I remember a freezing night in December 2007. In Görlitz, Germany’s easternmost city, thousands of Germans and Poles cheered, drank beer and bubbly and embraced as the border checkpoint was dismantled. Poland had joined the Schengen area, and Germany’s last frontier was now open. It was a night fraught with symbolism. Görlitz is on the river Neisse, the border imposed on Germany after the second world war. And the last Germans who had taken down toll barriers to Poland had been Hitler’s soldiers in August 1939.

For most people in Britain, it’s difficult to even imagine the emotional pull that an open Europe has on the German imagination. Throughout history, Germany’s borders have fluctuated – due to foreign invasion, by the Swedes, say, in the 17th or the French in the 18th; or due to German aggression and its failure in the 19th and 20th centuries. To be “surrounded by friends”, as chancellor Helmut Kohl put it, was a completely new experience, and given our history, a piece of good fortune for those who were “born late”.

Kohl’s opposite number in Britain – Margaret Thatcher – was less prone to believe that the “late-born” Germans were different from their fathers and mothers. “By its very nature, Germany is a destabilising, rather than a stabilising force in Europe,” Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, explaining why she had tried to get Mikhail Gorbachev to oppose German reunification. She also met with leading historians in order to understand the German “national character”. According to the memorandum of the meeting, this included “angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complexes and sentimentality”.

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Kohl himself might have agreed with her; his predecessor Helmut Schmidt certainly did. Both saw the European Union as a means to contain German nationalism. Indeed, this has been the raison d’être of European integration since the very start. In 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was founded in order to put the backbone of German industrial and military might under French supervision. And of course sacrificing the Deutschmark for the euro was the price Kohl paid for getting François Mitterrand to support reunification. However, warning signs of a new German assertiveness emerged when Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder, tried to forge an anti-American and anti-British Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis. And although Angela Merkel is no Schröder, the crisis of Kohl’s brainchild, the euro, forced her Germany into the role of a European hegemon.

“Suddenly, Europe is speaking German,” said Volker Kauder, leader of the CDU in parliament, five years ago. And he wasn’t referring to language schools. What he meant was that in the eurozone crisis, Germany had imposed austerity on the rest of the currency union. Internal memoranda leaked to the press make it clear that people such as finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble saw the crisis as an opportunity to change not only the policies but also the make-up of the political class in countries such as Greece or Portugal, not to mention France, “which only recently didn’t even want to pronounce the word ‘Schuldenbremse’” (the cap on sovereign debt demanded by Merkel’s stability and growth pact), as Kauder crowed. As for the British, he said: “We cannot allow them to get away with just seeking their own advantage.”

Kauder is not a nationalist. Nor are Schäuble or Merkel. And the EU is not some Fourth Reich, as some Eurosceptics in Britain suggest. But the sheer size and economic weight of Germany create their own dynamics – and their own dialectics.

Among them is the rise of nationalism. Although Germany’s elite has been very successful pursuing its interests under the guise of Europeanism, the anti-elitist resentment-mongers of the Alternative für Deutschland party started demanding less Europe and more Germany at the very moment when the Greek crisis showed how dominant Germany was in the eurozone. In the refugee crisis, which provoked a European revolt against Germany, the AfD’s anti-Europeanism is gaining traction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher. Photograph: Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty Images

In recent local and regional elections in the west German states of Hessen, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Pfalz, the AfD got between 12 and 15% of the vote. In the eastern state of Sachsen-Anhalt it got 24%, making it the second-strongest party after the governing CDU. When elections come up in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (where Merkel has her constituency) this autumn, the AfD may become the strongest party, and in 2017 it will enter the Bundestag. The success of the AfD will increase the pressure on any government to put Germany first, and Europe, Nato and the west second.

Thatcher had an inkling of this development. But she was caught in a double bind. On the one hand she saw that pro-western German politicians such as Kohl wanted to contain German nationalism through European federalism, a concept she abhorred. On the other hand, Germany unbound was an even greater danger. In a telephone conversation with US president George Bush in 1990, she foresaw a change in the balance of power in Europe due to the rise of Germany, and warned that “looking well into the future, only the Soviet Union – or its successor – could provide such a balance”.

Given the state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Thatcher’s geopolitical vision seems absurd. But there is something to be said for her assessment that since its inception as a nation state in 1871, Germany has “veered between aggression and self-doubt. The true origin of German angst is the agony of self-knowledge.” The AfD and its growing host of intellectual apologists campaign aggressively against German self-doubt; it’s time, they say, to put the past to rest, to cast off the taboos imposed by the victors of the second world war.

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The refugee crisis has allowed the party to break the taboo on racism, albeit not directly but by defending racist organisations such as the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) as “concerned citizens”. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers was received ecstatically in these circles as absolving imperial Germany of any responsibility for the first world war. And the AfD’s tweedy, Anglophile intellectual spokesman Alexander Gauland (a Thatcher-hater, by the way) has advocated a “neo-Bismarckian” policy for Germany.

What this means is “balancing” Russia against the USA, as Thatcher wanted to balance Russia against Germany. In its draft manifesto, the AfD calls Russia “crucial” for European security and wants an end to sanctions, but makes no mention of the USA or Britain, except to rail against TTIP and to demand renegotiation of the status of “allied” – ie Nato – troops stationed in Germany. It wants a German seat on the UN security council and a UN veto on Nato activities out of area, which the party rejects anyway. The AfD would reintroduce the draft and give Germany an autonomous defence industry – the very thing the Coal and Steel Community was designed to prevent. Finally, the party would jettison the euro and turn the EU into a loose Gaullist “Europe of Fatherlands”.

Some elements of this nationalist ragbag may strike a chord with Conservative Little Englanders and anti-Blairites in the Labour party. But make no mistake: the “Christian” Germany the AfD vows to protect is supposed to be “abendländisch” – a term which is hard to translate, but basically means anti-Anglo-Saxon. If the AfD succeeds in playing wag-the-dog in foreign policy, as it already does with immigration, Germany could become a danger to itself, Europe and the west.

For this reason alone, Brexit would be irresponsible. The EU – and liberal Germans – need Britain in order to help contain a Germany that may have little to do with the “new Germany” I saw celebrating falling borders not quite a decade ago.