Why the absence of Rome still echoes in Europe’s search for union.
A Common Enemy Is Never Enough
Every generation likes to imagine that nothing unites like a shared threat. We repeat it after disasters, quote it in politics, toast it during wars. Yet the record says otherwise.
When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, its heirs had enemies enough: Persians, Goths, Vandals, Huns. Later, Islam would rise out of Arabia, sweeping across North Africa and into Spain. If common peril could forge lasting union, Europe should have welded itself solid by the seventh century. It didn’t. The continent fractured—first into principalities, then into languages, then into nations whose feuds became their heritage.
China, facing parallel dangers from its northern steppes, moved in the opposite direction. By the time the Tang dynasty took shape, the empire had re-coalesced into a single administrative machine that would last for centuries. The difference, as historian William Rosen observed in Justinian’s Flea, was simple and brutal: China had a sovereign, Rome did not.
Without a common sovereign, Europe’s pieces learned to define themselves against one another. Geography did the rest—mountains, rivers, and long winters creating local loyalties stronger than any memory of empire. A shared enemy might ignite coordination, but when the danger fades, there’s no structure left to sustain the peace. A sovereign, however imperfect, creates habits of coexistence: courts instead of raids, taxes instead of tribute, a map with a center.
The story repeats. The modern European Union was conceived in the ashes of a common enemy—Fascism—and built on the hope that economic sovereignty could outlast the fear that birthed it. Eight decades later, the scaffolding holds, but only just. Currency crises, migration, and divergent politics have tested the premise that a shared danger can substitute for shared authority. The project now drifts between solidarity and splinter, like the late empire it half remembers.
The lesson reaches further than Brussels. Families, institutions, even alliances often mistake friction for glue. We rally against the other, but when the threat subsides, so does the unity. What endures are systems that can absorb disagreement without dissolving—rules, trust, and some sense that the center, however small, still holds.
Rome’s loss wasn’t only territorial; it was conceptual. Its citizens could become anyone and anyone could become Roman. When that inclusive sovereignty vanished, identity shrank to soil and blood. The map filled with borders and epics about belonging. Europe gained its nations but lost its empire’s ease of entry.
A common enemy unites for a season. A common sovereign—real or imagined—binds for an era. The first demands fear; the second, consent. The first ends when the battle does. The second asks us to keep showing up, long after the fire is out.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
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