Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 23

NATIONAL IDENTITY

immigrants could be much slower and more problematic
than assimilation has been in the past.
Fourth, never before in American history has close
to a majority of immigrants spoken a single non-English language. The impact of the predominance of
Spanish-speaking immigrants is reinforced by many
other factors: the proximity of their countries of
origin; their absolute numbers; the improbability of
this flow ending or being significantly reduced; their
geographical concentration; their home government
policies promoting their migration and influence in
American society and politics; the support of many
elite Americans for multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual education, and affirmative action; the economic
incentives for American businesses to cater to Hispanic
tastes, use Spanish in their business and advertising,
and hire Spanish-speaking employees; the pressures
to use Spanish as well as English in government signs,
forms, reports, and offices.
The elimination of the racial and ethnic components
of national identity and the challenges to its cultural and
creedal components raise questions concerning the prospects for American identity. At least four possible future
identities exist: ideological, bifurcated, exclusivist, and
cultural. The America of the future is in reality likely to
be a mixture of these and other possible identities.
First, America could lose its core culture, as President
Clinton anticipated, and become multicultural. Yet
Americans could also retain their commitment to the
principles of the Creed, which would provide an ideological or political base for national unity and identity.
Many people, particularly liberals, favor this alternative.
It assumes, however, that a nation can be based on only
a political contract among individuals lacking any other
commonality. This is the classic Enlightenment-based,
civic concept of a nation. History and psychology, however, suggest that it is unlikely to be enough to sustain a
nation for long. America with only the Creed as a basis
for unity could soon evolve into a loose confederation
of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little
or nothing in common apart from their location in the
territory of what had been the United States of America.
This could resemble the collections of diverse groups
that once constituted the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman,
and Russian empires. These conglomerations were held
together by the emperor and his bureaucracy. What
central institutions, however, would hold together a loose
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2016

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ow deceased Harvard professor Samuel P.
Huntington discusses social and political
influences trending in a direction that could lead to
the weakening and eventual dissolution of the United
States. He poses the example of the Soviet Union as
a case study demonstrating the weakness of mere
idealogy (communism) employed in an effort to unify
different cultures and nationalities—an approach that
eventually failed. To mitigate and reverse such trends
in the United States, he proposes solutions to restore
and stimulate American cohesion and national identity.

American assemblage of groups? As the experiences of
America in the 1780s and Germany in the 1860s suggest,
past confederations normally have not lasted long.
Second, the massive Hispanic immigration after 1965
could make America increasingly bifurcated in terms
of language (English and Spanish) and culture (Anglo
and Hispanic), which could supplement or supplant the
black-white racial bifurcation as the most important division in American society. Substantial parts of America,
primarily in southern Florida and the Southwest, would
be primarily Hispanic in culture and language, while
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