Pat Buchanan's fake nationalism

Pat Buchanan says he objects to the EU because it's a supranational organization assuming ever more sovereign authority over its members and their peoples.

He protests, he says, in the name of a historic "Europe of the nations", though the actual historic "nation states" of Europe he professes to admire are nearly all of them not really that, and most of the great powers of Europe throughout its history were not remotely that.

But though he loathes the supranational EU whose membership is entirely voluntary, whose government is increasingly democratic, and that is not the creature or tool of the imperial power of any one of its members, he admires the authoritarian Vladimir Putin for, among other things, trying to recreate the quondam Russian Empire by reincorporating into his Russian Federation, whether they will or no, various of the national states that escaped it when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Hence he opposes American action against Putin's war in Ukraine, NATO inclusion of the Baltic States, and hostility to Putin's efforts to reassert Russian control short of actual conquest of others of those breakaway nations.

A voluntary federation of European states he deplores as a betrayal of nationalism.

An empire imposed upon many nations by one nation he celebrates.

The truth is that Pat Buchanan and Europe's populist enemies of the EU loathe it for a variety of reasons quite other than its incompatibility with nationalism, beginning with the welcome it extends to non-white and not very white, and non-Christian and specifically Muslim, immigrants and refugees.

And then there is the policy of complete freedom of citizens of any member state to move about and live and work anywhere in the entire Union.

And then there is the support of the EU not only for the welfare state but for social liberalism, including but not limited to social and governmental secularism, abortion rights, equality of the sexes, and the whole package of LGBT rights.

Contrast these with Putin's policy of near establishment of Russian Orthodoxy and the continued criminality in Russia of violations of traditional Christian sexual morality, homosexuality in particular.