Long historical narrative that is hopefully worth reading

Once upon a time, realms across Europe were ruled by their respective Monarchs. Their economies were characterized by protectionist policies, driven by a belief that the total wealth could not get larger. Culturally, their peoples were born into a fixed hierarchy depending on their class (which determined their occupation), their geographical location, and the will of the Monarch. Ethics, morality, and the explanatory power of life used to justify how society, economics, and identity should be all centered around the God of Abraham and almost exclusively the teachings of Jesus Christ. (Some exceptions do exist, such as the Spanish Caliphate.)

This world order was eventually challenged by the Age of Enlightenment. Monarchies were replaced by democracies, either entirely or by losing all of their political power. Protectionist economies (especially as rendered by mercantilism) were replaced by classic economic liberalism (free-market capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism) and eventually, once the lower classes had organized themselves in a way that let them increase their standard of living through political influence in the new democracies, economic social liberalism. Modern societies were thus built on a strong desire for freedom, eventually coupled with a strong desire for varying measures of equality. Culturally, fewer and fewer things were predetermined. There was still (and there is still) a correlation between what a person's parents did for a living and what they wound up doing for a living, but mostly if you looked in more general terms than before. It was not entirely "farmer => farmer", but maybe "well-educated => well-educated (but maybe another area of business)". Ethics, morality, and the explanatory power of life used to justify how society, economics, and identity should be began to center around philosophy, especially humanist philosophy, and science. The agenda was especially dominated by the epistemological debates of empiricism versus rationalism, and logical positivism versus constructivism, structuralism, formalism, intuitionism, etc. etc.

Countries became more wealthy, populations became better informed, choice became more free. But, alas, nationalism had been the propagandistic "glue" used to hold together societal coherence once those fixtures had been replaced. Nation states are a relatively new idea. National cultures, too. Individuals were no longer to focus on their local identities, but on their national ones (though many still do, like French people primarily thinking of themselves from, say, Bretagne or Lyon, and as Frenchmen second). Mozart, a citizen of Salzburg, which was an independent entity not a part of Austria, famously wrote of himself in his letters that he was a "German". He was part of the privileged classes who were introduced first to nationalism, and it started being fashionable around his time. But nationalism eventually ended up having an extremely bad track record. Empires used new ideas about national ethnicity and cultural exceptionalism to carry the "white man's burden" to the far corners of the earth. Once coupled with the scientific ideas of the day, various pseudoscientific — philosophies primarily masquerading as science — took over, and Nazi Germany is a great example of how nationalism coupled with social Darwinism were allowed to shape a society and its policies.

But there is a thing that has become more and more clear now that we have moved into the period of late modern societies. (Make no mistake, societies that are simply modern or even agricultural still exist in Europe. They exist side by side, but they are becoming fewer and fewer. The development has been and is still moving toward late modernity. This is already old information.) With late modernity, hyper-individualism became a thing. We have now reached the exact opposite of agricultural societies. NOTHING is fixed. Not when it comes to identity. Some people become hardcore feminists who free-bleed, while others choose to live as a goat for 3 days. Subcultures are multiplying and more are coming every single day, and no one can tell you what you should work with, what your education should be, what your education should be, what makes a "happy" life, whether you should be religious or not, etc. — and in mathematics, we have seen both structuralism, 20th century mathematical intuitionism, and Gödel's uncertainty theorems prove with strong logic that logical positivism is a lost cause and that the ontological object of the field may not be anywhere but inside people's heads.

We now live in a world like that. It has been created from many political battles and a whole lot of discussions and debates. Also, violence, but more than anything in Europe the desire to refrain from violence in order to end our long history of being the continent that has had the most wars in history.

As someone else has explained here, things evolve naturally. We all need to come together in a way that is much closer than multiculturalism ("coexist, but preserve"). We need to blend and become pluricultural beings with many cultural identities that many of us have chosen on our own. That's what we would do in any other area of life. Want to be a vegetarian, maybe steal some Hindu culture in your hippie-ness? Sure, no problem. But because of modern populist national conservatism, "cultural protectionism" has become a thing. Want to replace your own cultural identity with elements of that from another country? Traitor. You're not supposed to integrate to a culture outside the borders of the nation state. People who come here are supposed to integrate, no, even assimulate, to our culture! (Whatever that means. I don't think anyone can define that in the late modern society.)

I want one country for all of us who live in this part of the world. "Continentalism," not nationalism, should be the next glue to get together a society at a larger scale, with larger populations, more power, and a better ability to prepare for the extremely uncertain future that is ahead of us that will most certainly be characterized by technical challenges that one small country cannot overcome on its own. Only a European Federation, a nation that we may call "Europe" informally, will have the power to reach the minimum capacity that will be needed to deal with these issues. I am not just talking about immigration. That is just a crisis that has been handled extremely badly by taking the Canadian idea of "multiculturalism" and then making it a political meme without thinking father into the future, or thinking about sustainability. I am talking about the crises of demography. The "burden of elderly". The fact that we do not have enough children. The fact that we are destroying the planet. The European continent has all kinds of societies represented, from agricultural to late modern, and the cake would not only get bigger — the standard of living and the safety and the benefits for all people here in all circumstances would increase so much by having a single country. Denmark is only a late modern country. It doesn't have anything else. Other places have something else. We can all compliment each other and create one society that deals with all of this, and have safety in a very large area in the world. We already have more peace and wealth than elsewhere. There is absolutely no reason not to continue demanding more.

Nationalism, of course, wants to keep things stuck in the 20th century. Vegetarianism and anti-meat environmentalism is becoming a thing here in Denmark, but national conservatives are so big on forcing pig meat down Muslim's throats that they basically say, without words, that hey — we don't care about the environment, either. Historically, our populist party here in this country has been a defender of parents' rights to hit their children, another culturally traditional thing that was outlawed in spite of their crazy ideas. Because that does not belong to the future. It is unsustainable. This kind of cultural protectionism is unsustainable. A Federation of Europe is the next step in the evolution of progress. It contains so much potential that this ideal should leave anyone with even the slightest sense of perspective drooling to see it realized.

I am just waiting for someone to be a cultural Adam Smith of sorts, and to write in terms of culture, as he did in terms of economics, a fitting answer to protectionism. It's just around the corner.