  We show that a large anomalous contribution due to nonperturbative
instanton-like gluonic field configurations to the axial charge of the proton
implies high-energy spin effects in $p-p$ elastic scattering. This is the same
mechanism which is responsible for anomalous baryon number violation at high
energy in the standard model. We compute the proton polarization due to these
effects and we show that it is proportional to the center-of-mass scattering
angle with a universal (energy-independent) slope of order unity.
