By Paul Craig Roberts

Tyranny is coming to Europe in the form of a new multicultural empire. Ancient sovereign states, such as England and France, and newer ones, such as Germany and Italy, are to cease to exist and to be folded into a European superstate. National existence is targeted for extinction by about 2006 followed by national consciousness.

Preparing the British for their demise as a people, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote in “The Independent” on Nov. 22 that “in a world where states and the interests of their citizens are so obviously interdependent, we need to rethink our attitudes to concepts like ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair agrees. The war against terrorism, he says, has made national sovereignty out of date.

If you think these are weak arguments for giving up the nation state, you have a point. The basis for successful political life is a common language, history and culture, which create “a people” sufficiently cohesive for democracy or self-rule to arrive at compromises that reconcile conflicts.

Coercion is the response to the massive third world immigration into European nation states. The erosion of “a people” by diversity has evoked tyrannical laws in an effort to coerce an artificial commonality.

Great Britain, for example, no longer consists of its indigenous peoples: English, Scots and Welsh. Britons are having to make room for large numbers of Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Pakistanis. Sheer numbers and victim group status impede assimilation , which, in turn, both impedes the immigrants’ progress and fosters resentment by diluting British culture.

The consequence of nonassimilation is racial inequality. The Labour Party has responded by blaming “racism.” On December 6 the government implemented draconian “race equality” laws. Public, private and voluntary organizations are under statutory obligation, policed by the Commission for Racial Equality, to produce racial equality in employment, college admissions, school performance, disciplinary proceedings, pay, benefits, facilities--in short, a thoroughgoing quota system.

Gurbux Singh, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, called the legislation “a powerful lever for change.” In effect, British culture has been declared unfair, because immigrants who do not assimilate are disadvantaged.

Europe is as overrun with third world immigrants as Britain. Some German Social Democrats favor immigration as a way of diluting the German population, thereby diminishing “the worst characteristics of the nation.” In other words, as a way of de-Germanizing Germany. Proposals are afoot to give the same state subsidies to Islamic cultural organizations as German ones receive.

Dilution of national cultures by immigration is the basis for the European Union. A weakened sense of nationhood in Britain, France and Germany means no effective opposition to bureaucratic rule by the European Commission in Brussels.

In order to criminalize national patriotism and opposition to immigration, the European Union is pushing forward legislation that makes xenophobia and racism crimes. Once this legislation passes, a European, who, for example, criticizes immigration as an anti-diversity measure that is wiping European civilization off the face of the earth, can be found guilty of racism and sentenced to two years in prison.

Similarly, persons who oppose EU measures as contrary to British values or French culture can be imprisoned   for xenophobia.

Hand in hand with the criminalization of national identity goes the European arrest warrant. Once in effect, an Englishman could be extradited to Greece and put on trial for offenses that are not crimes in England.

No finer recipe for oppression could be devised. The oppression will be felt most keenly by the British, for it is the liberties protected by their unique legal system that will be lost. Oppression leads to civil war, not European unity.

The U.S., of course, is on the same path. In fact, it began here with coerced racial integration by judicial decree, a “civil rights act” that destroyed freedom of conscience and substituted coercion for persuasion, and unconstitutional racial quotas that destroyed equality in law.

In the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, white governments are responding to the postwar propaganda about “racist white hegemonic culture” by disadvantaging the white populations and diluting the “hegemonic culture.” In the U.S., the melting pot has been evicted by the slogan, “assimilation is racism.”

If the melting pot is dismissed as racist, it must also be racist to question immigration. In the U.S. only one side of the immigration debate is permitted--the side that calls for more immigrants. In Europe, there will soon be no debate at all.

As the U.S. and European governments are committed to national and cultural suicide, what is the point of defense budgets? Shouldn’t the money be used instead for payments to make amends for having once had a hegemonic national identity?

Paul Craig Roberts is the author (with Lawrence M. Stratton) of The New Color Line : How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy