Reihan: Nationalism and the Superstate

Alex Massie has a terrific post on the EU and the rise of minority (what an awful term) territorial nationalisms.

Very briefly, what is the political valence of these nationalisms, and of Eurofederalism? I mean, it obviously varies from case to case. The now-dead call for "Padania" had a right-wing orientation. Scottish nationalism and the various Iberian minority nationalisms have a generally left-wing orientation.

The pro-market Anglophone right-liberals American conservatives tend to identify with (for obvious reasons) are almost invariably Euroskeptics. But of course the middle European Christian Democratic center-right is very Europhilic. We could just as easily imagine the opposite being true, with market liberals pro-EU and social market conservatives anti-EU. As Perry Anderson argued at length in the LRB, the EU we have represents the Hayekian ideal of inter-state federation that dampens economic nationalism and thus institutionalizes economic liberalism. There is some truth to this.

Though generally sympathetic to Euroskepticism, I actually found Glyn Morgan's The Idea of a European Superstate extremely convincing: the EU is not a superstate and it ought to be a superstate so that it can exercise power, whether in concert with the United States or in pursuit of its own conception of world order. Having two Western superstates rather than one and two-dozen squabbling pygmy-states makes a lot of sense in a world that will be increasingly shaped by non-Western powers. This notion has obvious conservative sympathies.