When I was growing up in Cold War America, Europe was simple: while a little froofy and way too obsessed with soccer, Europeans were our BFFs and allies in the eternal power struggle with the Red Monster behind the Iron Curtain. Sure, they'd had their troubles, what with being the epicenter of centuries of war and all, but that was all sorted out now, the borders were drawn forever and everybody knew where they stood.

As I grew up, saw the end of the Cold War and witnessed the birth of the European Union and then the introduction of the common currency, my schoolboy vision was replaced by the equally simplistic idea that a united Europe, however difficult it might be to create and maintain, was inevitable, a United States of Europe with its own currency to rival the dollar and level, along with China, the playing field of global economics.

Then I moved here.

Here's the truth—or at least one of the truths—currently being revealed by the European debt crisis: the Continent is today a collection of geopolitical conveniences, a hybrid of 19th-century ideas about the nation-state and a modern vision of global economics. There is no cultural or ethnic unity, no sense of "being European" as personal identity, excepting a few examples and only in the most narrow usages of the term.

Such a thing is, in fact, impossible, primarily because the countries that constitute Europe are not only wildly different one from the other but, more importantly, are recent and foreign creations, held together by finance and common usage more than national identity: how can a union of such entities expect to forge a cohesive whole, strong enough to withstand waters as rough the ones we're currently sailing? There are a few reasons why it won't be easy.

Regional Identity in Europe is Stronger than National Identity

Nation-building is a tricky business to define, but one could argue that France's efforts at nation-building have been more successful than those of other European countries, at least amongst the larger ones: they've been at it for longer and have suffered less major setbacks. One does not see here the kind of cultural and linguistic divisions—let alone straight-up (and sometimes violent) internal independence movements—that one sees in Spain and Belgium, for example. However, one cannot even talk about what it means to be French without talking about Bretagne, Occitania, Alsace, Savoie, Basque Country, Corsica...and that's to not even mention the islands. Add to this a double-digit population of immigrants of all races and creeds (myself included) and one has an extremely hard time understanding what right-wing politicians mean when they want to "rule France for the French." Who would that be, exactly? However one might define "the French" as an ethnic group, it would certainly by a minority of the current population of the geopolitical entity called France.

And the situation is considerably more complicated elsewhere on the Continent. In case after case, one finds that regional identities and, in the modern world of easy travel, diasporic ones are as or more important to people than what's written on their passport.

Of course there's nothing wrong with all of this, at least in theory: so what if European national identities are mythical products with questionable origins? Lots of group identities—maybe even all of them—are made-up, reverse-engineered tools of social cohesion, right? Isn't that what scholars have been telling us for the past few decades?

Follow the Money

The problem is that the European Union is currently experiencing the biggest identity crisis since its creation—cutting Greece loose is now officially on the table, and talk of further European segregation has already begun—and one of the things being revealed in this crisis is that the perceived advantages of financial interdependence were one of the only motivations most Europeans had in the first place for being a part of it. Now that membership has become—and may very well remain for the foreseeable future—as much of an economic liability as a useful tool, there is a notable lack of enthusiasm for the EU extending from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ukrainian border.

Once again, so what? Life goes on without the European Union, right?

Sure it does; however, one does not have to look very hard at European history to see a pattern of events when allegiances break down in these parts. If there is a pressing, even fanatical, motivation amongst European leaders to present a united face to the world, it's at least partially to reassure everyone—ourselves included—that Europe has evolved from its bloody problem-solving ways of yore.

Violence Has Never Been Far Away

One doesn't hear about them much, but defense concerns inform more of the current crisis than one might think. Consider the Greek military, for example: a prudently-trimmed military budget (Greece currently spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any EU country, and is second in NATO only to the US) would go a long ways towards ensuring Greek solvency but, despite criticism from the Greek left, this isn't going to happen. Why not? Because Greece has been "fighting" a de facto border skirmish with Turkey for decades (centuries?) and feels compelled to continue to do so in what can only be called a protracted arms race. The EU won't pressure them on this point, because the other 26 member countries are (understandably) reluctant to make a military commitment greater than that mandated by the EU's Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) to defend Greece in the event of a Turkish invasion. However ridiculous that may sound from the other side of the Atlantic, to the Greeks it is very real...and it's hard to tell them that history isn't on their side (or, for that matter, on the side of the Turks: it takes two, after all, to have an arms race).

And from whom does Greece buy the material to equip its formidable fighting force? Lots of people, as it turns out, but no one more than the French, the world's fourth-largest weapons exporter and a country that quietly maintains an enormous military of its own, despite not having fought a major armed conflict since the Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962.

(To make matters even more complicated, there is evidence that both France and Germany have used Greece's weakened financial condition to force them to continue to buy their weapons as recently as 2010, while simultaneously criticizing Greece for hiding enormous military slush funds from EU auditors and for heightening tensions with Turkey, technically a NATO ally. Nice.)

And what of the former Yugoslavia, with some ex-countries part of Europe, some hopeful to become part of Europe, and others openly hostile to Europe? What happens there during the EU's moment of weakness? What of Russia, who like Turkey has a particularly conflictual historical relationship with the very idea of Europe to go along with its often adversarial political stance towards her?

Prognosis

I'm not saying we're two steps away from World War Three. I'm just typing out loud, merely considering the historical context of widespread upheaval in European leadership. Let me throw a few dates at you: 1848, 1870, 1914, 1939. Those are the last four times that Europe saw the kind of crises and widespread changes in leadership that we will probably see in the coming months and years, and each of them saw substantial violence as medieval values reasserted themselves in chaotic spasms, temporarily replacing the progressive and tolerant ideals we Americans tend to associate with Europe. A pessimist might say that it's the periods of conflict, not of relative peace, that are the norm in this part of the world.

Incidentally, those dates also saw violent upheaval in other parts of the world. Let's see...2011? Check.

The best weapons, of course, against such upheaval are good leadership and the sound fiscal policies required to crash-land the current Ship of Fools as softly as possible: insurrection is, of course, less attractive to people who feel like they have something to lose. Is it possible, however, in the current paradoxical climate of forced belt-tightening on one hand and the perpetually-increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny global elite on the other?

Maybe I'm just having a bad day, but I really don't like the odds.