If Europe wants to maintain its influential place in the world, once again it has to enhance the role of its nation states. ‘Internal diversity and external unity’ would be a viable motto for a rejuvenated European Union to adopt.
The dispute over the openness of borders has divided Western societies. On the one side are the ‘globalists’ who consider ‘Weltoffenheit’ (a general openess to the world) as the kernel of an open global economy and of a humanist ethos, while on the other side are the new protectionists fighting for their own identities and sense of separateness.
This is the new conflict and it has already displaced the old quarrels between leftist ideas of progress and rightist conceptions of conservatism. With the average person increasingly voting for those who would shield him or her from a world of open borders, then the old left – right distinctions no longer apply, so preventing deeper research and new analyses.”