In Europe

dared to predict in 1953 – the year in which Stalin died, in which George Marshall and Albert Schweitzer received the Nobel Prize for Peace, in which Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, the year in which the East Germans rebelled and the Dutch-Belgian border was the scene of a fierce manhunt for butter smugglers – who would have dared to predict that half a century later there would be an EU of fifteen – and soon, twenty-five – members, with its own currency and its own parliament, a free space with largely open internal borders, that would stretch from Ireland by way of a united Germany to the very borders of chaotic Russia? And, by the same token: who would have dared to predict in 1953 that divers feelings of national pride and unity would play such an important role in European politics at the start of the twenty-first century?
    After their introduction, French writer Régis Debray referred to the new euro banknotes as ‘play money’, printed for a virtual community known as ‘Euroland’. It is, indeed, anything but the coinage of a political union with a sense of what it is and where it wants to go. For too long, European unification was a technocratic project set up by idealistic pioneers and soon taken over by businessmen, bureaucrats and government leaders, with only the occasional starry-eyed statesman to shake things up again. The new European cooperative venture was, in that way, largely a top-down affair. From the very start, of course, the common market was a major goal. And in the long term, of course, many European entrepreneurs would be lost if Europe did not develop into a single, huge, common domestic market. But the creation of a free European market has increasingly edged out the original objective, which is to provide a structure for peace.
    The European project was and is closely interwoven with the phenomenon of globalisation. As early as 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes described how a person in London, drinking his morning cup of tea in bed, could order almost any product in the world, in the certainty that it would be delivered to his doorstep as quickly as possible. That international interweaving has since developed to what a person of that day would have considered unbelievable proportions. According to some,the EU played – and continues to play – a major role in curbing and controlling these chaotic international networks and concentrations of power. In the eyes of others, however, the EU is very much an expression of the kind of globalisation against which increasing protest has arisen since the turn of this latest century; a globalisation driven by the nigh-religious belief that ‘the market’ is a panacea, that burgeoning international trade will ultimately work for the good of all, that poverty and tyranny will duly vanish of their own accord, that economic figures determine everything, that privatisation always has a beneficial effect, that competition is always best, that within these global systems the nation states will ultimately become obsolete. It is the philosophy of most political elites, but many citizens – even the majority in any number of European countries – don't believe in it at all.
    It is precisely this credibility gap which, as opinion polls showed, played such an important role in the rejection of the European Constitution by the French and the Dutch. It is not European unification itself which they rejected, but the way in which the project has been given form and continually expanded, until it has become so vague that they can no longer identify with it. For them, Europe meant the lifting of the bell jars under which each European nation had lived for centuries. It meant the dissipation of sources of conflict, the opening of markets and cultures, the freedom to go where you wish. But it also meant the abandonment of the national context within which the culture, economy, legal system and democracy had developed for centuries. For these voters-in-protest, borders did, sometimes, have a positive function: as the delimitation of their familiar, predictable, influenceable, safe world.
    Those same European pioneers, therefore, underestimated just how important such feelings of national cohesion can be, particularly in times of great change and turbulence. Or, better said, the way in which the rise of guarantor states after the war would provide a completely new basis for national sentiment. For in addition to the old national