On the night of Sunday November 1 2026, freezers in supermarkets across a dozen European countries switched themselves to defrost. Nobody inside the stores touched them. By morning, refrigerated shelves and cold rooms in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Estonia, Finland, Portugal and other countries were warm, and staff were filling shopping trolleys with food to throw away. On Tuesday the wave reached Germany, where Edeka, REWE and CAP-Märkte confirmed their cooling systems had been taken over.

The border is Europe’s oldest and most contested artifact. Europe has more international borders per square kilometer than any comparable landmass. It has redrawn them repeatedly — through conquest, treaty, collapse, and negotiation — and carries the scar tissue of every revision. To understand European identity is to understand that the border is not a settled fact but a managed argument, and that the management of that argument is itself the achievement.