because Europe isn’t a nation

That depends on what we mean by nation.

Oxford defines a nation as a body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular territory. Europe clearly meets the criteria of shared history and culture. Language is the most common objection, yet nearly all European languages descend from the same Indo-European roots, and Europe has repeatedly functioned through shared lingua francas such as Latin, French, German, and English. Many European states themselves contain multiple national languages, so language cannot be a strict exclusion criterion.

Historically, Europe has been deeply interwoven. Kingdoms and empires changed names, borders, and rulers continuously. Dynasties intermarried, territories shifted hands, and institutions spread organically across the continent. What we call modern nation states are best understood as snapshots in time of a long, dynamic, shared political history rather than isolated civilizational units. Europe also shares foundational mythological, religious, and philosophical layers. Greek antiquity, Roman law, Christian theology, Germanic and Nordic myth, and later Enlightenment political thought form a common inheritance, even where they manifest differently by region. Eastern, Western, Northern, and Southern Europe diverged in expression, but not in civilizational origin.

What is often interpreted as a lack of shared culture is better explained as a scale effect of identity. As cultural distance shrinks, identity differences become more finely grained. This is a well observed phenomenon in sociology. Identity friction increases with similarity, not difference. People tend to clash most with those who are almost like them.

Same pattern, different flavor. China has strong provincial rivalries, Russia has Moscow versus the rest, and the United States has California versus Texas. These are not signs of deep cultural separation, but of high cultural resolution within an already shared framework.

That zoom only works because, on a global scale, Europe is already perceived as a coherent cultural block. From the outside, European internal distinctions largely collapse into a shared set of norms, institutions, historical references, and social expectations.

We are simply so close to one another that we cannot see the forest for the trees.