What the Europeans are doing, under the aegis of the European Union, but really at the instigation of Germany most of all, will have two basic political effects. First it will split the EU east and west, possibly even more bitterly than the economic woes of the past five years have split north and south. Indeed, it is doing so already. Second, it will reshape politics within most, if not all, West European countries.

As to the former effect, think about Poland for just a moment. When Poland re-emerged into independence after World War I, it was a highly heterogeneous place. And that was troublesome for nearly every community involved, to put it mildly. The situation of most other Central and East European states was roughly comparable. Thanks to World War II and then the Russian insistence on a postwar territorial settlement of a westward-displaced kind, far more homogenous states emerged from the bloodbath. Poland today is vastly more homogeneous, both in ethno-linguistic and sectarian terms, than it ever was, and Poles by and large seem quite happy with the current situation—and they are doing well as a post-Warsaw Pact, post-communist society by most measures partly because of it. Why should they jump for joy when Mr. Juncker and the Commission in Brussels tell them that all this needs to end? They clearly are not jumping for joy, and the pressure from without is bound to help President Duda’s party in next month’s parliamentary elections.

To Poland’s west we are about to witness the biggest boon for right-wing xenophobes since the 1930s. All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s (and yes, there will be a sharp economic downturn to speed the effect; it’s already begun, in China, because we have allowed a half dozen major regional business cycles with their own, often balancing-out, dynamics to coalesce into one huge global business cycle), and we all know what happened next. How is the thinking in Berlin now different in essence from the calamity of Kellogg-Briand and Locarno? It is downright Kantian: The ethereal categorical imperative über alles. It also seems to me very Christian in the sense that it represents a tilt of intentions over consequences—and Kant was, remember, a Lutheran Pietist, so we know where his basic intellectual urges came from. Indeed, the denizens of the German Left seem to me a very religious people, only they think they’re secularists just because a clutch of proper names has changed, and they don’t often go to church anymore, but rather collect for the functional equivalent of communal worship in political meetings, university seminars, and protest rallies.