It might be argued that one of the limits of EUrope that has been revealed most starkly by Brexit is the EU’s ‘normative power’ claim to represent universalisable political values (Manners, 2002) – that is, values beyond the nation state. Most leading EU scholars are of a generation and career formation which viewed the EU as the best likely vehicle of carrying forward what was left of the ‘enlightenment project’, amid the sharp breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s of belief in utopian teleologies, heralded by post-modern and post-colonial thought. The European ‘dream of the nineties’ (for that is what it was) was most famously articulated in the writings of Habermas and Beck on post-national ideals and the cosmopolitan potential of the EU (Habermas, 1998; Beck and Grande, 2007; see also Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Delanty, 2009). Yet, the most potent ‘Leave’ arguments articulated in university debates around the UK before the referendum were those by agitated, internationalist-minded left wing students: aware they might be losing the rights of European citizenship, but prepared to say that the EU’s regional protectionism had been a disaster for agriculture and other forms of domestic industry in the developing world, as well as for the graphically desperate migrants seeking to find a way through the heavily policed, security cordon in the Mediterranean imposed by EU agencies such as Frontex, and washing up on Greek, Italian and Spanish shores. What on Earth could be ‘post-national’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ about such politics?

In this essay, I acknowledge this critical question, while mounting a normative defence of the core ‘post-national’ claim at the heart of the EU project: the idea of the ‘fourth freedom’, or the freedom of movement of persons (Favell, 2014). Little may be said perhaps in response to some of the EU’s neo-colonial ‘empire’-like effects on the development of the Global South, or the exclusionary drift of its North– South border politics; but other plausible counterfactuals suggest far worse versions of Europe-inthe-world, as well as of other increasingly likely scenarios of international power politics. The return of an unashamed political nationalism in Europe, obviously, negates directly the validity of post-national claims.