Ireland recently rejected this wordy device for leeching away even more of the national sovereignty that is a prerequisite for self-government. France's excitable President Nicolas Sarkozy, who currently occupies the EU's rotating six-month presidency, seems to think, as EU leaders generally do, that balky nations must keep voting until they vote correctly, at which point the ratchet of consolidation is irreversible. Britain's Conservative Party, which is favored to win the next election (sometime before summer 2010), says that if Ireland has not by then ratified the treaty, a Conservative government will urge rejection of it by referendum.

At their worst—their best is bad enough—EU enthusiasts clumsily invoke the pale specter of a synthetic terror, a recrudescence of bloody nationalism, to panic the EU's 27 member nations into "pooling" their sovereignties and "harmonizing" their social policies, for the greater glory of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, which is in Belgium, which is in crisis. It was cobbled together in 1830 from French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders, and after 178 years these regions find each other increasingly irritating. Perhaps they would seek a divorce if they could decide who gets custody of Brussels—and of Belgium's huge national debt. The Belgians, with their seven parliaments, should consult with the restive Bosnian Serbs of Republika Srpska, and with Moldova's secessionist Transdniestria region. Such would-be statelets might not make economic sense, but it is not obviously irrational for other considerations to matter, too.

Of course, not all European affirmations of ancient differences are wholesome. In Spain, Basque separatists recently detonated four bombs, the first near the city of Bilbao, which in 1936 and 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, was briefly the seat of an autonomous Basque government. But it is, on balance, nice that Marx and his epigones, who were reliably wrong, were never more so than when insisting, as other slow learners still do, that religion, myth and ethnicity were preindustrial forces that would lose their history-shaping saliency in the modern, market-driven world of economic motives. A core tenet of conservatism was put perfectly by William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." If it were, the present would be thin gruel indeed.

Correction (published Aug. 7, 2008): The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Alexander the Great had no children. A son was born after his death.

© 2008