Across Europe, an emerging pattern is unsettling the assumptions of liberal educators and policymakers alike. Students who study in multiple countries, speak three or four languages, and graduate from globally ranked institutions are gravitating towards nationalist narratives. Not all of them, of course, but enough to make us pause.

It is increasingly clear that the far right no longer appeals solely to those left behind by globalisation. In addition to resentment and anger, it has successfully tapped into something much more primordial and elemental: belonging.

And Europe’s institutions have no answer.

The numbers speak for themselves. The 2024 European Parliament elections produced the highest-ever vote share for far-right parties, with 27% of seats – 191 out of 720 – now held by MEPs aligned with far-right groupings.

This was not merely a protest vote from economically marginalised peripheries. Analysis of the European Election Studies 2024, covering nearly 25,000 voters across 27 countries, shows that far-right support among young men under 30 reached over 21%, a figure that has grown consistently across every election cycle since 1989.

In Germany, AfD grew from 5% among 18-24 year olds when it was founded in 2013 to 19% in 2025. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was the most popular party among 18-34 year olds in 2024. Across all ages groups, far-right parties now account for almost 25% of Europe’s overall vote share.

The far right is almost uniformly Eurosceptic, and poses a very real threat to the EU’s integrity. The 2025 Great Reset report, backed by far-right parties from across Europe, presented an explicit, detailed roadmap for dismantling the EU from within.

Despite this existential threat, the EU’s standard response has generally been to point to values statements, institutional reform, and economic reassurance. None of these come close to addressing the question that nationalist movements have learned to so capably exploit: who are you, and where do you belong?

The EU’s narrative vacuum

Nationalist movements are not winning on policy platforms, they are winning on identity. They offer a story – one that is emotionally legible, culturally rooted, and often exclusionary – about who counts as a real European, a real German, a real Frenchman. Against this, the EU offers a passport, a market, a currency, and a set of rights. These are all valuable, but they are not a story, let alone a compelling one.

This is not a new observation. As French philosopher Étienne Balibar argued in his 2004 book We, the People of Europe?, European integration has always contained a tension – between the universalist rhetoric of the European project and the exclusionary logics of nation, race, and language that it never fully displaced.

Over recent decades, the EU has neglected culture, assuming that cultural belonging would emerge as a natural byproduct of political and economic integration. It didn’t, and the absence of a genuine cultural strategy to build that belonging left a narrative vacuum that the far right has gradually expanded to fill.

What makes the current failure particularly striking is that Europe has, at earlier moments, understood the cultural stakes, and acted on them decisively.

The Council of Europe signed the European Cultural Convention in 1954, just nine years after the end of World War II. This agreement created the institutional architecture for collective cultural diplomacy among European states. The motivation was explicit: political and economic reconstruction alone would not be enough. Europe needed a shared cultural project.

The most enduring expression of that instinct came in 1985, when Greek Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri and her French counterpart Jack Lang persuaded their EU counterparts to establish what would become the European Capital of Culture programme. The stated purpose, as the European Commission now acknowledges, was to “strengthen the sense of belonging of European citizens to a common cultural area” and emphasise the cultural characteristics shared by all Europeans.

Read more: European Capitals of Culture: a diplomatic linchpin in an unstable........

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