LONDON — As I wandered around the anti-Brexit protests in London last weekend, I saw nothing on the many placards in the air that could counter the simple message of their opponents. The Leave camp's "Take Back Control" and proliferation of national flags have a powerful emotional pull, one that pro-Europeans have struggled to deliver.

Indeed, many of the thinkers and funders behind Brexit claim to see their future in an alternative model of transnational cooperation away from the EU, one that unites the U.K. with its "natural" partners in the so-called "Anglosphere": Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the U.S.

Nor are Brexiteers alone in their attempt to reinvent globalization and pivot away from multiculturalism toward romantic definitions of national identity. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s "Eurasian Union" also dreams of a Globalization 2.0, where common markets are predicated on emotional ties, patterns of migration rely on historical memory, and economic cooperation is defined by cultural affinities.

The emotional pull of these national narratives leaves EU supporters in the U.K. — and supporters of the "European" (i.e. democratic) course in Russia — with a quandary. The Eurasian Union may embrace tyranny, where the Anglosphere sings hymns to liberty, but both visions share similar underlying tensions.

In contrast, the EU doesn't appeal to emotion in its definition of European identity. Its approach is reflected in a curious document penned by EU founding father Jean Monnet, in the European School charter, institutions designed to create the future's ideal "Europeans."

In the EU’s purely rational view of the world, if workers in Sunderland in the U.K. lose their manufacturing jobs they could move to Essen, Germany, where there is work.

“Without ceasing to look to their own lands with love and pride,” Monnet wrote, the Continent’s children “will become in mind Europeans, schooled and ready to complete and consolidate the work of their fathers before them, to bring into being a united and thriving Europe."

According to this definition, Europe only takes shape in relation to the "national cultures" it is designed to overcome. Love and pride stands in contrast with becoming "in mind European," developing emotional nationalism should develop into rational pan-Europeanness.

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Monnet's was very much an enlightenment project, an appeal to the head over the heart. The guiding thought for advocates of the Anglosphere and Eurasianism is more romantic, focusing on spiritual and linguistic bonds.

“If I get up in the morning in South Africa their radio is like our radio — same with Australia,” Leave.EU and UKIP funder Arron Banks told the Guardian. “I don’t feel an affinity towards French, Germans and Spaniards. I’d much rather deal with my own kith and kin.”

In the EU’s purely rational view of the world, if workers in Sunderland in the U.K. lose their manufacturing jobs they could move to Essen, Germany, where there is work. But language barriers — and "love and pride" of country — mean that few do. If Britain were to have a deal on free movement with somewhere like Australia, Anglosphere proponents argue, the unemployed would be more likely to move and find work.

“It is not a question of race but cultural ties,” claims Banks. More upmarket Anglosphere thinkers such as MEP Daniel Hannan sometimes include Singapore and India in the Anglosphere, and stress common traditions of private property, jury trial, parliamentary democracy and an intellectual heritage where the "individual is lifted above the collective." (Hannan’s Twitter feed is emblazoned with the Anglosphere flag).

How can you appeal to emotion and identity when you argue that the point of modern Britishness, and Europeanness, is to rise above those things?

Eurasianism is a weirder, wilder beast. As Charles Clover relates in his engrossing account "Black Wind, White Snow," the idea evolved in the Gulag where its early theoretician, Lev Gumilev, saw such great suffering he thought the experience revealed peoples’ "true" selves. Gumilev and other Eurasianists believed populations that had once been part of the Mongolian Khanate, the descendants of the martial nomads of the Eurasian steppe, were unconsciously connected.

In its modern geopolitical iteration, Eurasianism pits a communitarian Moscow-led continental empire in perpetual conflict with a liberal Anglo-Saxon maritime empire. Putin’s 2012 creation of a Eurasian Customs Union was, writes Clover, a clear "wolf whistle" to the geopolitical mystics.

Eurasianism and the Anglosphere offer two former empires, both of which agonize about whether they are European, a way to reconnect with their imperial past and redefine globalization in a way that suits them.

Eurasianism, with its denial of universal values, opens up the possibility for Putin’s Russia to normalize corruption and human rights abuses as "cultural" quirks. Critics of the Anglosphere note how it can be used to make the case for radical free-market economics under the guise of culture.

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It's unclear to what extent the imperial center’s desires are echoed by their former colonies. Putin’s attempts to stuff Ukraine into the Eurasian Union led to the Maidan revolution in Kiev and Russia's invasion of Eastern Ukraine. Other states such as Armenia had to be pressurized. The Anglosphere appears not to involve pro-European Scotland and Ireland; the leaders of Canada, Australia and New Zealand have said they would prefer the U.K. to remain in the EU; and the U.S. looks, under Obama anyway, uninterested.

But this lack of solid grounding can also be an advantage: When one story fails, it can morph into another. Eurasianism can become the "Russian world." The "Anglosphere" can become the Commonwealth or Atlanticism. The message can morph until it finds a way to resonate.

As Remain supporters reorganize for the many negotiations and political twists and turns ahead, they are belatedly looking for a unifying message to encompass the European Britain they love but struggle to define. How can you appeal to emotion and identity when you argue that the point of modern Britishness, and Europeanness, is to rise above those things?

Some argue for the need to celebrate "immigrant Britain." As a non-Anglosphere, immigrant Brit I can sympathize. But, unlike "immigrant America," Britain has traditionally stressed tolerance — and separateness — over integration.

Others, most notably London Mayor Sadiq Khan, want to devolve London — and other cities and regions — to run their own affairs. "Take Back Control" cuts many ways. But the political road to such an arrangement is very long.

Putin’s Russia and Brexit Britain are qualitatively different polities, but their debates bear similarities to what I saw during the (ultimately unsuccessful) anti-Putin protests in Moscow in 2011-2012. The cosmopolitan intellectuals, business-minded liberals and hipster socialists failed to reach a common message, and so they were easily dismissed as members of a metropolitan bubble.

As the summer days get hotter, the conversations in London become more feverish. Some call for a global "progressive" coalition. Others argue that Brexit should be seen as part of a broader crisis that includes rising nationalism across Europe, refugees, the war in Ukraine, inequality, Turkey, and anti-democratic regimes in Eastern Europe. Still others call for a new Bretton Woods moment; a redefinition of NATO; new associative EU memberships for the U.K. and Turkey; a re-imagining of the West and of globalization.

The line between inspiration and desperation is thin. But if the pro-Europe camp wants to win, it has to think big and subsume the Anglosphere into something more exciting — and altogether greater.

Peter Pomerantsev is the author of “Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” (PublicAffairs, 2014), for which he won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.