A new era of nationalism seeking to reverse globalising trends of the post-Cold War decades is upon us. Everywhere one looks, there is a tailwind behind nationalistic groups demanding a return to an earlier period when governments were answerable to the majority of their citizens rather than shackled by multilateral or supranational institutions and greedy transnational corporations. The blowback against integration of countries into a global melting pot and formation of a broad international identity is strongest in Europe and the United States. The “Leave” campaigners’ victory in the Brexit referendum and the astonishing rise of ultra-nationalist right-wing populists in Holland, France, Germany and most of central and eastern Europe has overturned the elite project of a step-by-step evolution towards a “United States of Europe”. Barring privileged pockets in metropolitan cities where multinational corporate power still dominates, the rest of Europe is at war with what the Dutch sociologist Ruud Koopmans terms as “cosmopolitan overstretch” of Europeanist elites. Feelings of nativity and belonging to one’s own nation that were sought to be superseded by welding over 500 million people into a common track are breaking loose from controls.