i'm not european. i'm irish.
what exactly do i share with a german? an italian? we've spent a thousand years invading each other, redrawing maps in blood. our greatest cultural export to each other has been war.
and the estonians, romanians, latvians? we were building our common market while they were trapped behind stalin's curtain. now we pretend fifty years of separation never happened. we smile politely at eu summits and speak to each other in english. the language of the island that left us.
the eu exists in brussels conference rooms and privacy popups. in standardized 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. paperwork priests perform their sacred rites.
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national identity already creaks under its own weight. 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.
beneath these cracks lies the real fracture. our churches stand empty. tourists snap photos where believers once prayed. the cross that once united us gathers dust in museum cases.
america makes americans. arrive speaking mandarin, leave speaking american. one generation and your kids are arguing about the superbowl.
but europe can't make europeans. we lost our binding agent when we lost our faith. christianity gave us latin, sure, but more importantly it gave us the same stories, the same guilt, the same hope for salvation.
now what? we can't agree on electrical plugs. our trains stop at borders to change gauge. we celebrate diversity while our differences calcify into permanent features.
we swapped the cross for committee meetings. turns out bureaucracy makes for shit communion.
brussels thinks enough regulations will heal a millennium of grudges. no.
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then russia rolls tanks into ukraine and suddenly we remember. oh right. that's why we built this thing.
our militaries have gone soft. our energy policy was written by children. france sits pretty with nuclear plants while germany shuts theirs down in a fit of green virtue. we built beautiful train networks that stop dead at every border.
crisis brings temporary unity. we send weapons, take refugees, coordinate sanctions. underneath, the old wounds throb. poland remembers katyn. the baltics remember deportations. germany remembers division. we remember why we never trusted each other in the first place.
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we do not 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 digital panopticon.
negative identity is sand. you can't build on what you're not.
walk through molenbeek, neukölln, the banlieues. minarets rise where church spires crumbled. the call to prayer echoes through streets where church bells fell silent generations ago. this isn't about immigration. it's about conviction. they believe, and we doubt.
nature abhors a vacuum. especially a spiritual one.
our cathedrals host yoga classes. their mosques overflow at friday prayers. we champion tolerance until we tolerate ourselves out of existence. no core left. no center. just procedures and politeness and the hollow echo of what we used to be.
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brussels has one product: rules. we export compliance while america exports the future. silicon valley builds ai while we write ethics guidelines for technology we'll never create.
gdpr was supposed to be our moment. we'd tame big tech! instead we gave the world cookie popups and killed our own startups with compliance costs. perfect metaphor for modern europe. well-meaning regulations that piss everyone off and make more lawyers than programmers.
we've made bureaucracy our religion. the holy trinity of forms, frameworks, and fines. our salvation through standardization.
you can't regulate relevance. you can't committee your way to creativity. our best minds take the first flight to san francisco while we debate the ethics of innovations happening elsewhere.
we're the world's hall monitor. writing rules for a game we're not even playing.
i want this to work. we all do, secretly. even the skeptics. we see the logic, feel the gravitational pull of geography and history.
but wanting isn't enough.
every morning brings fresh cracks. another tax rise, another immigration scandal, another cultural clash. another reminder we're forcing something that won't force.
maybe the project was always too ambitious. too many languages, too much history, too little of it shared. we're bound by necessity, not love. coordinating because we must, not because we want to.
there's a particular loneliness in watching something fail that needs to succeed.
perhaps that's all we can manage. the machinery of cooperation without the soul of community. coordinate where necessary, diverge where possible, stop pretending we're building a united states of anything.
so i remain what i always was: irish.
and honestly? that's enough.