How Europe’s politicians started to think of themselves as European

GERMAN IS AEUEU thorough language. Almost every concept seems to be covered by a single compound word. There is , or the weight one puts on if sad. is for the worry that your life is running out and opportunities slipping away. Most satisfyingly, there is for when someone has a slappable face. When it comes to the , a compound word pops up repeatedly: , or a community of fate. Olaf Scholz, the new German chancellor, used the phrase when explaining why Germany must help its neighbours in the pandemic. His predecessor, Angela Merkel, was a fan too. Now, however, the concept—if not the tongue-twisting word—is spreading beyond the German-speaking world.An acceptance among Europe’s leaders and voters that the continent’s fate is bound together has been the main shift of the two years your departing columnist has spent writing this column. Residual objections to the idea melted during the pandemic. A long-standing refusal to issue common debt was reversed. (Mrs Merkel once said common debt would not happen in her lifetime. She is, at time of writing, fighting fit.) Even the most sovereignty-obsessed governments, such as Poland’s, were happy to make the responsible for sorting out the continent’s vaccines in a new constitutional frontier.