Homogenizers in Retreat

When Alexander the Great's weary soldiers trudged into northern Pakistan around 327 B.C., they were not too tuckered out to fraternize with the local ladies. Or so 'tis said, although ethnographers and DNA cast doubts on asserted close connections between Macedonians and today's Hunza people of the Himalayan foothills. But a myth's power does not depend on its plausibility, and the Financial Times enchantingly reports that on July 11 Prince Ghazanfar Ali Khan, representing the dignity of the "fair-skinned, blue-eyed Hunza people," arrived at Alexander the Great airport in Skopje—capital of the Republic of Macedonia, a shard of the former Yugoslavia—to assert kinship across 23 centuries.

So let us now praise a splendid reversal. Durable differences are flourishing, to the exasperation of would-be homogenizers of the world.

Macedonia demands recognition of a Macedonian minority in Greece, which wants Macedonia to change its name, which is the same as the name of Greece's northern province. Greece funds cultural institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan among the Kalash people, who also claim descent from the soldiers of Alexander.

From the Mediterranean to the North Sea—Scotland is in another fever of nationalist regret about 1707, when its Parliament became subservient to Westminster—Europe is experiencing interesting ferments. In 1500, there were approximately 500 European political units. By 1800, there were a few dozen, and that was before the unifications of Germany and Italy. The 19th century of consolidation has, however, been followed by fissuring. In 1920, after the First World War shattered the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, Europe had 23 states. By 1994, there were 50. The disintegration of two entities born out of the 1914–18 war, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, exemplify the politics of reasserted particularities.

Disaggregation is in the air even as the implacable consolidators of the European Union try to break ancient nations to the saddle of sameness. The EU has a flag that no one salutes, an anthem no one sings (it has no words), 27 different national memories and more than that number of durable ethnicities. Hence the EU is increasingly an opéra bouffe attempt to turn "Europe" from a geographical into a political denotation.

In 2005 referendums, the French and Dutch rejected what was preposterously called a European "constitution." It was a mare's nest of obscurantism (what was verbiage about the Sami people's reindeer husbandry doing in a constitution?) and lunacy (the right of children to "express their views fully"). Undeterred by democracy, and determined to continue the centralizing project, the EU ginned up the gaseous Lisbon Treaty, a sample of which is: "The Union shall contribute to the promotion of European sporting issues, while taking account of the specific nature of sport, its structures based on …" Good grief.