How much longer will the right in Italy, like other right-wing parties across Europe, ignore the simple — and uncomfortable — fact that abandoning the European Union is impossible? In Brussels these limits are well understood, though among the electorate they are far less so. The result is a paradox: Europe has become a seized word. Those who pronounce it with ease, who celebrate it as a totem, are above all the opposing camp, which has turned it into a banner, a catechism, a liturgy. Yet the Europe narrated by progressive think tanks and cosmopolitan foundations often remains a stage set: noble intentions and regulatory apparatus, but little in the way of perceived civic substance. This rhetoric, moreover, is measured against an undeniable fact: real Europeanization is advancing, both in institutional practice and in the economy.
In recent years the right has chosen the electoral shortcut of Euroscepticism. We recall the season of “out of the euro”and “out of the EU.” The only completed case, Brexit, belongs to a peculiar political tradition historically more detached from continental Europe. The United Kingdom has operated for centuries according to logics different from those of the continent. The point of no return, for Italy, was seen with Greece on its knees before the Troika: there it became evident that escape was not an act of freedom, but a risk of collapse. To continue brandishing Euroscepticism as an identity cornerstone risks speaking a language of the past.
Europe and the Right After Euroscepticism
It can be said without circumlocution: exiting is not a viable path for a country like Italy, nor for the vast majority of nations that make up Europe. Not because of the whims of “Brussels,” but because supply chains, financial markets, regulatory governance and administrative life are intertwined with the European framework. Leaving the euro would almost certainly entail a currency and financial crisis of such proportions as to endanger social cohesion and the capacity of the entire nation. The real question is no longer “Europe, yes or no?” but rather what political form we should give to our permanence.
European identity is a worksite under construction: much has already been built, but it must be completed with the consent of citizens. Rémi Brague reminds us that Europe needs its roots; de Benoist speaks of a Europe that protects differences; Faye, in short, links the solidity of the European project to the recovery of a shared identity. This is not a call to the past: it is an attempt to prevent the Union from remaining mere bureaucracy.
And one does not need philosophers alone to understand it. History is enough. Europe was not born in the corridors of Strasbourg: it was born in Rome, where universality was a juridical concept before it was a word; it reshaped itself in the Holy Roman Empire, which for centuries held together difference and common principle. At the same time, it is embedded in Christianity, which shaped imagination, arts, institutions. This heritage is not a museum relic but a political capital. To bring it, with secular pride, into the halls of Brussels and Strasbourg does not mean indulging in “identitarianism”: it means giving soul to decisions that otherwise appear neutral only on the surface.
Europe and the Right After Euroscepticism
Part of the Italian right has also sensed the sunset of anti-EU romanticism: already in 2022, and in practice even earlier, it was clear that the slogan of exit no longer held. Today new categories are needed, capable of combining real sovereignty with cooperation, security with European legality, the plurality of traditions with strategic unity. It is not enough to oppose Brussels: one must propose an idea of Europe that places peoples, representative institutions, and political responsibility at the center — and that restores clarity and intelligibility to the great common choices on industry, energy, defense, migration.
The alternative, then, is not between Europe yes or Europe no. It is between a soulless Europe, exhausted in documents and budgets, and a Europe that rediscovers its historical and cultural soul. The right must decide whether to settle for the role of ritual opposition, or to shoulder the harder and higher task of restoring to the word Europe a meaning worthy of its history.
M.S.
