it has probably run its course. The question, of course, is "What comes next?"
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/20/the-future-of-europes-radical-rightAfter 1945, as liberal Europeans worked together to create a new, and peaceful, supranational European entity, European rightists gathered in Rome and Malmö to develop their own version. ...
If Europe was to be reborn, they believed, it should be fascistic, corporatist, and organic. In sum, this would have not been a liberal, free-market, and class-based Europe, led by the countries that had won the war and backed by the United States. This order would guarantee the proper functioning of the European continent (and its common market).
It would also have been white-only.
The fascist version of the union lost out to the liberal one, of course, but rightest pan-European ideology never fully vanished. ... Today's European right wing identifies Europe as a white bastion of civilization.
For it, globalization, immigration, and Islam anywhere in Europe threaten the whole of it. Globalization destroys tradition, African immigrants assault European borders, and Muslims promote terrorism and hate. In sum, they are all enemies because
they challenge the "pure" identity and culture of the old continent. (
We want our continent back?)
Those who believe that the contemporary extreme right is novel and comparatively unproblematic are wrong. And those who call the phenomenon populism are incorrect, too. The use of such a generic label indirectly, and perhaps unintended, legitimizes a manifestly undemocratic and racist ideology.
Europe is now struggling with the integration of immigrants and the survival of its common currency.
The EU was founded on the basis of promoting fraternity among its populations after the brutality of World War II - integrating previously warring countries within a boundless and peaceful ideal. A European culture cannot exclude "others"; this would contradict the EU's very goal. The hope is that the continent will be ready to look, again, at itself and its inner values, and tackle this "pan-European" rightism once more.
You are right that "Confederate systems don't work" at least not in the long run. The EU has been successful for decades at bringing peace and prosperity to a continent with a history of warfare, but the loose "confederation" has probably outlived its ability to continue achieving these.
Europe needs to decide whether the successor to the loose "confederation" will be a more integrated association (as happened in the US) or a dissolution that brings back nationalism as the basis for governing Europe.