Saving European Identity Means Saving the Identity of Its Peoples

Europe is undergoing a demographic transformation that can no longer be considered merely a statistical issue. As of January 1, 2026, the population of the European Union stood at approximately 452 million inhabitants, an increase of 706,000 people compared with the previous year. But behind this apparently positive figure lies a very different reality: in 2025, just 3.46 million children were born in the EU, while 4.81 million people died. The natural balance was therefore negative by approximately 1.35 million people. The overall population increase was possible exclusively because of positive net migration. This is the starting point from which any serious reflection on Europe’s future should begin.
Europe is not simply growing more slowly. It has already entered a phase in which more people die than are born. This trend, which began structurally in 2012, is accompanied by the progressive ageing of the population.
Projections by the European Commission indicate that this transformation will become even more evident over the coming decades: Europe’s population is expected to reach its peak and subsequently decline, while the proportion of elderly people will increase and the share of the working-age population will decrease.
The problem, therefore, concerns not only pensions, healthcare, productivity, or the labour market.
We must also ask ourselves a much deeper question: how can a civilization preserve its identity if it becomes increasingly difficult to pass that identity from one generation to the next?
For too long, we have regarded demography as a subject for economists and statisticians. But a society is not merely the sum of its workforce.
A society is also memory.
It is language, literature, art, tradition, religion, customs, landscape, architecture, music, and history. It is everything that one generation receives from the previous one and freely chooses to pass on to the next.
A language survives because it is spoken to children. A tradition survives because it is taught. Cultural heritage survives because someone considers it important enough to hand down to the future.
This is why Europe’s demographic decline is also a problem of cultural continuity.
And this is precisely where a genuinely conservative reflection should begin.
To conserve does not mean rejecting change. It means preventing change from destroying what is worth preserving.
Europe does not need to invent a new identity by erasing the identities that already exist. On the contrary, it needs to recognize that its identity was born from the plurality of its peoples.
Europe is Italian, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Polish, Irish, Hungarian, and much more besides. It is made up of different languages, different traditions, and different historical memories.
This plurality is not an obstacle to European identity.
It is European identity.
The European project should therefore stop confusing integration with homogenization.
A European citizen should not be forced to choose between their national identity and their European identity. One can be deeply Italian and deeply European; deeply Polish and deeply European; deeply Greek and deeply European.
Indeed, it is precisely the strength of the identities that make up the continent that makes a stronger European identity possible.
The European Commission’s Culture Compass for Europe also recognizes cultural and linguistic diversity as fundamental elements of Europe’s heritage and assigns culture an important role in building a sense of belonging.
This principle should be taken to its political consequences.
Saving Europe means saving the cultures that make it up.
And to save them, it is not enough to fund museums or restore monuments. We must ensure that there are new generations to whom they can be passed on.
There is no miracle measure capable of solving the problem of declining birth rates. Decisions about having children depend on very different economic, social, and cultural conditions.
But precisely for this reason, it is necessary to create an environment in which motherhood does not represent a disadvantage.
Europe must seriously examine the differences among its Member States. Fertility rates are not the same everywhere, and family policies, together with economic, employment, and housing conditions, can contribute to creating circumstances that are more or less favourable to starting a family.
This does not mean claiming that there is an automatic relationship between a single benefit and the number of children.
It means recognizing that if a society wants more births, it must make it easier to have children.
And this means tax incentives, support for motherhood, childcare services, housing policies, parental leave, workplace flexibility, and above all, social recognition of the value of motherhood.
Motherhood is an investment in the future of society.
But a demographic policy without an educational policy would be insufficient.
We can have more children, but if those children grow up without knowing their history, literature, and culture, continuity is still not guaranteed.
Schools must once again become places of transmission.
Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Homer, and Manzoni do not belong in a museum of the past. They belong to the heritage through which Europe has built its consciousness.
A society that is confident in its identity does not need to erase what came before it.
It can criticize it. It can debate it. It can even reject certain aspects of it.
But it must first know it.
This is where we must go against the current of cancel culture.
Culture cannot become a permanent trial of the past in which every work is judged exclusively according to the moral standards of the present. Cultural freedom also implies the possibility of engaging with uncomfortable ideas, controversial works, and problematic historical figures.
Education should produce citizens capable of making judgments, not generations incapable of knowing.
There is, finally, a relationship between demography and social cohesion that should not be underestimated.
A society that is ageing, shrinking, and perceives its culture as something to be hidden may become more insecure. And an insecure society is more likely to perceive change as a threat.
It is within this space that xenophobia can also grow.
For this reason, a serious demographic policy must not be conceived as being against immigration. It must be conceived as a way of strengthening Europeans’ confidence in their own ability to have a future.
Legal and regular immigration can slow demographic decline and help compensate for the shrinking workforce, but it cannot replace a policy aimed at increasing birth rates. Eurostat data clearly show that in recent years Europe’s population growth has depended on net migration, while the natural balance has remained strongly negative.
The answer, therefore, cannot be to choose between families and immigration.
It must be to build a Europe confident enough in itself to be able to do both without fear.
This is why demography should become one of the European Union’s main political priorities.
Before even funding new major industrial policies, large economic projects, or further investment programmes, Europe must ask itself who will be called upon to live, work, and build that society twenty, thirty, or fifty years from now.
It should therefore promote common and binding policies to support demographic growth, while allowing Member States to choose the instruments best suited to their own social traditions, but setting common objectives.
At the centre must be mothers and families: tax incentives, housing support, services, parental leave, social protection, and working conditions compatible with motherhood.
Comparison among European countries should become a genuine research policy: studying where the decline in birth rates is less pronounced, what conditions accompany it, and which measures can be replicated. Not to promise miracles, but to learn from the results.
Because without families, there are no workers.
Without children, there is no future.
And without cultural transmission, there is no identity.
Saving European identity does not mean building a uniform Europe. It means saving the extraordinary plurality of its peoples.
It means allowing each of them to preserve their own language, history, and traditions within a common European home.
A Europe that once again has children, once again teaches its history, and no longer regards its cultural heritage as a burden from the past will also be a Europe less afraid of the world.
Because those who have confidence in their own identity do not need to be afraid of others.
They simply need to have something worth passing on.