Letter from the editors.

In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift portrays two nations ready to go to war over the subject of which end of a boiled egg should be broken in order to eat it. The Big-Enders and the Little-Enders are each convinced of their rightness and the utter wrongness of their opponents. National pride is at stake, and the issue can only be resolved through conflict.

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This is satire, but like all good satire it is based on fact. We have seen wars over similarly foolish subjects: the War of Jenkins' Ear between Britain and France, the Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. The theft of a pig nearly caused a war between Britain and the United States in the early 1850s, while France and Britain squabbled for years over possession of the Isles Minquiers, rocks in the English Channel that are submerged at high tide.

In each case, the casus belli is usually only a pretext. The real issue is the simmering mass of national rivalries and jealousies that are inherited from past generations, and are only dimly understood by the present. Following the horrors of the Second World War, an attempt was made to disconnect the present from the past, to create a new Europe in which old national rivalries would be stamped out and overlaid with a new European identity.

As time as shown, that project has met with mixed success. Old national identities have persisted and new ones emerged in Scotland and Wales, Flanders and Wallonia. Some of these national identities have emerged peacefully, others have been accompanied by varying degrees of conflict. But one thing seems clear. National identity has not gone away, nor will it go away.

Should this concern the business leader of the future? It is easy to focus on the negative aspects of national identity. What about the positives?

Europeans are proud of their national histories and traditions with good reason. Each country among us has produced its scholars, its poets, its ...