To the question that several share: What was lost? There is a remainder in this line of reasoning that is not stated explicitly, but which nevertheless lies there as a dark undertone: the question of what was in fact lost – not only politically, but humanly.

For what disappears in every cultural revolution is not primarily institutions, laws, or economic structures. It is something far more subtle. Something more difficult to rebuild. It is trust. It is continuity. It is the quiet certainty within a human being that the world makes sense, and that this same meaning is shared by others.

Europe was not merely a political project. It was a civilisational memory. An accumulated experience. Not perfect, never perfect, but recognisable. A place where a worker in Manchester, a farmer in Normandy, and an engineer in Stuttgart, despite all differences, nevertheless lived within the same fundamental understanding of right and wrong, of work and responsibility, of freedom and limitation.

This is the real loss.

For when the elite tear down, it is not only structures that disappear. It is that which bound the generations together. The invisible contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. The contract which said: We steward something we have not ourselves created, and we pass it on, a little better, a little safer.

Instead, we are left with a rupture. A merciless present.

Everything is to be reassessed. Everything is to be redefined. Everything is to be detached from its origin. History is no longer a source of learning, but a problem that must be cleared away. Tradition is no longer a resource, but an obstacle. Identity is no longer something one grows into, but something from which one is to be liberated.

And in this void – where there once existed a culture – something else arises.

Not freedom, as one might suppose. But a peculiar form of rootlessness. An existential instability. People who no longer know who they are, what they belong to, or what is expected of them. People who therefore become far more receptive to precisely the kind of governance that the elite claim to oppose.

For a human being without roots is easily moved.

It is here that the paradox becomes clear: the more one speaks of liberation, the more dependent individuals become upon the system. When family, culture, tradition, and local community are weakened, the state remains as the only stable point of reference. Not because it is strong, but because everything else has been made weak.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a consequence.

And it is perhaps this that is lacking in the analysis: the understanding that culture is not merely ornament on the surface of society, but the very supporting structure. When it is broken down, reforms, budgets, and strategies avail little. One has already undermined that which makes a society viable.

This is why the development is experienced by many not merely as politically misguided, but as a loss of reality. As if something familiar is slipping from one’s hands, without one quite being able to put into words what it is.

Everything we had, and everything we were.

Not in the sense of nostalgia. But in the sense of coherence.

For it was precisely coherence that made Europe strong. Not homogeneity, but continuity. Not perfection, but stability. Not unity, but a shared understanding of the framework for disagreement.

When this coherence is broken, democracy too becomes an empty form. Elections still exist. Institutions remain. But the underlying community – that which makes democracy possible – begins to crumble.

And without it, it matters little who wins elections.

One is then left with a society in which everything can be decided, but nothing is any longer anchored.

Perhaps it is precisely this that is the greatest blind spot of our time: the belief that one can tear down the organic and replace it with the constructed, without loss.

But civilisations do not function in this way.

They can be built slowly. They can be improved cautiously. But they cannot be dismantled and reassembled according to new designs without something irreplaceable being lost along the way.

The question, therefore, is not primarily what kind of Europe one wishes to create.

The question is whether one understands at all what it was that one had.