The fault line running through the European identity debate is not north-south or creditor-debtor. It is east-west, and it is older than the EU.

Eastern European nations spent decades under Soviet occupation during which their national identities — languages, cultures, borders — were systematically suppressed or redrawn. The recovery of those identities after 1989 was not incidental to their post-communist project; it was central to it. Nations like Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states did not experience national identity as a retrograde force to be overcome on the way to liberal modernity. They experienced it as the thing that survived when everything else was taken.