Europe's Two Flags: Recovering the Conservative Telos of the European Project

The EU flag is beautiful and should remain. Yet its symbolism of an empty centre encircled by stars does not do justice to Europe’s historical and civilisational substantiveness. This essay contrasts the EU Flag, also known as the Flag of Europe, with the composite Pan-European flag, whose sun-and-cross centre evokes an older and more substantive European inheritance. Recovering that inheritance means recalling the conservative associations long carried by ‘Europe’ as a civilisational concept, as well as the conservative and Christian-democratic energies that shaped the European project. European conservatives should not abandon the European project, but reclaim it. Needed is a conservative vision of European patriotism: modest, historically rooted, strategically intelligent, and critical of both liberal technocracy and self-universalising Westernism.