Böckenförde, Siedentop and Manent are well-known in their countries and beyond. Their arguments were certainly heard. But few European intellectuals seemed to share their sense of alarm. And if they did, they chose to remain silent. Why?

One reason may be that any argument which has something good to say about the nation state is met with a knee-jerk rejection. Richard Rorty took aim at the relentless disparagement of nationhood in Achieving Our Country (also published around that time, in 1997). “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals,” he wrote at the beginning of that book, “a necessary condition for self-improvement.” Political deliberation cannot be “imaginative and productive” unless the people’s emotional involvement with their country is such that “pride outweighs shame”.

This is the book where Rorty made the “something will crack” comment predicting the rise of a “strongman”, which was unearthed after the election of Donald Trump. But the analysis preceding that prediction has not yet received the attention it deserves. Rorty, a thinker of the radical Left in the Deweyian tradition, suggested that a strongman would rise after years in which national pride had been demonised and the bond of citizenship weakened by the “cultural Left” with its “semi-conscious anti-Americanism”. The “cosmopolitan super-rich”, the “smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors” barely think of those left behind in their country as fellow citizens to whom anything is owed. But the forsaken will “sooner or later realise that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or . . . jobs from being exported”. Then, Rorty said, something will crack.

In Europe the rejection of nationhood has been more extreme for reasons that are not difficult to imagine. As Manent wrote, the “historical evil” of the first half of the 20th century has “come to overwhelm European life and conscience to such an extent that European nations, in the name of ‘constructing Europe’, have embarked on a methodical process of self-erasement”.

There is something Orwellian about this collective self-erasement undertaken in the name of historical memory. But it has gone a long way in reshaping the consciousness of European intellectuals and academics. For most of them the main lesson of the 1930s is that any national pride must be nipped in the bud, along with the idea that liberal nationalism might ever have been a positive force in European history. The notion that there might be a relationship between national or cultural identity and democracy must be rejected outright. Indeed, a leading textbook of EU law proclaims: “The sense of a shared identity as a precondition for democracy is a dangerous, even fascistic, idea if it implies that individuals must have certain common traits or ways of seeing the world before there can be a democracy.” Tocqueville “dangerous” and “fascistic” too, then?