How to restore European unity without being stifled by nationalism

The world order as we know it is becoming a thing of the past. Resonating within the new order is, above all, the narrative of three players engaged in a superpower rivalry: the United States, China and Russia. A fourth voice is, for the time being, absent. Each of the three interprets the multipolar world in its own way and conceives of its order differently, basing it on the dictates of its own national identity. China, Russia and the new incarnation of the United States. Each of these states seeks to build its own ‘new’ foreign policy around a narrative of distinct identity, exceptional civilisation and a privileged mission. To do so, each requires a founding myth and an ideological framework.

Each draws on its own history and constructs a narrative based on elements of its own civilisation that can serve as the foundations for the societies of the future, founded on a distinct cultural code and separate value systems. None of this would be surprising, were it not for the fact that amongst these narratives, the fourth – the one closest to us – is barely audible: the history of Europe’s ancient and shared Latin culture.

China evokes an ancient civilisation that stretches into the present and future centuries. A China with a history stretching back millennia. An Asian civilisation rooted in human history, to which the world owes paper, the compass and gunpowder. In this narrative, Chinese and Confucian culture has shaped the East Asian region for thousands of years. And in this sense, at least, the Chinese narrative is legitimate.

The Russian case is quite different. There, ideology is subordinated to imperial political ends, and propagandists adapt the concept of a ‘millennial Russian world’ on a case-by-case basis to the geopolitical needs of the moment and the audience they are addressing. There is one narrative for the Global South, another for Europe, and yet another for China. The guiding principle is simply that ‘Russia is wherever a Russian soldier’s boot treads’. Drawing on fragments of history and the teachings of the Orthodox Church, the ideology of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ was constructed for domestic political purposes and to forge a great-power identity. To judge its authenticity, one need only recall that this geopolitical concept is barely thirty years old: it emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to fill the void and apathy that had taken hold in Russia when the separation of Ukraine – and of Kyiv as the spiritual source of Rus’ – became a fait accompli.

Meanwhile, in its ‘America First’ incarnation, our strategic ally presents itself to us Europeans as the new source of Western civilisation’s values: civil liberties and Christian culture. Alongside images of pastors deep in prayer before the silhouette of the US President in the early days of the war with Iran, slogans about freedom of speech, morality and mission reach us almost every week.

Europe seems to lack a narrative of its own. It is as though democracy had truly begun its history in the United States and Jesus had been born in Washington. The Old Continent remains divided into many national strands and has relegated the teaching of our common roots and more than two thousand years of history to primary school children. It is hardly surprising that today populists are able to convince a section of the European public that there is no common ground whatsoever. Yet what unites us in Europe is not merely a Latin civilisation whose roots stretch back to centuries before the coming of Christ, or an economy based on property rights, which predates our era. It is, above all, a culture and a way of conceiving of humanity and the value of human life. We Europeans forget where the foundations of the Western world lie. If we look at them anew, with fresh eyes, we shall see once again that the United States is, above all, the recipient of the European legacy, whilst Europe is the great source of Western civilisation’s culture.

There is something singularly paradoxical about all this. The continent that today is unable to tell its own story is precisely the one where every citizen can see its traces first-hand, every day. One need only look ahead. Anyone strolling through Paris finds themselves in the shadow of a triumphal arch modelled on the Roman style, whilst anyone passing the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin sees a quadriga and columns that are a direct reference to the architecture of classical antiquity. Anyone entering the Supreme Court in Warsaw reads Latin inscriptions on the façade that are not mere ornamentation, but a profession of faith in a legal order founded on that tradition. Europe is literally built on the foundations of this civilisation, and yet it pretends not to recognise it.

Every lawyer on the continent, whether practising in Lisbon, Stockholm or Kraków, reasons in terms of categories whose source lies in Roman law. Every agreement, every contract, every legal act bears within it the genetic imprint of the law developed, on a scale unprecedented in human history, by the institutions of the Roman Republic. This is neither a metaphor nor an academic concession. It is the foundation upon which the entire European legal system rests, from the protection of private property to the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, almost all citizens of the European Union write using the Latin alphabet. We use it in Polish, Finnish, Irish and Hungarian. We have made it our own, often at the expense of earlier writing traditions, because we have recognised it as a tool for community. An alphabet is not a technical detail. It is a choice of civilisation.

And before Rome came Greece. It was in Athens that, for the first time in human history, the citizen became an autonomous individual: not a subject, not the property of a sovereign, but a participant in public life, endowed with a voice and rights. Democracy is not a modern invention. It is European.

Rome took up that impetus and added something equally fundamental: the rule of law as the organising principle of an empire stretching from Spain to Mesopotamia. For the first time in history, such a vast territory was governed not by the force of arbitrary will, but by the letter of the law and by rules approved through the institutions. It was not an ideal; rather, it was an unprecedented constitutional foundation, the threads of which continue to shape the constitutional systems of European states to this day.

In that same ancient world, the pantheon allowed many gods and many traditions to coexist under one roof. Rome did not destroy local cults: it absorbed them, synthesised them and tolerated them. It was within this culture, and within a common order that was preserved, that Christianity flourished. And it was Europe, which for many centuries saw itself as Christianitas, that conferred an absolute dimension upon human life, making it the foundation of civil liberty and inalienable human rights.

This is not a story to be relegated, with embarrassment, to the pages of school textbooks. It is the living substance from which European identity is built, proof of the Latin roots of our strength. As a European, a Christian and a Pole who grew up in lands that the Roman Empire never managed to conquer, I feel I have a particular right to speak of Europe’s common Latin roots. It was the Slavic, Nordic and Baltic nations that adopted much of this culture – not through conquest, but of their own free will – just as, centuries later, they decided to join the European Community.

Yet there is one dimension that Europe, after the Second World War, deliberately excluded from its identity: security. In building an economic community, post-war Europeans sought prosperity within a common market, taking it for granted that security would be guaranteed by their allies across the Atlantic. But the time when one could remain removed from war in Paris or London is over. Just how deeply war can now penetrate beyond the front line has been demonstrated by every conflict in recent months. Modern hybrid warfare is, above all, a disregard for life and violence directed against societies, not against armies. Air strikes, sabotage of infrastructure, disinformation and cyberspace mean that today the front line runs through railway stations, hospitals, power stations and city centres. When hybrid attacks on Copenhagen Airport result in greater costs and dangers than the incident in Vilnius, it becomes clear that the differing perceptions of the threat, from Madrid to Warsaw, are a weakness that is tearing apart the very foundations not only of our continent, but of the Latin world.

In the current debate on common security, the EU finds itself, for the first time, faced with a historic opportunity: to build a common, European security framework. But it cannot do so without rediscovering common roots and a common identity. These are the values for which soldiers are prepared to wear a flag on the sleeve of their uniform, to fight for it and to die for it. Where, then, is the memory of the values of Latin Europe for which future generations of Europeans will want to fight? It is worth reminding ourselves once again of what unites us in a Europe which, throughout its history, has not lost its distinct languages, has not eliminated its nations and has not stifled Christian values. Dear nationalists: how, exactly, could seventy years of European federalisation have brought an end to the existence of our nations, when the Roman Empire failed to do so in a thousand years, despite being the greatest power of European antiquity?

Jacek Siewiera, a doctor, military officer and lawyer, served as Secretary of State and Head of Poland’s National Security Bureau from 2022 to 2025