European nationalist movements are paradoxically driven to remain in the EU, an organization dedicated to the extinction of national sovereignty.
One thing that unites all the current nationalist movements in states such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain is their seemingly paradoxical desire either to re-join or to remain in a supranational organization dedicated to the extinction of national sovereignty, in a project of ever closer union that renders previously national governments the equivalent of provincial governments.
If the recent history of previous attempts at such large supranational entities in Europe is anything to go by (though it may not be, history is not merely an exact repetition of previous patterns), such an entity will in the end provoke a violent nationalist backlash. As yet, however, there are only faint rumblings of this, earth tremors rather than earthquakes: but if, for example, one reads the book about Franco-German relations by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the perennial and charlatan leftist candidate who is nevertheless a significant political figure in France, one has the impression, so virulent is its Germanophobia, that it was written circa 1915. (In this case, the term phobia is not an exaggeration.)
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty