Europe is experiencing a revival of sorts: Nationalists are on the rise. On the surface, this trend would bode ill for the future of the European Union; after all, nationalist populism usually drives peoples to protect their own unique national interests. Yet the path that Eastern European nationalists wish to tread may actually unite Europe.

Populist nationalists promote an ideology that has been referred to as the “politics of values.” Given the right circumstances, it could sweep across Europe.

Nationalists are riding a wave of popularity in Eastern Europe. In both Poland and Slovakia, populists share power with extreme nationalist parties. In Hungary, the main opposition party, a Christian center-right nationalist party called Fidesz, has been whipping up public sentiment against the ruling Hungarian Socialist Party. Despite the socialists having won a recent parliamentary confidence vote, a January 17 Angus Reid poll has Fidesz enjoying a popular lead among the public, with 36 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Fidesz in the next legislative ballot. The ruling party garnered just 18 percent support.

With nationalists coming on strong in Eastern Europe, questions are surfacing as to why.

The answer is startling: Many Eastern Europeans—some from nations that have just recently become members of the EU—see the liberal collectivist European Union democracy as morally vacuous, a haven for what Pope Benedict xvi has termed the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Jacques Rupnik, writing for the Austria-based Institute for Human Sciences, states (emphasis ours throughout),

Democracy today has no rivals, but it is losing support. Populist movements harvest that ambivalence and discontent. They are not antidemocratic; indeed, they claim to be the “true voice of the people,” and constantly demand new elections or referenda. But they are anti-liberal; they accept democracy’s demand for the popular legitimacy, but reject its demand for constitutionalism (the separation of powers). They do not believe that constitutional norms and representative democracy have primacy over values and “legitimate” popular grievances.

Democracy is the perceived culprit for liberalism’s trumping of Eastern European values and thus is coming under increasing attack. A recent Gallup poll showed that a dismal 22 percent believe their votes in elections really matter.

Conditioned by decades of Soviet-style collectivism, many Eastern Europeans simply support a different cultural orientation than their Western counterparts in the EU. Yet today, the architects of the EU have fused Western liberalism, with all its love of moral relativism, to Eastern Europe, a bastion of revived Catholic, conservative culture since the Soviet demise. It may seem nonsensical to even attempt to pair the two together.

To understand one of the major motives for such an experiment, one need only examine the legacy of nationalism within Europe during the 20th century.

Following the revolutions of the 1800s, nationalism had seized Europe—but so had war. Two world wars in the 20th century, led by a resurgent and nationalistic Germany, taught the Continent a hard lesson: For peace to prevail, the Continent would need to replace nationalistic fervor with a loyalty to Pax Europa—a vision of European states combined into one power bloc. From this vision, the European Coal and Steel Community was born. It united just six European states into an economic combine. Over the course of 50 years, the Coal and Steel Community steadily transformed into the 27-member political union we know today as the EU.

Intrinsic to the process of becoming a member of the European Union is the sacrificing of national sovereignty and adopting of all the EU’s preordained treaties and rules of governance preceding the candidate’s membership.

So we arrive at the rub irritating populist nationalists today. As member states give up portions of their sovereignty to policy-makers in Brussels, what they receive in return is hard to quantify. Today, the EU is said to be in both a moral and political crisis, lacking purpose and structure. This disturbs nationalists, who believe they have traded national self-determination, following their release from Soviet tyranny, for an empty bag full of holes. Accordingly, “[T]hese populists attack the EU as an elite-imposed project ….” (ibid.).

This poses a real problem not only for Europe as a whole, but also for these Eastern European states in particular, which fear they have been shortchanged. Where to next for Eastern Europeans, then? For many, communism was a catastrophic failure, and the collectivist secularism of the EU is also an unsavory alternative.

There is a third option. Rupnik refers to what populist nationalists are preaching as the “politics of values.” This third way has the potential to be the glue that will unite all of Europe. In Poland, for example, “politics of values” are grounded in “the assumption that a ‘moral order’ based on religion should prevail over the freedoms guaranteed by permissive liberalism on issues such as abortion, gay rights and the death penalty” (ibid.).

This third option has much to do with resurrecting the primacy of traditional European, Catholic values and casting aside the liberalism that currently permeates Western Europe and its institutions. The idea driving many nationalists is, Let’s get together and acknowledge that our historic, predominantly Catholic culture here in Eastern Europe is under attack. We are now members of a union dominated by liberalism. If we don’t do something about this, our culture will be swallowed by the slow creep of Western liberalism.

Populist nationalists do not want to let Western liberalism, with its devotion to multiculturalism and moral relativism, seep into their culture, lest they become like Western Europe, which has become largely secularized and is being threatened by other cultures, notably Islam. Hence, they are fighting it with their own vision for Europe.

Rupnik outlines the populist nationalist alternative to Western liberalism as a “‘Christian Europe’ of ‘sovereign nation-states’ that opposes the existing materialist, decadent, permissive and supra-national model.”

The Vatican has the same vision. George Weigel, a senior fellow who holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, emphasized the importance Pope Benedict xvi places on Eastern Europe and the effect Catholic EU countries like Poland could have on Europe. Weigel stated, “The pope surely recognizes that Poland—in addition to its stable democracy and its growing economy—is home to an intact Catholic culture, at a time when the faith is dying in Europe and Europe is dying in part because of that. I suspect that the pope hopes that Poland’s faith will help re-energize Catholic faith throughout ‘Old Europe,’ and that Poland will help resist the drift in the European Union toward imposed lifestyle libertinism—what the pope referred to the day before his election as the ‘dictatorship of relativism.’”

It is this kind of faith that populist nationalists are pushing in Eastern Europe. Moreover, “politics of values” just might be a Vatican-inspired seed that grows into a European tree to unite West with East. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, governing the linchpin nation between West and East Europe, has pledged to try to insert verbiage into a revised European Constitution that would acknowledge the Catholic faith as the founding faith of Europe.

Europe is facing difficult, if not unsolvable problems with the moral and secularist fog that some suggest blinds the way to unity for the would-be superpower. Yet European nationalists have resurrected the ideology that once ruled all of Europe as the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire embodied “politics of values”—the values of Rome.

The very foundation of the third way—or the “politics of values”—is not some new untested method for leading Europe. No—the politics of the third way is nothing less than a resurgence of the ideological framework that undergirded Europe for a thousand years prior to the age of nationalism. The third way is the restoration of the Catholic heart within Europe, and the nationalist populist “politics of values” agenda may just be the catalyst to help bring this about.