It's not just about what they eat, it's when. And when the Parisians rise unsteadily from their chairs to go back to the office, their associates in Madrid are themselves just sitting down to lunch. But they might not be able to reach their clients in Germany, many of whom would be leaving the office after a long day, around 6 p.m. Even away from the table, Europeans move from birth to death with striking dissimilarity, as statistics kept by the EU suggest. Yet the suicide rate is more than twice as high in Denmark as it is in Portugal. Death from traffic accidents is four times higher in Portugal than in Sweden.
Language is probably the most obvious and powerful obstacle to culture-blending.
English is already the lingua franca of international trade, computers, scholarship, culture. Since it was born around here and prospers around the world, English may become, by default, the language of Europe. Which leads me to wonder whether, in 100 years, Portuguese or Dutch will have become folkloric tongues, like Breton is today in northwest France or Cajun in Louisiana. Polyglot Europe is a supposed brake to a convergence of European cultures and even economic unity because of the restraints on mobility that language imposes. A worker in Cleveland can move to Phoenix if she finds work there, the argument goes, but a worker in Palermo cannot move to Copenhagen so easily.