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Europe is nowadays at a crossroad, divided between the need to remain faithful to its core democratic values and freedoms, maintaining an area of freedom and justice and the need to protect its citizens against the new terrorism and the rise of nationalistic leaders and parties that require less Europe and more power back to the nation states. We are witnessing a return of the politics of fear; in Hobbes terms, convincing people that there is no other alternative and that politics has been exhausted; it remains the fear (Furedi, 2005). In the age of the war on terror, fear was a necessary argument to be brought on for justifying the US foreign policy in the Middle East (Robin, 2004). Nowadays, in the Middle East radical Islamism is justifying the war on the West through its faceless jihadist warriors spread across Europe, on the new hybrid terrorism that replaced wars on the ground. Hence, the enemy is becoming present and imminent, so the protectors arise justifying, once again, the language to legitimate new policies or public choices (Robin, 2004). The rise of extremism, radicalization and populism are facets of the same politics of fear. When the refugees arrived, the protectors against the identified enemy emerged.In the following article the mechanisms used to prepare the society for the arrival of the populist Messiah will be demystified from a political science perspective and also analyzed from a legal point of view; the only bonding agent to a real European identity through various political disagreements is throughout law and the guiding common values. However the most critical factor in the success or failure of this type of leadership and in the seductive appeal of extremism is the emotional factor, the tactics employed to trigger the raw emotions present in the human nature particularly in crises. Beyond politics of fear we also need to look at and understand the politics and policies that took us here: the multicultural discourse with its policies of integration, assimilation and tolerance partially produced the adversary effect: a generation of young people who do not feel they belong, who do not wish to assimilate and who are not embracing either being tolerated or tolerate. They are the European jihadists, who took policy makers and politicians by surprise. To understand the psychology of these people will enable us to properly fight against the root causes of extremism, radicalization and terrorism; moreover, might lead us to understand what should be the adhesive of a genuine European identity.Europe has always struggled with conflicting visions of its identity, of a unifying idea that will erase national particularities, a generous idea with such irreducible values (Hazard, 1989). We are witnessing now, after a long process of integration, a return to instinctive national sentiments. In the face of fear, people want to feel safe; hence a leader who can promise security and protection is gathering the popular support: we see it in the recent Austrian elections, where the far-right party of Norbert Hofer gained the upper hand and determined the resignation of the Chancellor amid huge debates over the refugee crisis. Nationalism is a crisis of identity (Smith, 2003), the response to the irregularities of modernity by taking pride in your own nation. The exhaustion of politics and modernity refuels the seduction of a puritan ideology, ready to sacrifice anything for the idea; the so-called Islamic State with its political religion in the name of certain purity opposed to modernity proved to have a terrible impact on the European youngsters joining by hundreds a foreign jihad. Puritanism and politics are not new in Islam and fundamentalist Wahhabism is the weapon against modernity and the West, a deadly one, using religion as the community aggregator against the identified enemy. However, marginal youth and a romantic version of nationalism appeared first in Europe in the creation of the nation states and later were exported as such in the European colonies (Kedourie, 1960/1993); from the clash between cultures and the shattered sense of self emerged generations of immigrants in Europe. Nonetheless we are observing now the same divided self and a confused identity in the third generation immigrants, young people becoming terrorist fighters, but at the same time a diverging vision about what is precisely to be European.The dilemma, from a legal point of view, is profound, as the EU cannot function unless the EU law is implemented in the member states and creates a common ground for policies and legal measures in the face of crisis. The refugee crisis emphasized precisely the lack of common legal procedures. Although the Dublin agreement, revised a third time, was decided and agreed upon the member states in 2013, by the peak of the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, the European Commission requested to a significant number of member states to make the necessary steps in order to translate the Dublin agreement into the national legislation. However, the current crises over a new Dublin, the forth, is just one issue where the divergent visions about the future of Europe come cross: the supranational, overly legalized and bureaucratic European Union that demands the national jurisdictions to harmonize with the EU law or a federal system where each state joins some of the agreements and refuses other.

Europe’s new identity: The refugee crisis and the rise of nationalism