A founding member’s apostasy

THE cosmopolitan Netherlands once stood at the heart of the cause of European integration. The country was among the founding members of the European Union and of the Schengen open-border treaty. With its economy looking to Germany, its cultural aspirations to France, and its political liberalism to Britain, and with an educated class that spoke all three of those countries’ languages as a matter of course, the Dutch saw themselves as the ideal mediators in the European project.

Those days are gone, and in July Geert Wilders, a far-right politician known for calling on the Netherlands to ban the Koran and exit the euro, wrote them a piquant epitaph. Mr Wilders announced he would hold talks with right-wing parties in other countries about forming an anti-Europe bloc in the European Parliament elections this autumn. He has since spoken with Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, a party similar to Mr Wilders’s Freedom Party in many ways, and with the Lega Nord in Italy. Having shattered the multi-cultural Netherlands, which once brokered the integration of Europe, Mr Wilders is now proposing to undertake Europe’s dismantling.