For decades, Europe has been trying to answer a seemingly simple question: what does it mean to be European? The answer, however, has never felt entirely comfortable.
Europe is not a nation writ large nor a community built on a single language, a single memory or a single historical experience. Its distinctiveness lies precisely in having built a common political project out of different histories, at times wounded, contradictory and even in conflict with one another.
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Perhaps the mistake has been to assume that a European identity can only emerge from what everyone shares in equal measure. Political identities are not built solely on points of overlap. They are also forged in the ability to recognise as one’s own what others contribute to the whole.
Europe shares history, but does not always share the same memory of that history. What for some was liberation may have been defeat for others; what for some was expansion was loss for others; what for some is a source of national pride may still be an awkward question for others.
The Spanish paradox: too European for the Americas and too American for Europe
The real European challenge, then, is not to manufacture a single memory. It is to shape a shared narrative.
Here the transatlantic experience can offer a useful key. For a long time, the American dimension of Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom has been read as an extension of their respective national narratives. 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 the Americas and too American for a certain narrow idea of Europe. Yet that unease may not be a weakness. It may, in fact, be an asset.
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: it also gains a way of engaging with the world. The same holds true for other national experiences when they cease to be treated as particular traits and begin to operate as shared capacities.
The EU’s challenge: achieving a common European narrative
The European Union has built a single market, shared institutions and, in part, a common foreign policy. But it still faces a tougher task: 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 mission: not to erase differences, but to learn how to turn them into collective strength.
From that perspective, the question shifts. It is no longer only about what Europe owes its transatlantic history, but about what that history can do for Europe in the 21st century.
European history should not function solely as a museum of national identities, but as a shared toolbox. Every Atlantic, Mediterranean, Central European, Baltic or Balkan experience can broaden the European project when it ceases to be seen as the exclusive inheritance of one state and starts to operate as a resource for all.
That transformation does not happen by itself. It demands a cultural and political choice: to stop treating national stories as sealed compartments and start weaving 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; it also acts better.
The question, then, is not whether all of Europe shares the same Atlantic history to the same degree. It does not. The question is whether Europe can turn that history, born in some of its member states, into a resource for the entire European project. The Atlantic bond should not be seen as historical nostalgia, nor as an awkward legacy the continent looks at from a distance. It is one of the ways in which Europe can widen 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 ability to connect, culture stops being an ornament. It becomes infrastructure. That is why heritage, education, universities and creative industries should not have a decorative role in the European project, but a strategic one: they help to explain Europe, to project it and to make it recognisable inside and outside its borders.
This calls for a mature gaze. Recognising the strategic value of the transatlantic bond does not mean glossing over its darker sides 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 here lies one of the keys to Europe’s future: learning to turn complex legacies into shared tools. It is not about erasing wounds or asking the past to stop making us uncomfortable. It is about preventing history from getting stuck between two equally sterile extremes: nostalgia and guilt. Between them there is a third option: to build.
That logic feeds into, even if 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 cannot explain itself. Before asking only how to include new communities, Europe must ask what shared narrative it offers: not one that is closed, exclusionary or uniform, but one clear enough to be understood and broad enough to be lived in.
Europe’s task is not to shrink until it finds a common denominator in which 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 Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the East, the North and the centre should cease to be the margins of a map and be recognised as energies of the same political civilisation. Europe will not grow stronger by managing a reduced version of itself, but by learning to grow with everything that makes it up. Europe will not be more Europe when everyone remembers the same things; it will be more Europe when it can turn each memory into a promise for the future.
Federico Gallardo is a Spanish actor with a career in film, television and audiovisual platforms spanning Spain, Mexico and the United States. In parallel, he drives cultural projects linked to memory, heritage and transatlantic relations. He is the promoter of the Archivo Indiano de Identidades Transatlánticas, an initiative devoted to exploring the historical, cultural and human ties between Europe and the Americas. His work combines artistic creation, cultural management and reflection on European identity and cultural diplomacy.
