The victory over coronavirus unified Europe at the cost of everything else. Borders dissolved not through diplomacy but necessity. Survivors merged infrastructure, governance, and culture into a single post-national organism: Eurostate.
Eurostate is not a nation. It is a mood stabilized by force. The trauma of mass death produced two governing beliefs. The first is that loneliness kills and the second is that love is dangerous. Every policy, institution, and punishment stems from these axioms.
The war against coronavirus is officially recorded as Humanity's Most Successful Failure. By every measurable metric, it was a victory. The pathogen was neutralized. The curve was flattened. The science worked. The models were right. But victory demanded mass compliance, and compliance demanded mass isolation. Europe did not collapse from the virus itself—it collapsed from the treatment.
By the time the virus was defeated, cities had lost their rhythms, families had learned to live without touch, grief had become ambient like background radiation and loneliness had stopped being an emotion and started being a chronic condition.
Europe survived biologically. Culturally, it flatlined. The old European states tried to restart themselves. They failed. Elections produced apathy instead of legitimacy. Borders reopened but meant nothing. National identities became aesthetic choices, not beliefs. People no longer said: "I am French" or "I am German." They said "I am tired", "I am alone" and "I don't feel anything anymore."
Nationalism requires passion. Europe had run out. What replaced it was not revolution—but administrative surrender. The merger into Eurostate began as a temporary emergency coordination framework.Key justifications include shared healthcare logistics, unified digital health passports, coordinated emotional health metrics and crisis-time speech moderation.
The emergency was renewed every year. Eventually, no one remembered what peace looked like. Emergency governance proved faster than democracy, kinder than nationalism, cleaner than ideology and most importantly, emotionally stabilizing.
Eurostate did not promise happiness. It promised no more breakdowns. A landmark study—now considered scripture—declared: Loneliness is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Eurostate did not interpret this metaphorically. If cigarettes kill, and loneliness is cigarettes, then loneliness must be regulated. This became the founding axiom of Eurostate: Unmanaged emotion is a public health threat. From this followed every policy that outsiders now call dystopian.
Before Eurostate, relationships were already unstable. After the pandemic, breakups spiked, domestic conflicts escalated, emotional manipulation became normalized and love turned corrosive. Hospitals recorded a new cause of death: Cardiac poisoning due to prolonged relational toxicity. Hearts failed without physical cause. Love—once romanticized—was now statistically dangerous.
Thus Eurostate made a decision no previous civilization dared: Relationships would be restricted. Not banned out of cruelty— but quarantined like a virus. The compromise was the situationship. A relationship without commitment, ownership, permanence or destiny. Situationships were flexible, reversible and emotionally ventilated. Love was reduced to low-dose exposure. This stabilized the population—but hollowed it out.
People survived. They just stopped believing in 'forever'. Europe did not fall to invasion. It did not fragment in civil war. It did not collapse economically. Europe died because it could no longer justify meaning (Christianity had become symbolic, liberalism had become procedural, national myths had become cringe and romance had become lethal.)
Eurostate was not founded on hope. It was founded on harm reduction.