Continental Drift: The sad sight of a Europe running on inherited reputation
EUROPE IS OVER. Someone had to say it.
For decades, Europe sold the world a story.
Cobblestones and Cartier. Renaissance ceilings and Ryanair. A continent that had figured it all out: the welfare state, the wine, the weather (mostly tolerable), the whole civilisational package tied up with a Michelin bow. Many of us bought the story too, once.
I don’t anymore.
And I say this not as a provocateur looking for a headline but as someone who has watched, trip after trip, the slow unspooling of an idea that simply no longer matches the reality on the ground.
Start with the climate: and I don’t mean the weather, though God knows that’s collapsing too, with wildfires in Greece and floods in Germany becoming as seasonal as Wimbledon. I mean the climate of confidence. Walk through any European capital today, and you sense it: an exhaustion, a defensiveness, a continent perpetually apologising for its own history while being wholly unable to write a new chapter. Brussels legislates. Paris strikes. Berlin deliberates. Nobody builds.
Which brings me to infrastructure, and here I speak with the authority of a frequent flyer who has been humiliated by more European airports than I care to count. Heathrow’s queues are now a rite of passage bordering on hazing. Fiumicino in Rome runs on a prayer and a baggage carousel that hasn’t been serviced since the Jubilee year. Berlin’s airport took so long to build it became a punchline before it became a runway. Compare this to what Mumbai’s T2 or Delhi’s IGI have managed to pull off in the same window, and the comparison isn’t flattering to the Old World.
Europe’s trains are romantic on postcards and unreliable in practice. Its grids buckle in heatwaves it insists are unprecedented every single year. This is not a continent investing in tomorrow; it is a continent maintaining the museum pieces of yesterday badly.
And then there is the question nobody in polite Davos company wants to litigate honestly: migration, unmanaged and unmoored from any coherent policy, has changed the texture of European cities faster than their institutions have been able to absorb.
This isn’t a moral argument; it’s an administrative one. You cannot run open borders and a closed bureaucracy in the same breath.
Sweden didn’t sign up to become a case study in parallel societies. Germany didn’t plan for the strain now visible in its housing, its schools, its social cohesion. France is having a national nervous breakdown roughly every 18 months over precisely this question. The politicians who once called any concern about this “far-right hysteria” are now, rather sheepishly, adopting the very policies they once denounced. That tells you everything about how untenable the original position was.
None of this is Europe’s fault alone: global instability, war on its doorstep, a demographic cliff of its own making with birth rates that would make any actuary weep. But the response has been paralysis dressed up as principle. A continent that once exported certainty to the world now imports uncertainty and calls it diversity of thought.
I say this with genuine affection, not malice. I have loved London, adored Paris, been besotted by Venice long before Instagram discovered it. But love doesn’t require blindness.
The Europe of the brochure: efficient, enlightened, effortlessly superior, is not the Europe I encounter anymore. What I encounter is a continent running on inherited reputation, propped up by tourism revenue and nostalgia, while its trains run late, its airports embarrass, and its politics fracture along fault lines it refused to acknowledge until they had already cracked the foundation.
The idea of Europe as shorthand for the pinnacle of governance, infrastructure, and civilisational confidence is, for all practical purposes, over. What remains is a beautiful, ageing estate, badly maintained, increasingly mortgaged, and still charging first-class prices for what is, functionally, a coach experience.
Someone had to say it. I just did.