— This op-ed in OpinionJournal fleshes-out some of the details of the center-right forces achieving dominance in Europe:
In any event, we will not have to worry about Mr. Le Pen for more than the two weeks until the runoff. When Mr. Chirac is re-elected, he will have to lead his country in a very new Europe, but not the center-left Europe so long imagined by most of the intellectuals and fashionable politicians. Through no particular merit of his own, Mr. Chirac will be a major player in a center-right Europe that will be more suspicious of the mounting power of the European bureaucracy in Brussels, less inclined to dissolve national identities in a new continental union, and keen on retaining more initiative in national legislatures.
One of the predictable responses to globalization is a resurgence of tribalism. In the third world, this takes the form of religious zealotry, and in the first world, nationalism. It’s an interesting deal.