The Melting Pot Lectures the Continent

There is a certain comic bravado in watching Donald Trump take lumps out of Europe as though it were a failed experiment in over-integration, rather than a continent that has, quite deliberately, stopped short of becoming what his own country already is.

Because the awkward truth is this. The United States is not just influenced by Europe. It is what happens when Europeans stop being European in any meaningful sense and become something else entirely.

Germans arrived, Irish arrived, Italians arrived, along with half the map in due course. They did not remain Germans, Irish and Italians for long. They married each other, moved states, lost the languages, kept the surnames for decorative purposes, and produced a population that is now thoroughly blended. The old national distinctions survive, but mostly as faint labels rather than anything that structures daily life.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the much-maligned European Union is attempting something far more modest and, in its own way, more difficult. It is trying to get French, Poles, Italians and the rest to cooperate while remaining recognisably French, Polish and Italian. Integration without assimilation. Coordination without merger.

If Brussels announced tomorrow that its objective was to turn the French into a regional variant of Germans with a shared language and interchangeable identities, there would be riots before lunch. Quite sensibly so. That is not the project.

And yet, when Trump rails against Europe, the complaint often sounds like this. Too integrated, too entangled, insufficiently sovereign. One is left wondering what he thinks the United States is. It is not a loose club of English, Germans and Irish politely minding their own business. It is the end result of those groups largely dissolving into a single, mixed population over time.

In other words, America resembles what a far more deeply integrated Europe might look like after a long period of blending, rather than anything the EU is currently trying to build. It has a single political system, a dominant language, and a population so intermixed that the original national labels carry limited weight.

There is also the small matter of timing. The United States did its blending in the 19th and early 20th centuries, under conditions that no longer exist in modern Europe. Large-scale migration into a relatively open society, a common language, and the absence of entrenched nation-states made that process possible in a way that cannot simply be replicated today.

The irony is not subtle. The same political instinct that frets about blurred identities and over-integration abroad presides quite happily over a society built on precisely that process. The average American of European descent is a small coalition government in their own right, assembled from bits of the continent and held together by habit rather than principle.

None of this makes the United States uniquely enlightened. It has its own divisions, some of them stubborn. But on this narrow question, the contrast is hard to ignore. Europe is trying to make cooperation work without dissolving its nations. America dealt with the problem by largely dissolving those distinctions within its own borders, and calling the result normal.

So when Trump takes aim at Europe, he is not just criticising a foreign arrangement. He is, in a roundabout way, objecting to a diluted version of the very process that produced the country he leads.