There's some tension in the idea of using Europeanization to combat globalization. It's already acknowledging that nationalism is too narrow a boundary and that the modern world with Internet technologies needs connections on a larger scale. So, why not globalization? Or, if you reject globalization, why not nationalism?

Thus it's no great surprise that some Europeans reject the Franco-German vision of the EU because it's too narrow and localized, while the French voters reject it because it's too geographically broad and insufficiently nationalistic.

The EU's answer to the problem of globalization is straightforward: hide.

The "protestant North" and the "statist continent"? Go ahead and say it - "the Catholic continent". Because the continent is as Catholic as the north is Protestant.

not since 1789.

Christian faith was weak on the Continent even before 1789, discredited in part by the religious wars that were propagated by corrupt rulers who aggrandized their own power by fomenting war. Christian institutions were then greatly weakened by the violent secularization that took place under the French revolutionaries and then Napoleon, who kidnapped the pope, emptied the monasteries, and stabled horses in cathedrals. Since then the laicists on the Continent have attacked Christianity relentlessly, and they largely succeeded in turning the continental populace into unbelievers by World War I.

Spengler at Asia Times has often made the good point that continental Europe was never more than half Christian, they retain pagan nationalist and racial prejudices that are incompatible with Christianity.

Meanwhile, faith was restored in England and America by the religious Great Awakenings, especially the first that flourished with the turnpike roads that networked England in the 1720s, when John Wesley began preaching. No such Great Awakening occurred on the continent.

Africa is more catholic than continental Europe.

It probably has a lot more to do with where feudalism put down its deepest roots. There are some forms of Protestantism, like Lutheranism and Anglicanism, which are every bit as statist and corporatist as Catholicism.

The French revolution was virulently antireligious.

Shelton,

Africa is also, to the best of it's feeble abilities, more statist than continental Europe.

Sounds to me like they're both tribal.

Mike,

Given the behavior of the Church in France for the preceding 1500 years or so that is not surprising.

pj:

I think you might be minimising the devestating effect WW1 (especially) and WW2 had on religious faith in Europe.