The year is 2035 and Helmut Kazantakis has just been sworn in as the first president of the New European Republic.
Mr Kazantakis, who is half-Greek, has an unusual first name (for a Greek), but his mother, who was from Leipzig, had sworn that she would name her first-born after German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had unified East and West Germany during that very difficult time of change. She had been vacationing in Greece soon after the unification and had fallen in love with a swarthy sailor who took her group on an excursion to the islands, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Consolidating his pan-European DNA, young Helmut’s upbringing took him to Paris, Geneva and Frankfurt. His mother, though hopelessly in love with Niko, the wild-haired, hard-drinking sailor, retained enough of her Teutonic values to ensure that her young son was spared the indisciplined joy of growing up au naturel on the islands. She sent him off to a gymnasium in Frankfurt, followed by college in arts and letters at the Sorbonne, and, finally, finding that his wayward genes were still expressing themselves, finishing school in Switzerland.
And, it was here, on a skiing holiday, when he inadvertently tumbled in the snow with a very fetching French cabinet minister, that he was recognised as a potential Eurostar and groomed for a role in Brussels.
By 2010, when the first cracks in the Euroland were beginning to show, young Helmut was dispatched back to Athens as a peacemaker between the Greek government and the unions. He was quite a laughingstock, at first, with his strange name and rather formal ways. However, he won over the protestors with a worthy show of ouzo-inspired Greek dancing and extravagant promises, key amongst which was that he would get Angela Merkel, the sternish then-Chancellor of Germany, to wear an itsy bitsy, teeny weenie yellow polka dot bikini to the next meeting of the European Council, which was to be Santorini later that year.
Of course, he was not able to deliver on that promise — Ms Merkel, with whom he had worked for some months, loved him dearly, but not that much. Despite that failure, however, his mission was a resounding success. The Greek government, supported by the ECB and, on the sidelines, the IMF, was able to impose some pretty serious service and benefit cuts, the weakened euro helped pick up tourism revenues, and all seemed well, at least for a while.
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Unfortunately — though unsurprisingly — the inherent conflict in the birth of the euro, akin in some ways to the conflict in Helmut’s own gene pool, continued to reassert itself in succeeding years. Helmut was dispatched in turn to Portugal, Spain and Italy as the ambassador of choice to ensure that people were entertained enough to accept the pressure of reduced benefits and having to learn to work. He also took the initiative to set up special events to stimulate frivolity in Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf and even, once, in Munich during Oktoberfest, when he ended up so drunk that he made advances at the mayor, a large man in lederhosen, who tried to have him whipped.
Over time, Helmut’s work began to change the way Europeans behaved and acted. They started becoming more and more like each other. The Germans and the Dutch became a little more wild-haired; their attitude to work and productivity became, shall we say, a little more Mediterranean, and, Allah be praised, the clinical surplus that the North enjoyed with the South started to slide. On the other side, the Greeks and the French and the Italians started becoming a little more circumspect, a little harder working, and Real Madrid and Barcelona no longer qualified for the European Cup as a matter of course.
By 2020, seminal research in cosmetology by the Yves St Laurent foundation began to merge skin tones across the continent. Pioneering work in active voice alteration by Nokia brought languages and accents closer together. Only wine and cheese remained parochial, but by 2025 it was even possible to get a very Neapolitan pasta in places as far north as Hamburg. The culmination of this almost genetic unification of Europe was seen in 2029 when the Italian finance minister, a nephew of the late Silvio Berlusconi, one-time Italian president who was not renowned for either fiscal prudence or probity, was made head of the European Central Bank.
And when, at long last, the great European experiment reached its desperate conclusion of political union, Helmut Kazantakis, the widely acknowledged Father of Modern Europe, was the unanimous choice as the first president of the Republic.
The euro surged on the news, rising from a multi-decade low of 72 US cents to nearly parity with the dollar.