The English-Mediated European Cosmopolis as Proto-Federal Infrastructure

This article uses the recent online push for a “United States of Europe” as an entry point to examine whether Europe already hosts an English-mediated cosmopolis and what that implies for European identity. Across Facebook, TikTok and Reddit, youth-driven pro-EU imaginaries circulate largely in English—memes, shorts, slogans—and often bypass national divides. The paper argues this is not political noise but evidence of a European subset of a wider, near-global English Cosmopolis: a mainly online, supralocal communicative space in which English functions as the default code of contemporaneity for many younger, urban users. Using the lingua cosmopolitana framework, it shows how digital Euro-patriotism both presupposes and strengthens shared English repertoires only loosely anchored in member-state publics. It then asks whether this English layer can coexist with “unity in diversity” and, within limits, scaffold thicker European solidarity. This, in turn, gives European identity a recognisable vernacular digital layer today online.