Events since 9/11 have heightened both foreign-policy and cultural divisions between Europe and the US. One view, often expressed by Europeans and liberal Americans, is that the US is becoming far more nationalistic and culturally conservative than Europe. Samuel Huntington’s new book, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate, is likely to reinforce this view. Huntington, the Harvard politics professor who wrote The Clash of Civilizations, has written an equally provocative book about the threats to American identity posed by regionally concentrated immigration from Mexico. The book has raised an enormous stir in intellectual and media circles and has been widely criticised in the US for “nativism” and anti-Hispanic scaremongering.

The nativist charge made by Alan Wolfe and other American reviewers is unjustified. Notwithstanding a few ambiguous passages, Huntington’s celebration of the American racial melting pot is a far cry from the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow or Pat Buchanan. The main argument of the book is a very European one: that national identity is rooted in an ethno-cultural core rather than in abstract, universal principles. This premise, developed by the British theorist of nationalism Anthony Smith, holds that modern nations emerge from a pre-existing ethnic core, and that many of the myths, symbols and memories of nations have ethnic antecedents. Ethnicity is based on the idea of shared myths of descent. Most Europeans (the French and Swiss are partial exceptions) accept this idea for their own countries, but also believe the very different claim of American exceptionalism: that the US has always defined its national identity in ideological and political rather than ethnic terms. Huntington spends much of the early part of his book debunking this idea, and sketches the lineaments of America’s Anglo-Protestant core. He correctly notes that the free population in 1776 was around 98 per cent Protestant and 80 per cent British in ancestry. However, he stresses that the nation evolved away from its Anglo-Protestant ethnic roots with the inclusion of the Irish Catholics and Germans after 1865 and southern and eastern Europeans after 1945, and left its white racial unity behind when African-Americans in the south gained civil and voting rights in the mid-1960s. He speaks of the nation as Anglo-Protestant in a cultural, rather than a strictly ethnic sense – an argument which writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Salins and Francis Fukuyama also advanced in the early and mid-1990s.

The idea that Anglo-Protestant Americanism has a cultural core which can assimilate ethnic and racial outsiders reflects recent currents in liberal nationalist political theory – particularly the writings of David Miller and Yael Tamir – that espouse a “deep” civic nationalism. These writers contend that liberalism can coexist with a national identity based on myths and symbols that runs deeper than the contractual ties between state and rational citizen that form the hallmark of Jürgen Habermas’s thin “constitutional patriotism.” Huntington defines America’s Anglo-Protestant cultural core as consisting of the English language, American political history and a number of characteristics derived from a low-church Protestant heritage, namely its evangelical and congregational religiosity, moralistic politics, individualism and work ethic. He cites a vast array of contemporary survey evidence which shows that Americans are on average more religious, individualistic and hard-working than people in other developed countries. This cultural core, he claims, has altered little over two centuries despite the absorption of millions of immigrants from around the world. He notes with approval rising rates of intermarriage among Americans of all ethnic and racial groups and a sharp rise in the proportion of Americans who are ethnically or racially mixed. This, he claims, is evidence of the power of America’s Anglo-Protestant based melting pot to dissolve ethnic boundaries.

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