ABSTRACT
Pro-EU technocrats and intellectuals often regard European values and traditions that have evolved over the centuries as not only irrelevant to the needs of the twenty-first century, but also as deeply problematic and flawed. The premise of the anti-populist critique of nostalgia is that rather than providing a positive guide to life, the customs and traditions of the past stand for negative and oppressive conventions and practices. The controversy surrounding the status of Saint Stephen's Crown, and more generally of the role of tradition, was implicitly a debate about how the legitimacy of a state and its institutions are constituted. Regime change in Hungary occurred under conditions that avoided debate on what constituted the normative foundation of the new regime. A study on Britain's political culture titled Risk, Threat and Security points out that this nation's people have become alienated from their national institutions and their attachment to shared values is too superficial to constitute a 'dynamic community'.
