The patches no longer work

While being too busy making Europe, they forget to make Europeans.
The far-right landslide victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is no longer a warning. It is a pattern that has been repeating since Brexit. Resentment and frustration are being exploited by political opportunists who see Europe as weak.

And they are right. Europe is weak, and it is getting weaker with each new election, simply because there can’t be Europe without Europeans.

National identity is created by its power structures dominated by elites who fear their influence is threatened by any transnational project. European Union is the project that united the continent after the bloodbath of two World Wars, but in the eyes of an increasingly growing number of people, it is seen as a technocratic elite club whose benefits are shared by an army of overpaid bureaucrats. These, in the eyes of many, are the only ‘Europeans’, and in the context of growing inequality comes as no surprise that not many can identify themselves as such.

The patches no longer work. If Europe is to survive, it needs to invest in making Europeans.

It has to invest in people who embrace local because it makes them global. People who understand that we all are a combination of layers, intersections in a web of exchanges woven by the whole of humanity in its multiform and ever-changing culture, as Carlo Rovelli nicely frames it.

Europe needs free and safe people who understand that being European is the best chance of avoiding being made cannon fodder by nationalist opportunists and the economic interests they represent.

Photo by: Luis Villasmil, Unsplash