The Reluctant Europeans: Protestantism, Nationalism and European Integration.

I argue in this paper that Protestantism is an important cause of Euroskepticism in Britain, Scandinavia, and to some extent the Netherlands. Protestants, in contrast to Catholics, had few tools for uniting the Continent. Their Christian universalism was real, but invisible. Their churches were arms of their individual states and lacked a transnational structure. Their few confessional parties were small, parochial and lacked a common European political agenda. And Protestant culture proved inadequate to generate a community spirit across national boundaries and between political leaders. But aside from their lack of tools, Protestant nations simply did not want to meld their states into anything more than a European economic cooperation zone. To the Protestant mind, the state was not the cause of Europe?s tragedies. Individual states were the bulwarks against coercive, homogenizing forces, whether they issued from the Vatican, Napoleonic Paris, Hollywood?or Brussels. States had saved what was most important in the sixteenth century; states could still be trusted to save what was most important in the twentieth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]