In Sweden, integration minister Nyamko Sabuni, a naturalised citizen of Congolese-Burundian origin, ardently insists on intrusive measures to ensure that Muslims adhere to Sweden's laws.
In the Netherlands, Somalia-born former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is best known for her involvement in the film Submission directed by her collaborator Theo Van Gogh, later murdered in 2004 by a deranged Dutch Islamist who threatened her with the same fate. But even before this event, Ali was already well known as one of the most vociferous guardians of her concept of Dutch national identity.
In France, Fadela Amara, daughter of Algerian immigrants and founder of a group that protests against abusive treatment of Muslim women in France, proclaims an adamant French republicanism; as France's new minister of urban policy, she now seeks to apply this doctrine in the troubled banlieues.
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (August 2005)
"Art and suffering: four years since 9/11" (August 2005)
"Rebranding America" (September 2005)
"Judith Miller's race: the unasked question" (October 2005)
"France seeks a world voice"
(December 2005)
"A question of class" (January 2006)
"Europe's forked tongues"
(February 2006)
"The worth of illusion" (March 2006)
"The labour of others" (April 2006)
"A question of class, race, and France itself: reply to Richard Wolin" (May 2006)
"The writer and politics: Peter Handke's choice" (June 2006)
"Zidane and France: the rules of the game"
(19 July 2006)
"Barack Obama, Moroccan Ali, and me"
(5 February 2007)
"Iraqis adrift"
(19 February 2007)
"Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel"
(6 March 2007)
In Germany, professor Michael Wolffsohn, a naturalised emigrant from Israel has written: "If there is anything which I as an individual can contribute to a community, my community, my nation, it would be this constant plea for an inner sense of nationalism among the Germans."
In Britain, Pakistan-born Labour MP Shahid Malik- on the eve of his first official trip as Britain's international-development minister - told the media that his role was to represent the best of British values abroad, and that the United Kingdom is unparalleled in the rights and freedoms it offers Muslim citizens.
These first- or second-generation immigrants are among the most vociferous champions of national values in their respective European nations. In Europe, the continent which counts the most countries in the smallest landmass, individual nations are constantly asserting their individuality. As the European Union becomes more effective, a European identity is now tangible. At the same time, intra-European migrations (and the influx of immigrants from Africa and Asia) are altering the demographics of western Europe countries. Perhaps because of these changes, the discrete nations within the EU are debating their individual identities in the continent's shifting demographic and geopolitical structures.
The capacious nation
The British prime minister Gordon Brown's invocation of Britishness - and his search for inductive processes, values and even a representative national motto that might help inculcate it - is part of the raw material of two openDemocracy initiatives: the OurKingdom conversation on this multinational country's future, and the dLiberation project testing the applicability of ideas of deliberative democracy to the European Union. In his blog for openDemocracy on the Tomorrow's Europe deliberative event in Brussels, J Clive Matthews notes that understanding the nature of national identity in Europe remains vital: dictums set out in the EU's capital may have legal weight, but a sense of community can't be so simply prescribed.
"A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two things constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other is in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrances; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage, which all hold in common." This description, from Ernest Renan's classic 1882 description of a nation and nationalist sentiment (in What is a Nation?), is no longer valid. A century and more years later, "the common rich legacy of remembrances" has fallen away. Migratory life inevitably results in a different set of memories for those collected in close geographic quarters, and for immigrants in Europe, many of whom came to European countries because of a colonial allegiance, the remembrances are very different.
England's ideas of right behaviour shifted with the end of empire, as Priyamvada Gopal wrote in the Guardian, reviewing a the British Library's Countdown to Freedom exhibition about the end of colonialism in India: "We need to stop believing that culture, community, religion and nation are the same entities. ...Or that the answer to extremism is ‘Britishness' through citizenship courses and English-speaking imams...chauvinism speaks many languages, including English. Luckily, so do freedom and tolerance" (see "A salutary reminder of the empire's pernicious legacy", 31 July 2007).
Comparable shifts are seen elsewhere. The Dutch constitution separated the state from religion as he 19th century was ending, yet allegiance to God is actively affirmed on Dutch currency (and was reaffirmed when it was carried over to the local version of the euro; France, which fiercely criticises the United States's use of the death penalty, only itself abolished it in 1981; and, through the lens of a new century's values, Germans are debating the second-word-war morality of some of their most decorated living writers right now. Mores change.
Even among the believers, national character has never been considered static. While the late-18th century German philosopher, JG Herder, insisted on the importance of teaching the national character to the populace, he acknowledged that the zeitgeist of a country belonged by definition to an era, a moment in history: "It adapts itself silently to classes of inhabitants, to their needs, inclinations and insights."
Few Europeans familiar with the transgressions in their nation's past would argue that mores should be fixed. Yet politicians and the citizenry still speak of national identity as if it can be pinned down. Alongside Gordon Brown's plans there is the pre-election assertion of the immigrant's son who became France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that "to be French is not a race or an ethnicity", but "a collection of values".
Sarkozy made the strategic decision to appoint an unprecedented number of first- and second-generation immigrants of Arab and/or Arab origin (Rachida Dati and Rama Yade as well as Fadela Amara) to his cabinet. When people of immigrant background champion "national traits", the affirmation can be read as an acknowledgment that they consider the ways of the adopted homeland as superior to those they or their ancestors left behind. Consequently nationalist politicians and the media give them ample space in the public forum (on the flip side, President Sarkozy is fond of telling people of immigrant origin who don't like the country to leave.)
A man out of place
By contrast, for Barack Obama, the one second-generation immigrant running for president in the United States, his background is a liability. Mr. Obama has been questioned because his story differs from the typical black American's story, and because he spent part of his childhood outside of the United States. Obama's immigrant history is disparaged by some black Americans whose ancestors came to America as slaves, and acquired tremendous political clout by constantly challenging a national character that permitted slavery and systemic discrimination.
Many black Americans don't feel that they "chose" the United States nor are they allied to another country. In part response, there have been some attempts to create a link to Africa (including the creation in 1966 of an alternative "African" holiday in December - Kwanzaa - which I was taught as a child during the 1970s before learning as an an adult about the questionable figure who had invented it). And then there is the sobriquet African-American, which (in part because of its political championing by figures such as Jesse Jackson) has managed to become standard even though many black Americans, including me, prefer the term black. In any case, none of these efforts have managed to create a visceral bond with Africa among black Americans.
But Barack Obama has also failed to capture the attention of many Americans for another reason: introspection is not an important factor in public debate in the United States, certainly not now and maybe not ever. The regard is outward-directed, as Americans are concerned with avoiding physical breach of their borders rather than defining the spirit of their nation.
A welcome reinforcement
For Europeans, the most devastating events of the last century had roots in an intra-European breakdown in morality and unified discourse. And thus Europeans feel that the intellectual and spiritual struggle is an essential one, a means to finding the right balance between assimilation, accommodation and evolution in constructing a national character, even while realising that the concept might be outdated.
True, expressions of identity can take the form of revelling in charming quirks: the French like good wine, Brits are fond of self-deprecating humour, Germans make splendid beer, the Dutch are great cleaners. But when people invoke national character in more fundamental ways, especially in contrasting established social norms to what they perceive as imported mores, discussions become fraught with the memory of past transgressions in the name of preserving cultural purity. If the defence of the national character comes from the mouths of those who fit the ancient phenotype of the nation, it can be subject to accusations of xenophobia or racism. Yet when voiced by an immigrant or the child of immigrants, it rings of promise fulfilled and the triumph of the new country's ideals and mores.
In his famed 1882 essay on the characteristics of a nation, French philosopher, Ernst Renan correctly predicted that the national boundaries known then would eventually fall away - that discrete nations would be replaced with a European federation. He closed his speech with this: "The best way of being right in the future is, in certain periods, to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion."
The idea that people can fall out of fashion is disturbing, but history has shown that certain voices are better received at certain moments. This desire to be right "in the future", may lead the old guard of mandarins to cede centre-stage to immigrants in the debate over the future of national identities even as many of us wonder if in truth, these identities have ever really existed.