I don’t see anything but wishful thinking in such predictions. What is supposed to be the exact causal chain between persistent debt crisis, “erosion of legitimacy” (what does that mean in practical terms anyway?), and political instability (of what exact kind?) that would necessitate increasingly ham-fisted measures? It sounds to me like just another story grown on the substrate of democratic-era political mythology, not a realistic Machiavellian analysis of the situation.

Overall, I think you’re underestimating the strength of the carrot-and-stick incentives that the Eurocrats have at their disposal to stabilize this situation. A European nationalist politician is faced with unnanimously hostile mass media that will equate him with Hitler, as well as the threat of being prosecuted for hate speech should he resort to effective hardball rabble-rousing propaganda. And even if the nationalists achieve some electoral success despite all this, and then survive the inevitable subsequent media onslaught, they will have an almost irresistible incentive to sell out and give up on anything beyond small concessions that will at most slow down the Eurocrat plans somewhat. (If this sounds unrealistic, consider that the current president of Serbia used to be the de facto leader of the Serbian Radical Party, which made Golden Dawn look laughably moderate in comparison. Yet it took very little time for him and almost the entire politically talented Radical Party cadre to become good Eurocrat toadies once they caught sight of the carrots.)

The parallel with the nationalism-driven disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR breaks down because this disintegration happened in an ideological vacuum, which occurred after the Communist elites had lost faith in the foundational ideology of the system. Unlike in Lithuania or Croatia in 1989, a nationalist politician in today’s Europe is not facing a decrepit elite that will offer only token resistance (while realizing that the system is finished and it’s high time to figure out how to maintain their status in whatever will replace it). He is facing an elite with a strong grip on power and a supremely high confidence in its ideological, moral, and historical mission. So the more accurate parallel are nationalists in the USSR or Yugoslavia some decades before that — although of course the ones in today’s Europe are bound to be neutralized by subtler and gentler methods.

I’m in broad agreement with you about the positive potential of European ethno-nationalism (near zero) — it doesn’t contain any answers to anything that matters. Negatively, however, it is hugely important. In economic terms, it represents an automatic counter-action to the strategic suppression of moral hazard, marking a limit where the dream of large-scale collective responsibility disintegrates. In modern history, it is no coincidence that the collapse of communist projects is manifested in a nationalistic form (in the USSR and Yugoslavia, perhaps even Myanmar). It is the most immediate way people express the rejection of a shared destiny. Offe seems to think this is already well underway in Europe. Do you think he’s wrong?

Accepting everything you say about the weakness of nationalism, it also has some strengths (when envisaged as a disruptive force). For instance, it is by its very nature disintegrated, which means that supra-nationalistic stabilization has to work everywhere, whilst nationalism only has to break out anywhere. Once disintegrative dynamics are unleashed, both mechanical conduction, and cultural contagion, work to spread it throughout the system. It only takes one significant revolt against European supra-nationalism — i.e. the election of a hard-line nationalist government, probably somewhere in the southern periphery — to send shock-waves through the whole continent, perhaps jolting the process of integration into reverse.

None of this amounts to a confident prediction, but it certainly rises to the level of an effective threat.

Can there really be any doubt that they’re already finding it an extremely serious political obstacle.

How exactly? In what way has nationalism been anything more than an easily managed marginal nuisance for the EU project in recent decades?

Ethno-nationalism obstructs risk-pooling, and thus strikes at the very heart of the ‘European Project’.

Well, yes, but what force does it strike with? Sure, it may lower somewhat the first derivative of various measures of how victorious the transnational progressives are. But it definitely has no prospect of getting it anywhere close to zero, let alone reversing its sign.

It looks like we have an empirical disagreement here. From what I see, the era of romantic nationalism hasn’t left any such deep imprint, and I just don’t perceive any strong atavistic tribal emotion behind whatever remains of nationalism in today’s Europe. For all practical purposes, it looks like an ideology whose time has come and gone.

(Admittedly, nationalism is an extremely powerful ideological tool when it’s actively whipped up by the big megaphones of mass propaganda. Also, its one saving grace is that it has historically served as a focal point for political organization against even more hideous and insane leftist ideologies. But none of this is relevant for its role in the reality of today’s Europe.)

What’s more, I come from ex-Yugoslavia, where due to the recent unpleasantness people have probably the most emotional investment into nationalism out of all Europeans — and yet I can observe the same phenomenon even there. As soon as the nationalist propaganda from the big megaphones is toned down, nationalism ceases to be a significant ideological influence for the overwhelming majority of people.