Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. 

(William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, 1623)

God is dead. History is dead. And now, according to a widely shared diagnosis of our time, the future itself seems to be on its deathbed. The future appears to have collapsed – either consumed recklessly or buckling under the pressure of constant emergencies and a pervasive sense of temporal scarcity. At least in the West.

As the future dies, so too seem to fade its promises of a better life, its capacity for collective imagination, and its ability to galvanize shared agency and solidarities. Time feels out of joint (to quote Shakespeare once more): volatile and directionless, disordered by deep transformations and interdependent shocks – by what is now called the polycrisis.

In an attempt to control these uncertainties, we have turned the future into trackable deadlines and precise targets, into calculable risks, into problems to be fixed step-by-step, with technical precision and pragmatism.

And so time seems to move only from “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow – creeping forward in that petty pace from day to day”, accompanied by a persistent sense of weariness and despair.

In this state of volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty, Europe is said to have lost sense and direction – orientation and meaning. While the twentieth century began with futuristic utopia on the horizon and ended with nostalgia (as described by Svetlana Boym), the twenty-first century may be drifting even more forcefully toward nostalgia. National-populist narratives latching on to an illusion they call the past, together with conspiracy myths, are increasingly filling the void, possibly becoming the most powerful corrosive narrative frameworks of our time.

Yet in the face of the future’s supposed demise, it is not only the far-right that seeks to resurrect history by inventing new folk tales. Across the political spectrum, actors are drawn to idealized pasts: liberals and conservatives, like the far right, invoke a “good old Europe” or a “great America,” even if the lost worlds they long for differ significantly. Parts of the left and the green movements alarmed by rising inequality, a collapsing climate, and the material consequences of digital transformation, express their own form of nostalgia – a yearning for a time before capitalism’s hyper-extraction, hyper-financialization and hyper-individualization.

But what if the future is not waning? What if it is overwhelmingly – even intimidatingly – omnipresent? Not absent, but excessive. Not singular but proliferating into countless competing possibilities. Perhaps the challenge is not that “there is no alternative,” but that there are too many – and no or little common ground on which to build shared visions? Is it complexity, plurality, and fragmentation that exhaust Europe’s capacity to define and act upon shared values, principles and priorities?

From the very beginning, Europe appeared full of vision and ambition. Over time this vision and ambition turned into a plethora of political guidelines, policy proposals, regulations, opinion polls, foresight reports, or trend analyses. And yet something essential appears to be missing: Is it confidence, commitment and political will, in short leadership capable of decisive action? Or perhaps what is lacking is a demos – a We, the People of Europe, able to integrate strangers into a common, democratic and hence ever-evolving political project, to cultivate a sense of shared fate, purpose and belonging, and to enable shared sovereignty?

Is this why a European renewal – deeper integration, or the prospect of a genuine political union – has been perpetually deferred, postponed to tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?

In such conditions, questions themselves become fundamental, as they open space for imagining more equal, free and democratic European futures. If the future appears either exhausted or overwhelming, the question becomes not how to restore certainty, but how democracy can live with and shape uncertainty.

Which stories do we want to tell? How and to whom? And maybe, most importantly, who is telling these stories?

In the current vacuum of confident democratic narration, the loudest voice shaping Europe’s future comes not from within the continent itself, but from the President of the United States, amplified and diffused across Europe.