Europe, that splendid continental patchwork of grudges, glories, and gastronomy, has long been a continent worth celebrating. Its European-ness—that ineffable mix of Roman ruins, Renaissance swagger, and the ability to argue over a border the size of a garden fence—is a triumph of human variety. But then there’s Euro-ness, the Brussels-brewed sludge of bureaucracy, a soulless attempt to iron out the continent’s wrinkles into a bland, borderless smoothie. The European Union, with its flag-waving zealots and their dreams of a superstate, has mistaken a vibrant continent for a country, and in doing so, has earned a place in history’s dustbin alongside other grand follies like the mullet and the Betamax. Allow me to dissect this tragic confusion, mourn the erosion of sovereign nations, and remind the Eurocrats that Europe is a continent, not a country—and it doesn’t need their meddling to prove it.
Let’s begin with European-ness, that glorious cacophony of cultures that makes the continent a living museum of human achievement. It’s the France of Proust and patisseries, where a croissant is a work of art and a strike is a national sport. It’s the Germany of Bach and bratwurst, where precision engineering meets an inexplicable love for socks with sandals. It’s the Italy of Fellini and fettuccine, where even a traffic jam feels like an opera. This is the Europe of sovereign nations, each a distinct thread in a tapestry woven from centuries of wars, treaties, and the occasional drunken exchange of princesses. European-ness thrives on difference: the Spaniard’s siesta, the Swede’s stoicism, the Brit’s dogged refusal to learn another language. It’s a continent where you can cross a border and find a new cuisine, a new accent, a new way to insult your neighbor’s football team. This is the Europe that has inspired poets, painters, and piss-takes for millennia, and it needs no central committee to keep its heart beating.
Enter Euro-ness, the EU’s attempt to replace this vibrant mosaic with a monochrome mural of “unity.” Euro-ness is the Europe of directives, regulations, and a currency that sounds like a budget airline. It’s the Europe of grey men in grey suits, droning on about “ever-closer union” in a glass tower that looks like it was designed by a spreadsheet. The Eurocrats—those self-appointed shepherds of a borderless utopia—have decided that Europe’s pesky nations, with their pesky histories and pesky voters, are obstacles to progress. Why bother with sovereignty when you can have a one-size-fits-all parliament that churns out laws like a sausage factory with a fetish for red tape? Euro-ness is the belief that a Pole, a Portuguese, and a Finn can be mashed into a single “European citizen,” all happily waving a blue flag with stars that nobody asked for. It’s a vision so sterile it could disinfect a hospital ward.
The EU’s homogenization project is not just misguided; it’s a betrayal of what makes Europe, well, Europe. Take the Euro, that shiny symbol of unity that’s about as unifying as a family reunion with an open bar. Introduced with fanfare, it promised prosperity but delivered austerity for half the continent. Greece, Ireland, and Portugal learned the hard way that a currency cooked up in Frankfurt doesn’t stretch to Athens or Lisbon. The single market, another Eurocrat fetish, was supposed to make trade seamless, but it’s also made it easier for multinational corporations to dodge taxes while local businesses drown in compliance costs. And let’s not forget the Common Agricultural Policy, a labyrinthine scheme that pays French farmers to grow nothing while ensuring your supermarket tomatoes taste like damp cardboard. Euro-ness doesn’t celebrate Europe’s diversity; it smothers it under a blanket of bureaucracy, turning a continent of character into a continent of checklists.
The loss of sovereignty is the real tragedy here. Europe’s nations—forged in blood, sweat, and the occasional Viking raid—have histories that predate the EU by centuries. Yet Brussels treats them like unruly provinces in need of a stern headmaster. The Lisbon Treaty, the Maastricht Treaty, the endless treaties nobody reads but everyone’s bound by—these are the tools of a creeping superstate that erodes the right of nations to govern themselves. The UK, in a rare moment of clarity, saw the writing on the wall and Brexited, though not without tripping over its own shoelaces. Other nations, from Hungary to Poland, are pushing back, their leaders branded as “populists” by Eurocrats who think democracy is fine as long as it delivers the right result. On X, the digital Colosseum where opinions duel to the death, users rail against the EU’s overreach: “Europe’s a continent, not a bloody country club,” one writes, capturing the mood with more eloquence than a thousand EU press releases.
The EU’s defenders will argue that supranational governance is necessary to prevent war, as if Europeans were one trade dispute away from dusting off the trebuchets. This is nonsense dressed up as history. Europe’s peace since 1945 owes more to NATO, economic recovery, and the sobering memory of two world wars than to any Brussels bureaucrat. The idea that a superstate is the only thing stopping Germany and France from reenacting Verdun is as absurd as suggesting the Dutch need a directive to keep building dikes. Cooperation between nations—trade deals, alliances, the odd joint space project—doesn’t require a supranational overlord. Europe’s strength lies in its nations working together, not dissolving into a federal soup where everyone’s a “European” but nobody’s anything else.
And yet, the Eurocrats persist, their hubris as towering as their glass palaces. They dream of a United States of Europe, ignoring the fact that the actual United States took a civil war, a constitution, and a shared language to pull it off—and even then, it’s still arguing over who gets to carry a gun to the supermarket. Europe, with its 24 official languages and 27 flavours of resentment, is not a country and never will be. The attempt to make it one is like trying to herd cats with a PowerPoint presentation. The more Brussels pushes, the more the continent pushes back. Look at the rise of so-called “far-right” parties—less fascist than fed-up—in France, Italy, and Austria. Look at the farmers clogging highways with tractors, refusing to be dictated to by technocrats who’ve never touched a pitchfork. Look at the X posts, dripping with scorn: “The EU wants to be my mum, but I’m not eating its kale smoothie.”
Europe doesn’t need a supranational government any more than a fish needs a bicycle. Its nations, for all their flaws, are the engines of its genius. They compete, they bicker, they borrow each other’s recipes and start wars over football matches, but that’s the point. European-ness is the chaos of difference, not the conformity of Euro-ness. The EU’s dream of homogenization will fail, not just because it’s evil, but because it’s boring, and Europe—glorious, messy, maddening Europe—has never been boring. So let’s raise a glass (of Chianti, or Guinness, or schnapps) to the continent that refuses to be a country, and tell the Eurocrats to take their starry flag and their grand designs back to the drawing board. Or better yet, the shredder.