i'm not european. i'm irish.
i know that sounds like a slogan until you are standing in dublin airport at 5am behind a lad in a county jersey arguing with a ryanair bag sizer. there is nothing abstractly european about that scene. there is a very specific kind of national exhaustion. bad coffee, wet shoes, everyone half-proud and half-ashamed of everyone else.
then you land in germany and the train machine makes you feel like you have failed an exam.
this is the problem with "european" as an identity. it works beautifully as a logistics layer. roaming charges disappear. plugs converge. students do erasmus and come home with better cheekbones. a polish plumber can work in ireland and an irish idiot can spend a weekend in lisbon pretending to understand wine.
that part is real. i like it.
but a logistics layer is not a people.
what exactly do i share with a german? with a greek? with an estonian whose grandparents lived under soviet rule while ours were arguing about the church and the brits? we can cooperate. we can trade. we can defend each other when russia starts behaving like russia. none of that means we have become one thing.
the EU exists in conference rooms, court decisions, privacy popups, airport lanes, agricultural subsidies, phone chargers. it is very good at making life slightly less annoying in ten thousand tiny ways.
it is much worse at making anyone cry.
national identity is already hard enough. irish people fight over who counts as properly irish. germans still have a strange relationship with their own flag. italy is a country, a civilization, and several arguments in a coat. france is france, which is both an achievement and a warning.
then brussels arrives and asks everyone to feel something larger and thinner.
we swapped the cross for committee meetings. turns out bureaucracy makes for shit communion.
that is not a dunk on bureaucracy. clean water is bureaucracy. safe planes are bureaucracy. the single market is bureaucracy doing something useful while nobody claps. the boring bits of europe are often the best bits.
but boredom cannot be the whole story.
ukraine made this obvious. for a while everyone remembered why the machinery exists. weapons moved. refugees arrived. sanctions coordinated. old neutralities became harder to perform. poland and the baltics sounded less paranoid than they had the year before.
crisis can make a chorus out of people who do not share a songbook.
then the crisis becomes admin. budgets, procurement, elections, speeches, exemptions. germany has one instinct, france another, ireland another, hungary its own little theatre. the machine keeps moving, but you can hear the gears complain.
the spiritual problem is harder to say without sounding mad.
europe used to share a religious grammar even when it was busy murdering itself. saints, sins, guilt, salvation, bells, fasts, feast days, the same old stories translated badly across borders. now our cathedrals are full of tourists taking photos of the faith we outsourced to museums.
maybe that is fine. maybe secular Europe is gentler than what came before. I am not nostalgic for priests having the run of the place.
still, something is missing.
Rules can stop people from hitting each other. They cannot tell them why they are together.
that is the fragility. not that europe will collapse tomorrow. it probably won't. institutions can limp for a long time. so can marriages.
the fragile thing is the story. ask for sacrifice and you find out fast whether the thing is loved or merely useful.
i want europe to work. i like the trains when they work. i like being able to cross borders without a little man in a booth pretending my passport is personally offensive to him. i like the idea that small countries do not have to face empires alone.
but wanting is not identity.
coordinate where necessary. trade where useful. defend what actually needs defending. stop pretending we are building a united states of anything.
when the form asks, i will tick european.
but if you wake me up in the middle of the night and ask what i am, the answer is irish.