In principle I share your views on #peakfascism. But here you point out the real problem after we have left the peak behind us: not that hard-core nationalism will prevail but more progressive forces will fall back on nationalism to appeal the masses. (And not that Putin will prevail but that Europe will fall back into accepting war as a "Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.")
As far as the return of nationalism to fashion is concerned, Eastern Europe is also partly to blame: the glorification of the nation state here is often due to the fact that it died an unexpected “death at young age” (Estonia et al). And the situation in Ukraine, where a real national consciousness has only developed lately as a result of the Russian attack, is even worse: How are we going to explain to people that the nationalism that helped them through the war must now be put in the recycle bin quickly?
Thank you for the extensive reply - I am impressed when someone still puts that much time and energy into their answers. I try to respond with a few thoughts that are less focused on the current political situation, but take the topic further. Things that I happen to think about myself. (A bit in the style of your hashtag talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten, which I greatly admire by the way).
If we look for a moment at the two competing models of liberal democracy on the one hand and autocracy on the other, what is the role of nationalism there? No matter what, one thing seems clear: it is non-essential. (As you yourself say with regard to Russia, where nationalism is "a means and mode of self-insurance" to secure autocracy). This actually seems to indicate that nationalism can be seen as temporary, transitional (Ukraine) or a stopgap (Russia) or a fallback (Germany) and in any case that we could do without it. But can we?
Benedict Anderson points out that the cultural origins of nationalism lie in the great religions - nationalism as Ersatzreligion, so to speak. All nations live in the belief that they are very old and practically eternal. And this provides answers to the great metaphysical questions of 'where do we come from' and 'where are we heading to', questions for which the political models of liberal democracy or autocracy have no answer - they simply don't care. Yet, interestingly, we live in a time of resurgent nationalism without nations. In the case of Russia, it is clear that people are caught up in myths. In the case of Hungary, it's simply ridiculous.
What I'm trying to say is that you don't seem to mind moderate nationalism if it enables a functioning liberal democracy, but wouldn't such nationalism just be folklore? We are probably not yet at the point where we can leave nationalism completely behind, but I believe that a more appropriate attitude would be to achieve a balanced dialectic between the local and the global. The ground you can touch with your own hands and the people you interact with on a daily basis and the planet as a whole, which we have been aware of since we were able to see it from the outside on the flight to the moon - on television (Günther Anders). There is no place for the nation in this dialectical construction, but the religious feeling of nationalism remains - like a phantom pain.
A 'progressive nationalism' (does this term already exist or have you just coined it?) would certainly be a label that Estonia would like to adopt. But what would be its content? We are convinced that national consciousness ultimately rests on the Estonian language. But even that is debatable: everyone here is at almost bilingual (Estonian/English) or trilingual (Russian/Estonian/English). Nationalism is already a thing of the past but the deeper need for something like nationalism is what we don't have an answer to yet. And that's what all these crises are about at the moment: Androids may dream of electric sheep - but do they know their homeland? - There you go!