other efforts at transnational cooperation. Still, there is little indication that Europe's central governments--a tribe unto themselves --are ready to yield significant power, whatever the case for a regional politics. They stick by not only De Gaulle, but also Otto von Bismarck. The borders may be obsolete, but his 19th century dictum that "whoever speaks of Europe is wrong" is still to be convincingly disproved.

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