In Europe

millions of immigrants. The number of Muslims in France rose to seven per cent of the population, in the Netherlands to more than four per cent, in England and Germany to over three per cent. Problems arose primarily in those neighbourhoods where the newcomers huddled together – immigrant concentrations of seventy per cent were noted here and there – and where a competitive struggle arose for such scarce resources as jobs, housing and educational facilities.
    In 1981, violence and rioting broke out in working-class neighbour-hoods in London, Liverpool and Manchester. They had to do with the dearth of opportunities – at least for Britain's poorest inhabitants – during the Thatcher era, but racial conflicts also played a role. Starting in the early 1990s, that dissatisfaction began to play a role in European politics as well: in France, the vehement nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen won some fifteen per cent of the votes; in Germany, the
Republikaner
party of former SS man Franz Schönhuber – whose memoirs about his great role model Adolf Hitler sold around 180,000 copies – took between five and ten per cent of the vote; in Austria, the FPÖ of the young right-radical Jörgen Haider became – with a quarter of the votes cast – the country's second largest party in October 1999; in the Netherlands, the Centre Democrats – including a number of splinter parties – came on the scene, and in Belgium the Flemish Bloc of Filip Dewinter created a furor with slogans like ‘A Flemish Flanders in a White Europe’.
    Without exception, opinion polls reflected the same pattern: the majority of Europeans remained reasonably tolerant, but the group opposing a multicultural Europe had grown since the 1980s. In a survey held in 1997 among a thousand citizens from each of the EU member states, forty-one per cent stated that there were too many foreigners livingin their country. One in ten felt sympathy for racist and ultra-right-wing organisations. In 2000, more than half the Western Europeans surveyed felt that their lives had worsened with the arrival of immigrants, and that their social system had been undermined.
    Halfway through the 1990s, the journalist Will Hutton sensed a clear shift in mentality in Britain, a waning tendency to bear collective responsibility, a ‘dissipation’ of values such as ‘an honest day's work for honest pay’ and ‘the idea that success and hard work go together’. ‘Businessmen are mesmerised by their personal salaries. Politicians are no longer able to step outside their tribal circuits. Jobs are easily lost and never found again. A lifetime's savings can easily be stolen … The prevailing mood is one of general fear and apprehension.’
    For ten years Thatcher damned equality and extolled the virtues of inequality. Inequality was the key to her ideology, the driving force behind her success. In this way, following the post-war consensus ideology, she set a new tone. And, despite her dubious achievements, this tone was adopted by an increasing number of European countries in the 1990s. Four decades after the war, the sense of togetherness, the solidarity after all the shared hardships, had run its course.
    It is the morning after in Llangynog. The empty pub still smells of beer and sweat. On the car radio a church service in Welsh, indecipherable yet highly familiar. The trees have already lost most of their leaves, the countryside is a greenish-brown, the sky an unbroken grey, the light watery. Then comes the quiet little port of Fishguard and the wait for a ferry. A few dozen wooden ships are listing on the muddy flats, a little further along emergency repairs are being carried out on the
Queen Beatrix
, three sandpipers are grubbing after a worm, a little girl runs in circles on the pier, a hardy family is having a picnic in the wind. The entire scene is immersed in the sound of waves, gulls, the clang of metal.
    Late that afternoon, after the crossing, the road leads through little Irish villages, past low houses, a factory with bars at the windows. There are betting shops – the bank branches of the poor – everywhere. A hunched farmer is holding a red flag: his wife drives a herd of cattle across the road. The countryside is full of crows. At dusk I arrive at the home of my Irish acquaintances, Declan and Jackie Mortimer. Declan hasjust come back from the hunt, beside the mower and the compressor in the barn hangs a good-sized deer, a tub of blood on the ground beneath