For decades, the question of what it means to be European has lingered, never quite settling into a comfortable answer. Europe is not an enlarged nation-state, nor a community bound by one language, one memory, or one historical experience. Its distinctiveness, rather, lies in having built a common political project out of different, often wounded, contradictory, and even opposed histories.
The assumption that a European identity can only grow from what everyone shares equally may be the root of the problem. Political identities are not forged solely on commonalities; they also emerge from the ability to recognise as one's own what others contribute to the whole. Europe shares history, but not always the same memory of that history. What for some was liberation may for others have been defeat; what for some was expansion may for others have been loss; what for some is national pride may for others remain an uncomfortable question.
The Spanish Paradox: Too European for America, Too American for Europe
The transatlantic experience offers a useful key. For a long time, the American dimension of Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom has been read as an extension of their respective national stories. In the Spanish case, that relationship has been marked by obvious tensions: pride, guilt, memory, criticism, belonging, wounds, and opportunity. Spain has often been seen as a southern, Mediterranean, Atlantic, and American Europe all at once—too European for America and too American for a certain narrow idea of Europe. But perhaps that discomfort is not a weakness. Perhaps it is an advantage.
Spain's Atlantic dimension is not an exception to its Europeanness but one of its most valuable contributions to the common project. Through it, Europe not only recalls a complex part of its past but also gains a way of relating to the world. The same happens with other national experiences when they stop being understood as particular traits and begin to act as shared capacities.
The EU's Challenge: Building a Common European Narrative
The European Union has built a common market, common institutions, and, in part, a common foreign policy. But it still has something more difficult pending: turning its historical differences into a shared grammar. The formula 'unity in diversity' should not be read as a pleasant slogan but as a political task—not to erase differences but to learn to transform them into common capacity.
From that perspective, the question changes. It is no longer only a matter of what Europe owes to its transatlantic history but of what that history can do for Europe in the 21st century. European history should not function only as a museum of national identities but as a shared toolbox. Each Atlantic, Mediterranean, Central European, Baltic, or Balkan experience can broaden the European project when it ceases to be understood as the exclusive heritage of a single state and begins to operate as a resource for the whole.
That transformation does not happen by itself. It requires a cultural and political decision: to stop treating national histories as closed compartments and to start incorporating them into the common European narrative. In the Atlantic case, that means turning a complex memory into real cooperation—education, heritage, universities, cultural industries, cultural diplomacy, and spaces for dialogue with Latin America. There, Europe not only remembers better but also acts better.
The question, therefore, is not whether the whole of Europe shares the same Atlantic history to an equal degree. It does not. The question is whether Europe is capable of turning that history, born in some of its member states, into a resource for the entire European project. The Atlantic bond should not be read as historical nostalgia or as an uncomfortable inheritance that the continent contemplates from the outside. It is one of the ways in which Europe can broaden its conversation with the world.
In a fragmented world, where influence is no longer measured only in military or economic power but also in trust, legitimacy, and the capacity to connect, culture stops being an adornment. It becomes infrastructure. That is why heritage, education, universities, and the creative industries should not occupy a decorative place in the European project but a strategic one: they help to explain Europe, to project it, and to make it recognisable within and beyond its borders.
This demands a mature outlook. Recognising the strategic value of the transatlantic bond does not mean whitewashing its shadows or turning the past into propaganda. On the contrary: only a Europe able to look its history in the eye can use it honestly. But looking it in the eye does not mean standing still. Memory cannot be only a debt; it must also become responsibility, knowledge, and cooperation.
Perhaps there lies one of the keys to Europe's future: learning to turn complex legacies into shared tools. It is not a question of erasing wounds or asking the past to stop being uncomfortable. It is a question of preventing history from becoming trapped between two equally sterile extremes: nostalgia and guilt. Between them there is a third possibility: to build.
This logic touches, even if only indirectly, one of Europe's major contemporary debates: integration. For years Europe has been asking itself how to integrate those who arrive. But no one can integrate into a project that does not know how to explain itself. Before asking only how to incorporate new communities, Europe must ask itself what common narrative it offers—not a closed, exclusionary, or uniform one, but one clear enough to be understood and broad enough to be lived in.
Europe's challenge is not to shrink until it finds a common denominator where nothing is uncomfortable but to dare to live by a multiplying principle: an identity that does not dissolve difference but turns it into strength. The path forward lies in embracing complexity, not avoiding it.
