Europe is very good at presenting itself in rooms with flags.
I like the flags. I also like leaving the room.
Europe is a night train and a motorway service station. It is a Flemish town, a Valencian market, a Polish family story, a Finnish library, a Greek ferry, a Portuguese café and a border that once meant paperwork but now barely interrupts the road.
It is not one culture.
That is the point.
A European identity that requires everyone to become culturally interchangeable would be both impossible and boring. The interesting version is layered: local, regional, national and European identities overlapping without one needing to erase the others.
You can be deeply attached to a language, landscape or tradition and still recognise that your neighbours' attachments deserve room too.
Europe is also contradiction.
We preserve old streets while arguing about new housing. We celebrate mobility and complain about tourists. We want local character and global opportunity. We inherit memories that do not always agree with one another.
A mature sense of belonging has space for that tension.
It does not need a myth of perfect unity. It needs enough confidence to stay in the conversation.
That is why ordinary life matters to me.
If Europe is only visible when leaders meet, people will experience it as something done above their heads. If it is visible in study, work, travel, culture, research, friendship, infrastructure and the small freedoms of daily life, then the political project has human scale.
Europe is argued about in institutions.
It is lived everywhere else.