A united Europe is the only reasonable political utopia that Europeans have ever managed to create.

If I am not mistaken, there are a range of obvious facts supporting this idea.

They are so obvious, in fact, that I fear that we tend to forget them, living as we all do under a tyranny of the present in which yesterday’s news is already in the past and last week’s news is practically prehistoric. I will only be covering three of these facts. The first is that Europe’s premier sport is not football, like so many people think, but rather war. Europeans were killing each other throughout the last millennium without so much as a month-long truce, and in every way possible: 100-year wars, 30-year wars, civil, religious and ethnic wars, and world wars that were basically European wars. The latter were truly horrific. As Steiner himself writes, between August 1914 and May 1945, from Madrid to the Volga, from the Arctic to Sicily, an estimated 100 million men, women and children died as a result of violence, famine, deportation and ethnic cleansing, with Western Europe and the west of Russia turning into a land of death, the scene of unprecedented brutality, from Auschwitz to the Gulag.

The European Union project clearly arose from the horror of this indescribable carnage and from the wise, weary and courageous conviction that nothing like it should ever be seen in Europe again. The result of this conviction is no less obvious but also no less amazing: my father knew war, as did my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather and probably all of my ancestors, but I have not. I am part of the first generation of Europeans to have never experienced war, at least between major European powers (we should of course not forget the ferocious fighting that tore Yugoslavia apart). Some even say that another European war would be inconceivable. That seems naive to me.

In European history war isn’t the exception – peace is. If serious problems like those behind the 2008 crisis return to the surface, it is all that is needed to bring nationalism – the ultimate cause, insignia and fuel for all European wars to have taken place over the last two centuries – back with a vengeance. European unity was conceived to fight it, but this is no easy task. Nationalism is not a political ideology but rather a religion. After all, the nation replaced God as the political foundation of the State, and supplanting it in Europe will be almost as hard as it was to supplant God.

As George Orwell observed, nationalists are indifferent to reality. This means that it doesn’t matter that data shows, for example, that leaving the EU is a bad deal for the UK or that anti-immigration rhetoric is nothing more than xenophobic ranting, because nationalists will keep thinking that Britain should leave the EU and that immigrants are threatening their jobs and safety, and as a result will still vote for Brexit. Condorcet4 wrote that “fear is the origin of almost all human stupidities, and above all of political stupidities,” and Walter Benjamin said that happiness was living without fear. Nationalists are unhappy and very afraid; for many of them the European Union is nothing more than a distant, useless and soulless nuisance that obliges them to live exposed to the elements, with strange people speaking strange languages and with strange customs.

They prefer to live with others like them, or rather with those they believe or have been led to believe are like them, protected by age-old false securities, sheltered under illusory collective identities and breathing in, as Nietzsche would say, the old smell of the barn. The only way to do something useful with the future is to keep the past in the present, so it is a massive mistake to forget the dark history of violence that devastated Europe, acting like it never happened; to forget that the European Union has been key to wiping clean this sinister past is an even graver error.