The Aurora Review

By Jackson Mitchell — Culture & Literature

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People like to think Europe’s identity is spelled out in its treaties. The EU has all the trappings—flags, an anthem, courts, a mountain of law. On paper, that ought to be enough to hold a continent together. But every time Europe hits a real crisis—war, migration, economic turmoil—you can see just how thin that legal identity actually is. The real sense of being European isn’t written into institutions or directives. It lives in language.

Europe’s never come together just by law. Borders have moved, empires crumbled, governments flipped—too much chaos for legal codes to really keep people bound. What lasts is the way people speak: family dialects, stubborn minority languages, old literary traditions that outlive any regime. Long before Europe tried to stitch itself into one political space, it talked itself into existence.

Language remembers what law can’t. Laws look ahead. They’re supposed to be clear, logical, the same for everyone. They iron out differences for the sake of order. Language does the opposite. It keeps all the oddities and contradictions, all the bits of local life. A Catalan, a Pole, a Finn—they might be citizens under the same treaties. Still, their sense of belonging is shaped by more than just a legal framework. It’s the way they speak, what they read, how they tell stories.

That’s why Europe’s biggest tensions so often play out over language. Fights about autonomy in Spain, language laws in the Baltic, debates over education in France—these aren’t just bureaucratic squabbles. They cut right to the heart. Language decides whose history gets remembered, whose culture feels “normal,” whose voice carries weight. When people defend their language, they’re not pushing back against Europe—they’re fighting for their own place inside it.

Literature makes this obvious. Europe’s best writers never sound like bureaucrats. They write from the edges—from exile, from minority corners, from inside language disputes. Kafka’s German in Prague shows Europe’s real inner life. Joyce explores this with twisted English in Dublin. Kundera’s Czech, shadowed by exile, offers insight in a way no treaty ever has. They capture how it feels to live between identities, to belong without ever being the same.

Flip to the legal side, and you’ll see the difference. EU law is crucial—it keeps things coordinated, protects rights, keeps the wheels turning. But it’s abstract. People follow it, but almost nobody feels changed by it. When things get tough, law loses to old loyalties. Language, though, hangs on. It slips through closed borders. It survives regime change, censorship, even exile.

This isn’t to say Europe should ditch law and just lean on culture. Institutions matter. Still, Europe keeps stumbling when it tries to manufacture emotional loyalty, because it misses where identity actually grows. You can’t pass a law that makes people feel like they belong. All you can do is protect the messy, unpredictable conditions that let identity take root.

Europe’s real unity has always been about difference. Not the sameness of harmonized rules, but the ability to recognize and live with one another’s differences. Language teaches this better than any law. It reminds people that identity is handed down, fought over, shaped and reshaped, never really settled.

If Europe’s going to last as more than just a market or a security pact, it won’t be because of its laws getting everything right. It’ll be because its languages, its stories, and its local voices were allowed to exist side by side. They were not pressed into a single mold. Europe sticks around not because everyone speaks the same. It sticks around because it’s figured out—sometimes awkwardly—how to listen to all the voices it holds.