Across the pond in Europe, the National Question is getting really prominent. Anti-national universalism in the last century threw up two great supranational projects: the Soviet Union and the European Union. The Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago. I don’t think it’s too much to hope that the EU is now collapsing as we watch.
Key players here, not very surprisingly, are the East European nations who experienced the U.S.S.R. at first hand. Among those nations are four who call themselves the Visegrad Group: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
It so happens that the Visegrad group celebrated its 25th birthday last Monday, February 15. The Group was formed in 1991 to, quote from their mission statement, “work together in a number of fields of common interest within the all-European integration.”
Back then, at the time the group was founded, the main aim was to get admitted to the EU. They subsequently all did get admitted, in 2004.
The Visegrad Group—sometimes written as the Visegrad Four, or just V4—is something of a tadpole demographically: Poland accounts for sixty percent of its population. The other three countries, the tail of the tadpole, are just forty percent.
That is significant politically as well as just demographically. Last November’s election in Poland was won by the Law and Justice Party, a National Conservative party skeptical of the EU and strongly opposed to mass Third World immigration. ...
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