Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar plastic of global brands and the same coffee chains you already hate in airports.
So I understand the impulse to say: “This is finished. This is no longer Europe. This is a joke.”
The problem is not the feelings. The problem is the jump from disappointment to total verdict.
When someone calls Europe pathetic, morally bankrupt, incapable of raising an army, overrun by strangers, abandoned by its allies and sliding into a wasteland, they are not giving a diagnosis. They are describing their own despair. It may be honest, but it is not precise. It does not actually help us decide what to do next.
If we want to think like adults – or like a slightly moodier Spock – we have to separate three different layers: what has really gone wrong, what is actually changing, and what is simply projection of private anger on public reality.
First, what has really gone wrong.
Europe did become strategically lazy. For decades, most governments happily outsourced hard security to the United States, spending less than they promised on defence and treating war as something that happens on television. The post-Cold War dream said that economic interdependence and polite diplomacy would domesticate any predator. Russia was handled with speeches and pipelines. Cheap gas and comfortable illusions.
This was not just naivety; it was a very European arrogance. We believed that our model – law, trade, soft power, endless negotiation – was the final stage of history. Tanks and artillery were for other, less civilised continents.
Reality has corrected this mistake with brutal clarity.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not only shatter Ukrainian lives. It also smashed the illusion that geography and history had been permanently tamed. Europe discovered that its armies were small, its ammunition stocks thin, its supply chains fragile. It discovered that its loud values were not automatically backed by hard capabilities. It felt the humiliation of sending strong words and weak shipments.
There is also the demographic problem: a continent that is rich, old, and tired. Birth rates low, average age rising, pensions and health care systems under pressure. This does not mean immediate collapse; it does mean that every long-term plan must wrestle with a basic fact: the people who have to pay for it or fight for it are fewer and older than before. That is not exactly the recipe for aggressive strategic confidence.
Add to this the institutional style of the European Union and many European states: a love affair with process. Layers of procedures, committees, consultations, safeguards, checks and balances. All of this was built to prevent another 1930s. The result is a complicated machine that is very good at preventing sudden moves, and rather bad at making necessary ones. By the time twenty-seven governments have found common language, the situation on the ground has often moved three times.
So yes, there is complacency. There is slowness. There is the heavy perfume of bureaucracy, sometimes so thick you cannot smell reality anymore.
But now the second layer: what is actually changing.
The story that Europe “will do nothing” while its house burns is already outdated. Defence budgets are rising at a speed that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago. Countries that once treated military spending as something half shameful suddenly discover that tanks and artillery are not symbols of fascism but tools of survival. Defence industries expand, ammunition factories work in extra shifts, forgotten skills are being rebuilt.
It is late. It is messy. It is still dependent on American logistics and intelligence. But it is not “nothing”.
Support to Ukraine is an example of this duality: on one side, slow, fragmented, always behind battlefield needs; on the other, huge commitments of money, weapons, training, energy support, refugees taken in. It is not the heroic fantasy of a continent standing as one legion. It is also not the cynical fantasy of a continent shrugging and going shopping. It is a clumsy but real attempt to act like a geopolitical adult after many years pretending that adulthood is optional.
The same pattern appears in internal politics. For years, mainstream parties treated questions of identity, borders, social cohesion as impolite topics that only “extremists” touch. This was foolish. It allowed anger to ferment outside the official discourse. We are now in a correction phase: harder debates, sharper elections, new parties, uncomfortable coalitions. It is not pretty, but it is politics finally dealing with reality instead of outsourcing it to slogans.
And now the third layer: projection.
A lot of rage against “Europe today” is not actually about Europe. It is about personal loss. The loss of youth, of a simpler world, of a time when one’s own cultural group felt safely centred. When someone says, “It no longer looks like Europe,” they usually mean, “It no longer looks like the memory palace I built in my head fifty years ago.” This is normal human psychology. It becomes dangerous when we mistake it for objective description.
Yes, city centres are more globalised. Yes, mass tourism and chains have flattened some local flavour, the same way they did in North America or Asia. But this is not a unique European fall from grace; it is capitalism with jets and shipping containers. If you blame it purely on Brussels or refugees, you are simply choosing an easy target instead of looking at the global economic system that delivers your cheap gadgets and flying holidays.
The same distortion happens with immigration. It is obvious that migration at large scale brings tensions, especially when states manage it badly, cluster people in specific districts, or pretend that integration happens automatically. It is also obvious that turning millions of human beings into a faceless invasion from “over there” is both morally lazy and strategically stupid. You cannot fix real integration problems by fantasising that Europe was once perfectly pure and is now hopelessly contaminated.
Touch it lightly, and the issue looks different: a combination of economic need, demographic reality, humanitarian obligation, policy failure, and cultural anxiety. Treat it as a simple story of barbarians at the gate and traitors inside, and you are not analysing anymore; you are writing war poetry for your own fear.
The harsh rhetoric about “cowardice”, “softness”, “decadence” also deserves a second look. It confuses two very different things.
One is the refusal to act from selfish comfort: “Let someone else fight, I prefer my lifestyle.” This is indeed contemptible.
The other is a deliberate choice to constrain power with law, to build systems where the state cannot easily crush the individual, where even hateful speech is often tolerated, where police cannot simply disappear suspects because they are inconvenient. This is not weakness. It is the most ambitious thing Europe ever tried to do: to build a civilisation where force is placed in chains, and still survive in a world where others do not play by those rules.
Of course, such a civilisation is permanently at risk. It will always look soft from the outside. It can decay into procedural self-paralysis. But the answer to that risk is not to spit on the whole project as “pathetic” and dream of some fantasy of “strong men” and “balls”. The answer is to re-arm, to reform, to cut some of the red tape, while still holding the line on the idea that citizens are not raw material for state power.
If we are honest, part of the anger against Europe is that it fails to match the simple narrative structures we like: the glorious empire, the revolutionary vanguard, the noble underdog. Europe instead is a collection of half-successful compromises between memory and modernity, sovereignty and integration, welfare and competition, security and rights. It is boring, frustrated, argumentative, sometimes hypocritical. It is also, simultaneously, one of the safest, freest, and most prosperous places ever to exist on this planet.
This is not an advertisement. It is an uncomfortable duality. The continent is decaying in some ways and maturing in others. Ageing and rearming. Losing illusions and still clinging to some of them. Opening its doors and then panicking about who comes in. Speaking grand words while shipping too little too late – and then, sometimes, shipping more than anyone expected.
To call this “inept, embarrassing, pathetic” is emotionally satisfying. It gives you the clean pleasure of condemnation. You feel like the last clear-sighted witness among sleepwalkers.
But if you care about Europe as more than a stage for your disappointment, this is not enough.
We do not need another theatrical obituary for the continent. We need a colder gaze and a more precise language. We must admit the structural weaknesses: late awakening to hard power, demographic squeeze, overgrown bureaucracy, shallow consumerism eroding local cultures, badly managed migration and integration. We must also admit the strengths: technological and industrial capacity, still enormous economic weight, surprisingly resilient public support for open societies, and a slow but real movement towards strategic seriousness.
Between self-congratulation and self-hatred there is a third path: self-respect without self-delusion.
The interesting question is not, “Is Europe finished?” That is the kind of question we ask when we want to feel tragic, not when we want to act.
The interesting questions sound more like this:
What kind of power does a liberal, aging, diverse, bureaucratic but wealthy continent want to be in a 21st century full of predators? How much hardness is it ready to regain without betraying its own most valuable inventions? How much of the globalised sameness is it ready to accept in exchange for comfort, and how much local particularity is it ready to defend with real cost?
These are not questions for a museum. They are questions for a laboratory.
Europe is still exactly that: an experiment in how far you can civilise power without making yourself prey. Sometimes it behaves like a clumsy giant in slippers. Sometimes like a cornered animal. Sometimes like an old professor trying to negotiate with a street gang.
It is not glorious. It is not hopeless. It is unfinished.
Rage can be a useful alarm bell, but it is a terrible architect. If we want Europe to be something more than a nostalgic postcard or a globalised mall, we have to use colder tools: data, history, strategy, and a moral framework that does not reduce hundreds of millions of people – natives and newcomers – to simple stereotypes.
Otherwise, we are only adding one more noisy monologue to a continent that already has enough of them.
