The EU was supposed to end nationalism. It gave it new life instead.

The EU tends to be extremely generous in dignifying minority languages, regions, and even political movements with some kind of official status. Latvian, Irish, and Maltese are all recognized European languages, but good luck finding four million people who speak any of these fluently. Still, this kind of recognition is important to nationalists looking to maintain some kind of identity in the face of an overwhelming, powerful neighbor, or globalism more generally.

The European project has also demanded a kind of consensus politics, what Buchanan calls “economism.” Because this neoliberalism came to dominate the Europhile elite on both the left and right, it became diverse target during the economic downturn, leading to the fall of a conservative government in France and a Labour government in Britain.

As a result, as my former editor Daniel McCarthy pointed out to me, instead of ending nationalism, the Europhiles have ceded all the populist territory to nationalists on immigration, trade, or other forms of “economic patriotism.” Center-left parties are suddenly more vulnerable to the left, and center-right parties, deprived of the normal expressions of patriotism, have a gaping wound on their right.