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“A shared commitment to leisure, a short workweek, and a generous social safety net is nothing worth killing or dying for.”

And who will die for Donetsk, Luhansk or Crimea?

Pacifism beckons. Every major European nation in NATO—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland—will see defense spending in 2015 below 2 percent of GDP.

The idea of One Europe has depended on “the denigration of patriotism and national pride,” writes Thornton, “Yet all peoples are the products of a particular culture, language, mores, traditions, histories, landscapes. … That sense of belonging to a community defined by a shared identity cannot be created by a single currency.”

Christianity gave Europe its faith, identity, purpose and will to conquer and convert the world. Christianity created Europe. And the death of Christianity leaves the continent with no unifying principle save a watery commitment to democracy and La Dolce Vita.

From Marine Le Pen’s France to Putin’s Russia, nationalism and patriotism are surging across Europe because peoples, deprived of or disbelieving in the old faith, want a new faith to give meaning, purpose, vitality to their lives, something to live for, fight for, die for.

Countless millions of Muslims have found in their old faith their new faith. And the descendants of fallen-away European Christians of the 19th and 20th centuries are finding their new faith in old tribal and national identities.

Less and less does multiculturalism look like the wave of the future.