Short of bulk-buying hemlock and razor blades, there is no more effective way of national suicide than the embrace of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. Multi-ethnic nations can flourish, but multicultural countries are, in the absence of (to use some horrible jargon) an agreed shared ‘narrative’, doomed to disaster. For all their faults, the French have always understood this. The notion that every Frenchman (regardless of ethnic origin) should think of his “ancestors, the Gauls”, has been a key to the success of their republic, which even before the mass immigrations of the last three decades, was far less ethnically homogenous than is usually supposed. Over the last thirty years, France, like just about everywhere else in the West, has taken in too many immigrants too quickly, and the result has been predictably disastrous. The remedy? Secure borders, cultural assimilation of those who are there already (helped, where necessary, by anti-discrimination laws) and a great deal of money spent in the desolate suburbs that now surround many French cities. Affirmative action, however, will only make matters worse – and that, unfortunately, is what France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and one of the most interesting politicians on the right, now seems set to embrace.