Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 18

decomposition of the United Kingdom a decade before
they got under way. Few Americans now anticipate the
dissolution of or even fundamental changes in the United
States. Yet the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the 1990s East Asian economic crisis, and
September 11 remind us that history is replete with surprises. The greatest surprise might be if the United States
in 2025 were still much the same country it was in 2000
rather than a very different country (or countries) with
very different conceptions of itself and its identity than it
had a quarter century earlier.
The American people who achieved independence in
the late eighteenth century were few and homogeneous:
overwhelmingly white (thanks to the exclusion of blacks
and Indians from citizenship), British, and Protestant,
broadly sharing a common culture, and overwhelmingly
committed to the political principles embodied in the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other
founding documents. By the end of the twentieth century, the number of Americans had multiplied almost one
hundred times. America had become multiracial (roughly
69 percent white, 12 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black, 4
percent Asian and Pacific Islander, 3 percent other), multiethnic (with no majority ethnic group), and 63 percent
Protestant, 23 percent Catholic, 8 percent other religions,
and 6 percent no religion. America’s common culture and
principles of equality and individualism central to the
American Creed were under attack by many individuals
and groups in American society. The end of the Cold War
deprived America of the evil empire against which it could
define itself. We Americans were not what we were, and
uncertain who we were becoming.
No society is immortal. As Rousseau said, “If Sparta
and Rome perished, what state can hope to endure
forever?” Even the most successful societies are at some
point threatened by internal disintegration and decay
and by more vigorous and ruthless external “barbarian”
forces. In the end, the United States of America will suffer
the fate of Sparta, Rome, and other human communities. Historically the substance of American identity has
involved four key components: race, ethnicity, culture
(most notably language and religion), and ideology. The
racial and ethnic Americas are no more. Cultural America
is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates,
ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise
lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.
Reasons could exist, as Robert Kaplan observed, why
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“America, more than any other nation, may have been
born to die,”8 Yet some societies, confronted with serious
challenges to their existence, are also able to postpone
their demise and halt disintegration, by renewing their
sense of national identity, their national purpose, and the
cultural values they have in common. Americans did this
after September 11. The challenge they face in the first
years of the third millennium is whether they can continue to do this if they are not under attack.

The Global Identity Crisis
America’s identity problem is unique, but America
is not unique in having an identity problem. Debates
over national identity are a pervasive characteristic of
our time. Almost everywhere people have questioned,
reconsidered, and redefined what they have in common and what distinguishes them from other people:
Who are we? Where do we belong? The Japanese
agonize over whether their location, history, and
culture make them Asian or whether their wealth,
democracy, and modernity make them Western.
Iran has been described as a “nation in search of an
identity,” South Africa as engaged in “the search for
identity” and China in a “quest for national identity,”
while Taiwan was involved in the “dissolution and
reconstruction of national identity.” Syria and Brazil
are each said to face an “identity crisis,” Canada “a
continuing identity crisis,” Denmark an “acute identity
crisis,” Algeria a “destructive identity crisis,” Turkey
a “unique identity crisis” leading to heated “debate
on national identity,” and Russia “a profound identity crisis” reopening the classic nineteenth-century
debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers as to
whether Russia is a “normal” European country or a
distinctly different Eurasian one. In Mexico questions
are coming to the fore “about Mexico’s identity.” The
people who had identified with different Germanies,
democratic and Western European vs. communist
and Eastern European, struggle to recreate a common
German identity. The inhabitants of the British Isles
have become less sure of their British identity and uncertain as to whether they were primarily a European
or a North Atlantic people.9 Crises of national identity have become a global phenomenon.
The identity crises of these and other countries
vary in form, substance, and intensity. Undoubtedly
each crisis in large part has unique causes. Yet their
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW