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For many of Europe’s 350 million-plus citizens, the next five to ten years will be the most exciting, promising, and/or disturbing era of their lives. Only those with vivid memories of the 1939–45 war or the radical sixties might find these millennial years less than seminal. The quarrelsome patchwork of nations, peoples, cultures, economies, climates and topographies loosely known as Europe is facing the next millennium more united – or at least more closely bound together – than anyone could have dreamed just fifty years ago.

Brussels

The capital of Belgium has become shorthand for the ambitious project of European integration that started in the early 1950s. The changing names of the project over the decades reflect the broadening ambitions of the ‘Eurocrats’ and the visionary politicians who have driven it – the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), the European Economic Community (1957), the European Community (1967) and now, the European Union (1993). What started out as a forum for collaboration among six countries in a limited area of industry has evolved into nothing less than a drive to create, in effect, a United States of Europe, with its own single currency and supranational legislature currently covering fifteen countries, with more in the waiting room.

Not everybody in Europe is on board. The sort of people who used to be known as ‘right wing’ – typified by Britain’s Conservative Party and its former leader Margaret Thatcher – resent the political dimension. They think the project should stick to fostering trade and commerce and keep its hands off social policy, let alone political integration. Some ‘left-wing’ Europeans see the whole thing as a vehicle for big business to have its wicked way with workers, playing off those in high-wage countries against those in lower-cost areas.

As the process grinds on through committees, white papers, debates and summits, it may seem like a typically European phenomenon – long-winded, ponderous, bureaucratic, short on star performers and sex appeal. But it’s worth remembering that the western Europeans who have grown up watching this process are the first in many generations who haven’t taken time out to knock the hell out of each other in battle. And as recent events in former Yugoslavia have shown, Europe’s capacity for ethnic violence can never be completely discounted.

Slowly but surely, nations across Europe are in the process of uniting their destinies with former foes, of handing over strands of sovereignty previously held dearer than life itself. Long term, for many Europeans it will mean living under rules invented by other Europeans who don’t even speak the same language. This sort of prospect used to lead to fighting in Europe, but so far it has only sparked a war of words between the ‘Europhiles’ and the ‘Eurosceptics’ within countries.

With a fair wind, the early years of the next millennium should see the laborious but peaceful emergence of a true European Union, put together by committees rather than by combatants, but nevertheless a heroic achievement. What the late General de Gaulle said of his native France is even more applicable to Europe as a whole: ‘My friend, you can’t expect to unify overnight a country which boasts 257 different types of cheese.’

Déjà History

One of Europe’s big problems (and points of pride) is that the past is always getting in the way of the present and the future. For example, engineers trying to excavate tunnels for the city metro in Rome routinely came across ancient Roman relics – cue to stop digging and call in the archaeologists again. In London developers in the financial district have faced similar problems with buried Roman relics.

Even the idea of unifying Europe goes back a long way. On the eve of the first millennium, the year zero, the Romans were on their way to ruling an empire that would cover much of the territory now in the European Union. A thousand years later, the German-speaking area of Europe was engaged in a long-running attempt to put together a second empire – the would-be Holy Roman Empire. And after Napoleon’s short-lived conquest of Europe in the early 1800s, Hitler made his bid for the Third Reich (Third Empire), which crumbled in 1945.

On a less grand scale, many of the European social and workplace attitudes prevalent for much of this century are steeped in a sense of the past – the dynamics of left-wing/right-wing class politics and the efforts of workers to protect their interests. Workers’ ‘struggles’ are remembered as heroic, and even today, large numbers of Europeans are loath to give up hard-won privileges for the uncertain prospect of global next.

In short, Europeans’ history, their perception of history, and the legacies of history have all too often served to keep them apart and stuck in the past. But now, it seems that the grip of history is loosening across the whole Continent – although people in the Balkans might disagree on that point. New generations of Europeans have grown up amid peace and plenty, eating the same fast food, drinking the same soft drinks, driving the same cars and increasingly sharing the same tastes in music, movies and TV. These New Europeans display a mindset that breaks with the thinking of previous generations – much more focused on the here and now, on themselves and their own futures, much less interested in where they are from and more concerned with where they are going.

To paraphrase Francis Fukuyama, we may well be witnessing something akin to the end of history in Europe – or at least the beginning of the end of Europe’s obsession with history.

The Euro Nightmare

With the approach of the year 2000, computerized countries all over the world are facing the same Y2K ‘millennium bug’ problems. Computers in which dates were programmed as two digits rather than four will be completely thrown when 99 (of 1999) clicks over to 00 (of 2000).

But as Y2K fever heats up, Europe will add its own complication to the computer systems nightmare – a new currency, the euro, which is the flagship of an ambitious project of economic and monetary union. Banks and businesses in Europe currently have to deal with transactions between the fifteen currencies of the European Union, whose exchange rates constantly vary within fairly narrow bands. In order to simplify cross-border business in the future, Europe is going to phase in a single currency. The euro should make things much easier in the long term, but a lot more complicated in the short term. To quote from Peter Pan, the whole undertaking promises to be ‘an awfully big adventure’.

Europeans will be able to start using the euro on 1 January 1999, and for a three-year transition period it will be used in parallel with existing national currencies – the French franc, the German mark, etc. After that, it will be goodbye to the franc, the mark and all the other currencies that will cease to be legal tender in the summer of 2002. During the transition period, the euro will be the cross-rate hub – exchange rates will be calculated on the basis of each currency’s rate versus the euro, rather than directly between the currencies.

It’s not clear whether the European authorities were fully aware of the Y2K problem when they decided on the single European currency schedule. What is sure is that the timing is likely to keep legions of programmers very busy for a long time to come. Phasing in the euro will bring plenty of challenges. Currently, many companies need only deal with their national currencies, but even small, locally focused companies will have to phase in or switch to euro systems sooner or later. And the systems range from cash tills and computer keyboards with euro symbols all the way up to powerful number-crunching programmes handling corporate accounts. IBM calculates that the cost to companies doing business across the Continent will be in the region of US$175 billion. Fortunately, the banking industry is ahead of the pack in its preparations for the euro, which are thought to cost around US$100 million for big banks.

And the euro shift won’t touch only countries in the first wave of euro adopters. The European Union is the main trading partner for Britain, and while the British government is holding to a ‘watch from the wings’ line, British companies doing business with the mainland will probably find it pays to go euro sooner rather than later, since big Continental companies will be going for it. Business Week reports that Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever and many UK headquartered banks are among the companies that plan to start operating in euros at the birth of the new currency on 1 January. They’re sure to bring legions of suppliers and customers along with them.

Nonetheless, a survey by accounting firm Grant Thornton of London indicated that some 37 per cent of European companies haven’t even started thinking about the euro. It’s a fair bet that a considerably higher proportion of the cash-wielding public is even farther from incorporating the euro into their plans.

The Euro Dream

It shouldn’t take Europeans long to experience the benefits of the euro – which, among other things, will allow one to compare prices in different countries. The variations in price are sometimes big, and with no border controls between many EU countries, we can expect a sharp increase in cross-border shopping trips.

Despite the darkest suspicions of die-hard eurosceptics, the single currency isn’t being introduced to confuse people and make life more difficult. It’s part of a policy designed to remove the obstacles to doing business between European countries, creating a unified trading zone with a GDP to match that of the US. One likely consequence, posits the Economist, is that the euro could become a real alternative to the US dollar on a world scale, which would make it harder for the United States to run unlimited current-account deficits and to exercise unchallenged leadership of the international financial system.

Entry requests were reviewed at a summit meeting in May 1998, and the G-11 were officially named; Britain, Denmark and Sweden have chosen not to join the euro at this time – and Greece didn’t make the cut. At the same meeting Wim Duisenberg, a Dutchman, was named as head of the Central Bank, making him every bit as powerful as America’s Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

In any event, focusing on the EMU entry criteria has spurred countries to greater budgetary sobriety across Europe and in turn helped drive interest rates down – all good news for investors. On the corporate front, the introduction of the euro should cut the cost of transacting cross-border business in Europe. Companies won’t have to give their banks the spread on foreign exchange transactions, and they won’t have to pay for currency hedges to lock in their prices. Moreover, the euro should stimulate cross-border efficiencies, allowing companies to expand, consolidate, restructure or relocate without regard to currency differences. No wonder investors are getting excited.

Banks, insurers and finance houses are expected to be among the first companies to go regional with cross-border product offerings in the single currency, which will make for greater consumer choice and mobility within Europe. Right now it’s theoretically possible to take out a mortgage in one currency to buy a property in another, but the foreign exchange risks are daunting for the average consumer. With the euro, that risk is eliminated. The increasing pace of preparations for Y2K and the euro are making software houses an irresistible investment opportunity, too.

With zero hour approaching, things are suddenly falling into place for the euro. Against expectations, European economies started picking up in 1998, after almost a decade of sluggish performance which threatened to scupper the currency’s introduction. What’s more, the Economist reports that European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs Yves-Thibault de Silguy thinks that the spending on preparations for the euro, coming on top of Y2K spending, will give Europe’s economies a further boost.

Borders, What Borders?

For cross-border travellers in Europe, things are just returning to where they were a century ago, when it was possible to wander across the Continent without a passport. Only recently have border controls between many European countries been dropped (under the EU’s Schengen agreement), but already some countries are wondering what they have let themselves in for.

Since October 1997, flights between Italy, France, Germany, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have had domestic status, while land border controls are virtually nonexistent. The big worry now is that there are no secondary lines of defence to pick up illegal or undesirable immigrants – once they have made it into one of the countries, they can travel unimpeded to any of the others with little fear of being caught at border crossings.

Europeans and their governments are already daunted by the prospect of innocent economic migrants and asylum seekers turning up on their doorsteps from Africa and the near East. Many refugees in 1997 and 1998 were Iraqi or Turkish Kurds, who have been arriving in increasing numbers and applying for political asylum. EU countries are afraid things could get worse: recent years have seen sudden influxes from Albania and Bosnia; and the risk of mass migration from the countries of North Africa is ever present, particularly with Algeria virtually in a state of civil war.

But much more worrying are the activities of organized criminals who now make big money smuggling illegal immigrants, as well as the more traditional contraband of drugs, guns and money. According to Professor Ernesto Savona, director of Italy’s Transcrime research institute, the Albanian Mafia has now grown so powerful that it has already chased the Italian Mafia, once its patron and big brother, right out of the lucrative business of trafficking migrants. ‘Albanian-organized crime has its foot in the door, which is Italy, and this means people, prostitution and drugs.’¹ It will be tough for EU countries to hold on to the Schengen ideal of free movement of people without more stringent immigration and asylum laws.

Expect Europe’s open-borders policy to come under a lot of pressure within the Schengen group, while the UK looks on smugly.

Immigration If you’re looking for a hot-button topic in Europe, immigration has long been a reliable choice and is likely to stay that way well into the next millennium. Recently deceased British politician Enoch Powell made his name thirty years ago with his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech on immigration, while in France the National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen now commands around 15.2 per cent of French votes on an anti-immigrant platform of ‘France for the French’. It’s all about culture (with a small c), jobs, and welfare. The presence of immigrants who are really, seriously different can create huge culture shock, especially when they are there in large numbers and form their own self-contained communities. For instance, Germany, Europe’s biggest receiver of immigrants, has around 7 million immigrants out of a population of 82 million.

Every European country has its unique immigrant population profile – which itself begs the question of how many generations it takes for immigrants to be classified as locals. The UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have people from their former colonies, Germany has Turks and Eastern Europeans, most northern European countries have people from southern Europe, and southern Europe, which used to lose migrants to the north, is now having to deal with the unaccustomed problem of absorbing immigrants from Africa and the Balkans. Apart from the smells of unfamiliar cooking and the sound of strange languages, the big fears are either that the immigrants will work, taking the jobs of local people and driving down pay levels, or that they won’t work but instead will live on benefit payments.

Slow-to-change communities are feeling the effects of the economic upheavals that are sweeping the world and devastating traditional industries, leaving legions of unemployed. It’s all too easy for bewildered Europeans to point the finger of blame at immigrants, who are often concentrated in areas where the hardest-hit local people live too. And it’s all too tempting for extremist parties to play on voters’ fears, forcing even moderate politicians to take a harder line on immigration.

For example, the left-wing government of French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin caused a furore among its own supporters as it examined residency requests from 140,000 illegal immigrants. The government is aiming to modify tough immigration regulations passed by previous conservative governments under pressure from the far-right National Front, which wants to send all immigrants home. Jospin’s new law is easier on immigrants who have French-born children or who have been in the country for many years, but is tougher on recent arrivals and bachelors.

All across Europe, governments will have a tough job balancing conflicting factors. On one hand, they wish to stay true to their humanitarian traditions and tackle the practical task of integrating new arrivals. And on the other hand, they are mindful of the risk of social conflict that is likely if they overstretch the capacity of local people to absorb newcomers.

So far, the immigration debate has been conducted largely in terms of rights and responsibilities, of economic burdens, of redistributing an economic cake that is assumed to be of fixed size. But in the early years of the coming millennium, we can expect to see the focus start to shift towards finding ways to help immigration contribute to the economies of receiving countries.

The fact is that Europe needs immigrants. Birth rates across Europe are low and the native populations of most European countries are ageing and shrinking. As people live longer and the demographic bulge of baby boomers starts heading towards retirement, Europe will increasingly need the work and the taxes of immigrants to keep its economies humming.

You Are What You Speak?

So, in much of Europe in the year 2000, you’ll be able to cross borders without noticing them and you’ll only need to carry one type of currency, the euro. But what language will you speak? More and more, it’s likely to be English. Increasing numbers of Europeans are deciding that if they have to invest time and effort in learning a second language, it may as well be one that can be used as widely as possible in Europe and beyond.

Like so much else in Europe, there is a precedent for Europeans sharing a common tongue, a lingua franca. For well over a thousand years, into the early centuries of the present millennium, educated people across the Continent spoke variants of Latin, the language imposed by the Romans. Modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan are direct descendants of Latin.

For much of the present millennium, Europeans spoke a huge variety of local dialects. It was only with the establishment of modern nation-states and public schooling that the idea of standardized national languages took hold, enabling people in different parts of the same country to communicate with each other. But the problem with language is that it’s not only a means of communication, it’s also a repository of national culture, identity and pride.

When the European Community was founded French was the predominant language until the UK joined in 1972, when English began to pose a threat. Since the admission of the Scandinavian countries in 1995, English has been even more widely used; an article in the Electronic Telegraph noted a recent survey of more than a billion pages of EU documents that confirmed that English has taken the lead. Although there are eleven official EU languages, European Commission meetings take place in just three tongues: English, French and German.

The smaller EU nations, such as the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, take it for granted that their languages are of domestic interest only. Even Italy and Spain apparently have no international aspirations for their languages. Not so Germany and France, where the national languages are seen as flagships of the national culture, to be promoted with government backing to stop the insidious slide towards English.

More than half the Germany foreign ministry’s cultural budget is devoted to promoting German language and culture abroad in 180 German schools with 2,200 teachers and specialists. Nearly 170 government-supported Goethe Institutes employ 750 people in seventy-eight countries to champion the cause.²

France takes its language very seriously indeed and is trying its best to stem the tide of English. It has a highly respected body, the Académie Française, to rule on correct usage, and has placed legal restrictions on the use of English in public communications. France even runs an international forum of forty-nine Francophone countries, which held its seventh summit, in Hanoi, Vietnam, last year. Earlier this year, France lodged an official protest with the European Commission about the way English is supplanting French as Europe’s prime working language. As part of its campaign, France has made it clear that it will block the appointment of the next president of the EC if he or she does not speak fluent French.

But, for better or for worse, English is becoming the ‘industry standard’, in much the same way that VHS became the videocassette standard and MS-DOS, Wintel and TCP/IP have become computer standards. Perhaps it’s the fact that English developed as a melting pot of the major European languages. Or maybe that it’s an ‘open standards’ language – accessible to all, and not owned by any one country.

Sonja Huerlimann, account planner at Advico Young & Rubicam Zurich, predicts that English will become the first foreign language taught in Swiss schools. The New York Times reports that young French people are flocking to Britain to improve their English-language skills, which are appreciated in much of Europe but considered a threat to the primacy of the French language back home. The Netherlands has successfully touted the English language skills of its people to promote itself as an ideal location for multinational companies to set up their European headquarters.

Paradoxically, even as Europeans increasingly choose to adopt English as their ‘trading language’, many find themselves more able than ever to slip back into their minority languages and dialects back home – linguistic diversity is thriving in Europe. In Spain, young Catalans, Basques and Galicians have grown up being allowed to talk languages that were banned under General Franco. In Italy, it was recently discovered that Italian had not been officially registered as the national language. While amending this oversight, legislators took the opportunity to register eighteen regional dialects and languages.³

Despite its reputation as being English only, the Internet is providing a low-cost medium for minority language speakers dispersed across Europe and beyond to network in languages ranging from Albanian to Welsh. Visit http://www.partal.com/ciemen/europe.html for a sample.

In the coming millennium, expect Europeans to apply global – local thinking to language. For functional global communication, English is bound to emerge as the best option. For local, personal and cultural purposes, local languages will continue to be the entrance tickets to parallel worlds. The losers in this process will be those poor souls who speak only English.

What’s Next in the UK

The United Kingdom – what’s next even for just those two words begs a lot of questions. Namely, how far into the new millennium will the country still be a kingdom, and how much longer will it remain united?

But starting this section on a negative – or even a questioning – note would run counter to the spirit of the times for the UK. The country is on a roll, Cool Britannia, fêted by feature writers the world over, once again regarded as a world-class style capital. And it’s been lauded not only as a style leader, but also as being ahead of many other European countries in terms of its preparedness for the New Economy. ‘The UK is seen in some quarters as a model for a more commercial, entrepreneurial Europe,’ says Adrian Day, of leading brand consultants Landor Associates, based in London.

The buzz has spread all over the world, but probably the sweetest satisfaction comes from changed perceptions close to home. France has tended to regard Britain with amused and slightly bemused hauteur – a trendy tourist guide of the eighties was entitled London, 100 Years Behind and 10 Years Ahead. But many French are now seriously wondering whether Britain is leaving them behind. Unprecedentedly large numbers of young French people are crossing the Channel to find work in Britain and polish their English – some 60,000 of them are in London’s financial district alone, according to Le Figaro. Even the leader of the French parliament, Laurent Fabius, recently lavished his charm on Britain’s Prime Minister, according to a report in the Financial Times: ‘We are curious about you, dear Tony Blair, your personality and style, which have made more than one of us feel old-fashioned.’

Who would have expected it? Through the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, Britain seemed to be suffering a hangover from the Thatcher Revolution. The eighties boom peaked in 1988 and was followed by gloomy years of waiting for the return of the elusive ‘Feel Good Factor’, a buzzword used by the Conservative government of John Major (who succeeded Mrs Thatcher). House prices languished, homeless people were everywhere and politicians faced incessant accusations of corruption and wrongdoing – the so-called Sleaze Factor. Ironically, the Feel Good Factor only returned at the landslide victory of the re-engineered ‘New’ Labour Party under Tony Blair in May 1997.

Postwar Britain has been characterized by boom-and-bust cycles, and time will tell whether the latest upswing will fall into the patterns of the past or break them. New Labour has certainly declared its intention to change the country. Much of the spadework was done by successive Thatcher governments in the 1980s; they were responsible for breaking the power of the labour unions, abolishing restrictive working practices, privatizing state monopolies and forcing the notions of good housekeeping and profitability on both the public and private sectors. And New Labour’s macroeconomic thinking is not a million miles from Mrs Thatcher’s.

Blair’s honeymoon period has extended well beyond 100 days, although some of his high-profile showbiz supporters (e.g. the Gallagher brothers of Oasis) have already deserted him to protest against reforms of the welfare system. And there must be some doubts as to whether the Cool Britannia aura will survive untarnished until the new millennium – after all, fashion is fickle.

But, as Landor London affirms, the British at large have a sense of optimism, believe that the country is changing and that New Labour is modernizing it. So Tony Blair and the British people may well still find themselves on an extended honeymoon when the millennium turns. In any event, with a landslide majority behind him, Blair is one of the few current world leaders who can be confident of being in his job when the year 2000 dawns. For Britain, it’s a fair bet that the years straddling the turn of the millennium will go down in history as ‘The Blair Years’.

United? Kingdom? For the first time in many, many years, there is a real prospect of London handing over or ‘devolving’ powers to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, provided that mutually acceptable formulas can be devised. In the case of Northern Ireland, it would be a truly millennial achievement to leave behind violent civil conflict and find a formula acceptable to both the Republicans, who want the province to join the Republic of Ireland, and the Unionists or Loyalists, who want it to remain part of the United Kingdom. The early years of the next millennium are unlikely to see any substantial alteration in the sovereignty of Wales and Scotland. Any change in the composition of the United Kingdom will come with Northern Ireland.

As for the monarchy, the tragic death of Princess Diana in August 1997 triggered a heated debate about her estranged in-laws, the Royal Family and the continuing loyalty of the British to the monarchy. Polls at the time showed a marked cooling off of feeling towards ‘the Royals’ and their relevance to modern British life. (Then again, this is an era in which the Royals are reputed to employ paid spin doctors whose remit goes far beyond that of the traditional press secretaries, and in which the Blairs appear to be professionally styled prior to major appearances.) On a less emotional tone, would-be constitutional reformers used the occasion to renew discussion about whether it is appropriate for the people of a modern, postindustrial nation to be ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’.

The future of the monarchy, at least for the first half of the next century, is likely to be decided by emotional criteria. Public discussion of the Royals – meaning street level rather than media – tends to focus not on constitutional issues, but on personalities and, occasionally, on money. Recent polls have indicated that Prince Charles has recovered a lot of the ground he lost at the time of his ex-wife Diana’s death, while Prince William has inherited his mother’s good looks and goodwill. According to a report in the San Francisco Examiner, ‘Recent polls have shown that about 60 percent of Britons want the monarchy to continue. In the aftermath of Diana’s death, support for the monarchy dropped to between 40 and 50 percent, the lowest level in modern times. Analysts note that William’s father, Prince Charles, has been able to take advantage of the public’s affection for William and his younger brother, Harry, to restore at least a portion of his own image, heavily damaged by his stormy divorce from Diana and his admitted affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.’

So, provided the Royals perform well for the media (think showbiz dynasty) and provided they are discreet with their money, they can probably count on the sort of public goodwill that will keep the monarchy show running and running, and keep the K in UK. On the other hand, media editors must be drooling for the day when the young prince starts dating and, inevitably, screening for a wife. The precedents don’t bode well.

Identity and Change Some world powers are the product of revolution – France, the United States, Russia, China, India. Others have recast themselves after the turmoil of war or civil conflict – Germany, Italy and Japan being obvious examples. Almost alone among the world’s great industrial nations, Britain has no ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Liberation Day’ to celebrate.

Modern Britain is the product of evolution, not revolution. The British have never had a violent break with their past, never had to sit down together and write out a constitution or think up a completely new way of governing themselves. The legal system goes back centuries, with sedimentary layers of laws and modifications of laws. The British way has been to look to the past and tweak what worked before, rather than undertake a radical makeover.

This approach seemed to pay dividends for a long time. Over the centuries, the country amassed an empire that spanned the globe. Older Brits still recall nostalgically school atlases in which every continent had large areas of pink to mark British possessions, an era when ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’. But all that changed with World Wars I and II, which depleted the country and for ever loosened its grip on its colonial possessions.

Over the last fifty years, Britain has been forced to rethink itself, to abandon some cherished tenets of its self-mythology and to allow a new identity to emerge. The process has been long and painful, but it’s irreversible. In the mid 1990s, then Prime Minister John Major tried to stem the tide with a call for a ‘Back to Basics’ approach, along with a dewy-eyed evocation of old maids on bicycles and cricket on the village green. The country ridiculed his vision and voted him out at the next opportunity.

The British seem increasingly prepared, or perhaps resigned, to face a harsher future in which old maids won’t ride around on bicycles and the state won’t try to provide for all needs. ‘In the UK, a sea change is occurring,’ reports Gavin Heron, former strategic planning director at TBWA London, now based in Hong Kong. ‘People are moving from a dependency mindset to that of personal responsibility or control. They no longer believe the government will provide for them as it used to. The millennium is acting as a catalyst for a break with the past. It represents the future as now.’

Embracing Foreigners Britain is in the process of consciously becoming a multicultural country – a huge change from the days of the empire.

The United States forges its nationhood in schools with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. In France, immigrants are expected to put aside their origins and ‘assimilate’ French ways – as happened in France’s former colonies. The British, in contrast, have never expected foreigners to become British, so they were pretty much left to retain their own ethnic identities, as used to happen in British colonies. In Britain, immigrant groups have tended to retain their own ethnic flavour as they have found their way into society.

Absorbing immigrants has gone against the grain for many British people. Racial issues have been debated hard for many years and the anti-immigrant National Front enjoyed a brief spell of limited support in the 1980s. But an indication of the progress made can be seen in Mike Leigh’s award-winning feature film Secrets and Lies (1996), in which a working-class English woman is tracked down by the daughter who was taken from her at birth. The fact that the daughter is black and the mother is white is barely mentioned and has little relevance to the story, which is about family relationships and is virtually colour blind. Had the film been made ten years earlier, it would probably have been about race.

Much of Britain’s self-mythology has been about a plucky little country resisting foreign attempts to invade it – the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the French under Napoleon in the nineteenth century, and the Germans under Hitler this century. The country’s history of military and imperial success bred a feeling that Britain had little to learn from foreigners.

This British sense of effortless superiority has been severely eroded and even turned on its head. Over the last fifty years, as Britain has slipped down world rankings in all sorts of areas – GDP, income, standard of living, nutrition, education, sport – many British people began to acknowledge that maybe foreigners knew a thing or two after all.

A willingness to learn from foreigners is perhaps what distinguishes New Brits most from previous generations. A measure of this willingness is the fact that some of Britain’s most chauvinistic and reactionary clubs have thrown their doors wide open to foreigners. Britain’s football clubs – flush with cash from new TV deals – now field players from all over the globe. Even more surprising is that some of the top clubs have hired foreign managers – a radical development for the country that claims to have invented the game.