They aren't flourishing (unless a handful of councillers counts) if you want to see a flourishing ultra-right wing fascist party try France, but the problem is that just one counciller a council poisions the political climate in the area and makes ethnic minorites very, very afraid.
The thing that makes me very sad is that in European politics, for some reason issues of national sovereignty and independence get mixed up with racism and fascism. Can't a nation be independent AND have racial tolerance and equality? We Americans (the 0.01% who actually pay attention to world politics) scratch our heads at this.
The crucial difference is that, whereas America is united by one domineering national identity, Europe consists of roughly 40-50 different nations which all have unique different histories lasting back several centuries. So if one nation decides to be 'indepedent' it de facto becomes unaccepting and therefore intolerant of its next door neighbours.
In other words, we're all too closely crammed in next to each other to adopt some kind of nationalist ideology. The last big nationalistic experiment conducted by a European nation resulted in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
It wasn't all that nationalist really. Hitler wanted a strong Europe, using rethoric very similar to those of modern pro-Europe integrationists. That is, fo course, not to say that the latter are nazis or anything like that, but Hitler wasn't really a champion of the soverign nation. Racism is also fundamentally contrary to nationalism.
I also like Norway.
And we'll see, they rejected EU-membership twice already there's reasonable hope they'll do so again...
