The Europe That Lost Its Home: Why Churchill Would Probably Laugh at Our Mess
Every time I go back to it, I feel a knot in my stomach. Not because Churchill was right about everything- he certainly wasn't -but because the gap between what he envisioned and what we actually became is cavernous. It’s a gap that the bureaucrats in Brussels stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, because if they did, they’d have to admit their entire edifice is made of cardboard.
When Churchill spoke of a United States of Europe, he wasn't thinking about directives on the size of cucumbers. He was talking about a shared fate. He spoke of spirit and Christian ethics not necessarily in a religious sense, but as a moral code that holds us together.
He understood something we seem to have lost today. Institutions without a moral foundation are just furniture. You can move them around, you can replace them, you can ignore them. They don't inspire you. They don't ask anything of you. And a Europe that asks nothing of you will never have anyone to defend it when the hard times come.
Here is the funny part.Those who invoke Churchill to support the EU always forget the biggest detail. Churchill never wanted Britain to be part of that structure. He imagined Britain as an outside guarantor, a friend. He believed unity was something that had to be baked within nations, born out of suffering and coexistence. He didn't believe you could just invite countries into a room, give them an office, and say, There you go, you’re all Europeans now.
History has proven how wrong we were. We turned Europe into an administrative category. Being European became a line in a passport, not an identity.
We saw it in practice. In 2008, when the crisis hit, everyone looked out for their own skin. In the 2015 migration crisis, fences went up as if we’d regressed to the 19th century. During the pandemic, we were practically stealing masks and vaccines from each other. And Ukraine? We were slow, divided, and pained. Not because we didn't care, but because we had no shared framework of values to decide what we were willing to sacrifice.
The problem isn't the EU as an idea. The problem is that we built a machine for good weather and left our moral arsenal empty. In 2004, in the European Constitution, we erased every mention of our roots. We called it neutrality. In reality, it was cowardice. It was like writing a man’s biography and deleting his childhood just so strangers wouldn't feel uncomfortable.
If you look at Europe today, you see the flags, you hear the anthem, but if you scratch the surface, you’ll find a void. People don't live on their neighborhood’s GDP. They live on meaning. And the European project, in its attempt to be neutral and technocratic, ended up meaning absolutely nothing to anyone.
Perhaps Churchill was right. If he saw today's construct, he’d probably say that all we did was build a house with nothing inside worth protecting. And a house without a purpose, at the end of the day, is just a shelter from the rain.
And we, of course, are left wondering why it’s starting to pour outside.
Christodoulos Molyvas
Appendix: The Original Speech
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