May we take Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus as an exemplar of Europe’s current leadership class? Those of us captivated by the classic story at university recall a crafty warrior who exults in his victories: cajoling Achilles into battle, dreaming up the Trojan Horse, surviving mythic perils with little but his wits, and finally, killing the layabouts who would seduce his beloved wife. Few in the world of antiquity reserved more than contempt for the defeated, not the Athenians in Melos, in the Aegean, nor the Romans in Gaul. Victory came as a blessing of the gods, defeat as evidence of divine condemnation. The triumph of Odysseus became a foundational part of Greek culture, evidence of its superiority over barbarian Hittites.
Nolan gives us instead a traumatised war veteran haunted by the sack of Troy. A contemporary sensibility that imposes guilt as the price of success may make Matt Damon’s Odysseus, in The Odyssey, released on July 17, 2026, more palatable to modern audiences, especially the key demographic of progressive women put off by the boastful masculinity pervading classical literature. It also provides a key to understanding a puzzle at the heart of European politics: Why are centrist politicians loath to embrace the superior attributes of Western culture when threatened by those who would displace it with medieval barbarism?
The July 29-31 ruction over the invasion of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, provides a telling example. Some 60,000 poured into the city, a figure equal to roughly 70 per cent of its 84,000 residents, according to its president, Juan Jesús Vivas. Spain’s interior ministry counted 50,000, and at least 72 people died attempting the crossing. They were spurred by Pedro Sánchez’s inane offer of amnesty for half a million migrants, and likely aided by a Moroccan State eager to punish Madrid for its dalliance with Algeria. The reaction of European leaders was typically feckless: Sánchez posted a playlist on August 1 and departed for a summer holiday in Lanzarote. An emergency videoconference of the EU interior ministers on August 4 backed Madrid with copious verbiage and a call to reinforce returns and strengthen EU borders. A further meeting in October will consider (yet another) call to “beef up” Frontex, and examine the role played in the invasion by Europe’s favourite bogeymen: People smugglers and social media.
Communiqués, policy proposals and what US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called in January the “dreaded European working group” constitute Europe’s reflexive response to crises. No doubt the solutions emerging in October will direct further aid to African states, in the service of removing the “root causes” of migration. No amount of money dumped on governments in Rabat or Dakar will equalise the economic prospects of a young man in Fès-Meknès, northern Morocco, with the benefits enjoyed by an unemployed migrant in Liège, eastern Belgium. The pull factor inherent in migration flows can’t be solved by aid. It can only be thwarted by interdiction and deportation, animated by officials who believe in defending Europe, and implemented by hard men with guns. Expensively educated elites will decry this as Trumpism, and would rather apologise for Europe’s history, from which they omit such innovations as crop rotation, public sanitation and legal rational government, innovations that ultimately enabled unprecedented prosperity and the social welfare states that now lure migrants from Asia and Africa.
Europe’s leadership class is no longer capable of mounting a vigorous defence of its homeland and its manifold virtues, lest other states and regions accuse them of Euro-centrism or worse, racial bigotry. Europe’s leaders are as weary as Nolan’s Odysseus, tired of a world that has escaped the polite institutions and practices that centred the EU as an example for the world some 30 years ago, exhausted by the serial crises that have beset the continent. The EU has served admirably as a mechanism for redistributing German export earnings to French farmers and Spanish infrastructure. But it has found no substitute for the ties that bind together a nation and give a people the confidence that their society, their customs, their traditions are precious and deserve protection. The thin attractions of Euro-federalism may act as a siren call to politicians seeking a comfy sinecure in Brussels, but they cannot substitute for the primal attractions of nationhood. National pride is always a comparative exercise: Europe’s bien pensants therefore mock it but their social inferiors have no difficulty recognising the superiority of their societies to those in North Africa or central Asia.
Migrants and adversarial states around the EU sense a Europe that no longer believes in itself. Russia, Turkey and now Morocco see an EU that has replaced patriotism with process, cultural confidence with insipid relativism, or in blunt realpolitik terms, a patsy. Europe struggles to define itself in a way that would exclude those supporting sharia law or militant Islam from residency or even citizenship. A confident culture would recognise the incompatibility of these beliefs with life in a liberal democracy where women have equal rights, church and state are separate, and homosexuality does not merit murder. Europe accepts the adherents of these incompatible creeds and charges pet NGOs with their re-education. The State-funded Violence Prevention Network had been in contact with Abdul Ballout in the weeks before he drove a van into Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade on July 25, 2026, killing a woman and injuring 31. More public money will not convert into loyal democrats the 2,590 people Berlin’s domestic intelligence service counts in the city’s Islamist scene, much less the 28,645 logged across Germany as a whole, 9,110 of them classed as violence-oriented. Europe can no longer afford immigration policies driven by performative mercy rather than exacting self-interest.
Odysseus was driven by νόστος (nostos), the need to return home. His home was worth defending, either from Penelope’s suitors or Priam’s depredations. A similarly determined Europe would guard its borders from those who disdain its culture, not offer them public benefits and legal counsel. The efforts of Poland and Hungary to block the arrival of culturally incompatible migrants have drawn sharp criticism from Brussels, yet Warsaw and Budapest remain free of the rampant street crime and sexual assault plaguing Stockholm and Berlin. Unlike the deracinated apparatchiks in Brussels, Poles and Hungarians remain proud of their πατρίς (patris, fatherland) and regard residency as a privilege rather than charity. The emerging populist tide in the EU could soon make them omens rather than outliers.
