The New Cultural Nationalism.

November 1095. Pope Urban II traveled to Clermont, in France, to launch the first Crusade against Islam. It was thus historically resonant when Jean-Marie Le Pen took up the cudgels against Islamic immigrants by limping into second place in the first round of the French elections.

The Crusades were motivated by many things. Among the most significant was to affirm Christian and European identity in the face of Islamic cultural and military successes. A similar motivation underlies the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment.

As Europe forges itself into political, social and economic union, it is also trying to build a common cultural identity out of 15 stubborn nations. To the extent that it succeeds, Europe will inevitably become less tolerant of strong discordant cultural strains within. This not- so-conscious grappling for a common identity is something new. Commentators paint Le Pen as the poster boy for anti-immigrant rage. In fact, he is not representative of this new wave.

Le Pen is not campaigning against foreigners because they are culturally different and disturbing. He's an old-fashioned thuggish fascist who hates people with different skin colors and gets votes from people who compete with them for unskilled and semiskilled jobs. That makes him easier to explain and more satisfying to hate because we can join a nice clean morality play with a coda of political correctness.

Pim Fortuyn, the extremely appealing anti-immigrant standard-bearer in May's Dutch elections, is harder to dismiss. And more frustrating, since he is even harsher on immigration than Le Pen. He demands that any government he joins adopt his Zero Tolerance for new immigration. This is the future of European anti-immigrant (and most especially anti-Muslim) sentiment.

Fortuyn is neither anti-black nor even anti-Muslim--so long as these groups agree to become cultural and political Europeans. His argument is more subtle and more dangerous: Muslims who have flooded into the Netherlands in the wake of the 1993 open-border Schengen Treaty endanger the country's tolerant, modern European culture. These immigrants, he argues, practice an anti-feminist, anti-tolerant, backward-looking religion. What's worse, he suggests, their version of Islam seeks to convert infidels--and that means the Dutch way of life goes out the door if they succeed.

Mind you, this is not a case he makes in the overheated salons of Amsterdam's chic neocons. It's what he says on the stump, and it is having an enormous impact on the political discourse in the Netherlands and elsewhere. ...