At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple makes a point about many of those putative nationalist movements in Europe which I had not heard before: they are really covers for a more centralized and powerful European Union.

All the nationalisms that threaten to break up long-established states – Scottish, Catalonian or Flemish – seems strangely in favour of ever-closer European union (another cant term for construction). Independence, however, makes sense only where there is a strong degree of sovereignty, but European construction or ever-closer union means ever-less sovereignty for national states until it disappears altogether. The nationalists appear to want to jump out of what they think is a frying pan into the fire.