i'm not european. i'm irish.
what do i actually share with a german, or an italian? europe spent a thousand years invading itself and redrawing the maps in blood. the main thing its countries exported to each other was war.
and the estonians, romanians and latvians? we were building a common market while they were stuck behind stalin's iron curtain. now we act like those fifty years never happened. we smile at each other at eu summits and talk in english, the language of the island that left.
the eu exists in brussels conference rooms and privacy popups, in standard phone chargers and banana regulations. but "european" as an identity? i might as well call myself a citizen of nato.
we've built cathedrals to compliance, and paperwork priests perform the rites.
--
national identity is creaking under its own weight already. irish people fight over who counts as properly irish. germans still flinch at their own flag. italy can't decide if it's one country or three. france keeps reliving napoleon's greatest hits while the world moves on.
under all that there's a bigger crack. our churches are empty, and tourists take photos where people used to pray. the cross that used to unite us is gathering dust in museum cases.
america makes americans. you can arrive speaking mandarin and leave speaking american, and one generation later your kids are arguing about the superbowl.
but europe can't make europeans. we lost the thing that held us together when we lost our faith. christianity gave us latin, sure, but more than that it gave us the same stories, the same guilt and the same hope of salvation.
and now? we can't agree on plugs. our trains stop at borders to change gauge. we celebrate diversity while the differences set in for good.
we swapped the cross for committee meetings. turns out bureaucracy makes for shit communion.
brussels thinks enough regulation will heal a thousand years of grudges. it won't.
--
then russia rolled tanks into ukraine and suddenly we remembered. oh right, that's why we built this thing.
our militaries have gone soft and our energy policy was written by children. france kept its nuclear plants while germany shut theirs down in a fit of green virtue. we built beautiful train networks that stop dead at every border.
the crisis brought some unity for a while. we sent weapons, took in refugees and coordinated sanctions. but underneath, the old wounds still hurt. poland remembers katyn, the baltics remember the deportations, germany remembers division, and all of us remember why we never trusted each other in the first place.
--
we don't know what we are, only what we're not. not america with its cultural steamroller, not russia with its imperial fantasies, not china with its surveillance state.
you can't build anything on what you're not.
walk through molenbeek, neukölln or the banlieues. there are minarets going up where church spires fell down, and you hear the call to prayer in streets where the church bells stopped generations ago. this isn't about immigration. it's about conviction. they believe, and we doubt.
nature hates a vacuum, especially a spiritual one.
our cathedrals host yoga classes and their mosques are packed for friday prayers. we champion tolerance until we tolerate ourselves out of existence. there's no core left, just procedures and politeness and the echo of what we used to be.
--
brussels has one product, and it's rules. we export compliance while america exports the future. silicon valley builds ai while we write ethics guidelines for technology we'll never make.
gdpr was supposed to be our big moment, when we finally tamed big tech. instead the world got cookie popups and our own startups got killed by compliance costs. that's modern europe in one law: well-meaning regulations that piss everyone off and make more lawyers than programmers.
you can't committee your way to creativity. our best people take the first flight to san francisco while we debate the ethics of things being invented somewhere else.
we're the world's hall monitor, writing rules for a game we're not even playing.
--
i want this to work. secretly we all do, even the skeptics. we can see the logic, and geography and history keep pulling us together.
but wanting isn't enough.
every morning there's another crack: another tax rise, another immigration scandal, another cultural clash. another reminder that we're forcing something that won't be forced.
maybe the project was always too ambitious. too many languages and too much history, and too little of it shared. we're bound by necessity, not love. we work together because we have to, not because we want to.
there's a particular loneliness in watching something fail that needs to succeed.
maybe that's all we can manage: the machinery of cooperation without the soul of community. work together where we have to, go our own way where we can, and stop pretending we're building a united states of anything.
so i'm still what i always was: irish.
and honestly? that's enough.