There is a jilted quality to the way some Tories talk about Brexit, which is odd, given that Britain is dumping the European Union. The resentment would make more sense if it were the other way round: if 27 member states had expelled Britain from their club. But after decades of treating everything European as a punishment inflicted on a nation against its will, the habit is hard to break. Even the act of leaving is configured by the Eurosceptic imagination as something done by them to us. There is an illustration in the resignation letter sent by George Eustice, an agriculture minister, to Theresa May last week. Eustice was appalled by the prospect of an article 50 extension, which would, he fretted, be “the final humiliation of our country”. He said the European commission had “not behaved honourably” and had “deliberately made progress slow and difficult”. Yes, George, it would all have been quick and easy without those meddling Brussels bureaucrats.

Junior minister George Eustice resigns over article 50 vote Read more

It doesn’t require a romantic attachment to the EU to find such Brexiter tantrums tedious. All it takes is an ability to imagine what the process looks like from the other side of the negotiating table.

Immediately after the referendum, a big fear in Brussels was contagion. Zealous leavers had cultivated that idea. They cast Britain as the loose thread that, once pulled, would initiate a pan-European unravelling. No nation would be immune. EU leaders were then determined that the British experience should not invite imitation. And it doesn’t, mostly thanks to the luminous incompetence of Theresa May and her ministers. There are still plenty of eurosceptics elsewhere in Europe, but none looks across the Channel in admiration at a job well done.

But the European project still feels imperilled. While Westminster is consumed by Brexit’s parliamentary endgame, continental politicians are focusing on European parliamentary elections at the end of May. MEP ballots have often been a vehicle for protest votes (the Strasbourg legislature was a cosy incubator for Ukip over many years), and this year’s poll looks likely to amplify nationalist and xenophobic voices. That is the context in which French president Emmanuel Macron published a pro-EU, reformist manifesto in a number of newspapers, including the Guardian, on Tuesday. Macron positions himself at the head of a crusading liberal fightback against “anger mongers, backed by fake news”. His pitch is bracingly modern – “do more, faster” to combat climate change and bring democracy into the digital age. Although some of his methods have a ring of Brussels orthodoxy – a new EU agency, a convention, treaty amendment.

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It is easy to sneer at Macron’s grandiose “Dear Europe” missive. The message is alien to British audiences attuned to the surly idiom of Brussels-bashing. But it is also hard to deny that he is filling a vacancy. The EU’s achievements – banishing war from a continent historically prone to bloodshed, and allowing prosperity to flourish instead – have few articulate champions. Macron is also right that a happy ending to the 20th century is an insufficient argument for the EU today. Nostalgia plays into the hands of radical nationalists. Defence of the status quo reinforces their charge that Europe has become a project for the entrenchment of elite privilege.

The problem is painfully familiar to anyone who aches to reverse Brexit but recognises that the remain cause is still susceptible to caricature as the self-serving creed of an ancien regime. That might be too pessimistic now. There is no Macronite surge in the UK, but the embryonic Independent Group of MPs imagines that one day there might be. A paradox of the 2016 referendum is that a spirit of ardent pro-Europeanism, rare in British politics before the poll, was sparked in millions of people the morning after the result was declared. The blue-and-gold EU flag certainly never used to be displayed in windows or painted on faces at demonstrations.

There isn’t much comfort for militant remainers in Macron’s manifesto. He speaks of Brexit as a fait accompli, and a cautionary tale for the rest of the EU. This expresses a view, even among many anglophiles in Brussels, that the biggest favour Britain could do for Europe now would be to leave quickly and in an orderly fashion.

That impatience arises not out of vindictiveness or imperial Napoleonic ambition. It reflects a defensive view of Brexit as a hostile act. May insists that her own ambitions are for “deep and special” partnership, but she was not a natural Brexiter before 2016, and she won’t be in Downing Street for ever. Then what?

The current prime minister is in the business of damage limitation, whereas hardliners in her party view the European project with an impulse for damage maximisation. They might deny it, but it is a political and a psychological consequence of their position. If they think EU membership suffocates sovereignty they must want liberation for other captive nations. And if none heeds the call of freedom, and instead the EU collectively thrives without Britain, there will not be a retrospective case for having left. That is why Brexiters relish every symptom of economic and social trauma on the continent. The Tories in the European Research Group would not be so crass as to sport hi-vis jackets in the the Commons chamber, but when they watched gilets jaunes protests bring chaos to Paris streets you can bet they weren’t rooting for the besieged French president.

Macron knows it. He sees darkness in the underlying character of Brexit, as many EU leaders do. They see it perhaps better than May. She is squinting through the lens of parliamentary arithmetic and party management. Tory eurosceptics have their view warped by the need always to be victims of Brussels. The missing angle – the vital perspective from the other side of the table – is that Brexit is not something Europe is doing to Britain. It is something we chose, for ourselves and are now inflicting on our neighbours. • Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist