Steel Eel Under the Channel: Eurostar’s Cynical Glide Through a Fracturing Continent
The Eurostar, that sleek steel eel that slithers beneath the English Channel, is often praised as a triumph of European cooperation. In reality, it’s a 400-metre-long metaphor for the continent’s ability to charge premium prices for the privilege of queuing together. Board in London, debark in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam—three capitals that have perfected the art of disagreeing in multiple languages while sharing the same currency. The train itself glides at 300 km/h, yet the political baggage it drags travels considerably slower and with far more squealing brakes.
From a global vantage point, the Eurostar is both quaint and enviable. While China mag-levs at 600 km/h and California still debates whether a bullet train is communist mind control, Eurostar passengers sip chilled Picpoul and pretend the Wi-Fi works. The rest of the planet watches this 31-year-old service the way one watches an elderly couple dance competently at a wedding: mildly impressed, mostly concerned someone will break a hip. Still, the line’s mere existence irritates every airport lobbyist from Dubai to Dallas, who can’t fathom why anyone would pay not to be strip-searched before boarding.
Brexit, of course, tried to derail the romance. Britain’s decision to leave the EU produced the delightful irony of queues doubling in length the very day “sovereignty” was reclaimed. French border police now stamp UK passports with the enthusiasm of a jilted lover carving initials into a tree. The pandemic then emptied carriages so completely that tumbleweeds considered applying for residency. Eurostar’s parent company flirted with bankruptcy, because nothing says “unprecedented times” like a multibillion-euro piece of infrastructure kept alive by Zoom-fatigued consultants desperate for a Parisian dirty weekend.
Yet the service endures, a stubborn reminder that even the most dysfunctional family still convenes for Sunday lunch if the wine is decent. Its survival matters beyond Europe. Global financiers eye Eurostar’s refinancing schemes the way vultures circle a wounded zebra: cautiously optimistic and sharpening spreadsheets. The train’s green credentials—90% less CO₂ than the equivalent short-haul flight—are waved like a moral permission slip every time an activist glues themselves to something. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. frack on, content to let Europeans brag about their 15-minute passport stamps as the planet gently simmers.
Further abroad, the Eurostar is a soft-power flex. Japan nods approvingly; its Shinkansen invented high-speed rail but never managed the international plot twist of burrowing under a rival navy’s favorite moat. India studies the model while simultaneously building and not building a dozen similar corridors, a quantum superposition only a bureaucracy can achieve. Even the African Union, presently preoccupied with coups and climate debt, files away the concept for that utopian day when Lagos and Abidjan might trade places in under four hours instead of four days on a lorry full of yams.
And so the Eurostar keeps shuttling lawyers, mistresses, and overfed MEPs beneath the seabed, a metallic thread stitching the continent’s contradictions together. It is at once a relic of the 20th-century faith in technocracy and a 21st-century test of whether rich nations can still share toys without sulking. When the power flickers and the tunnel lights dim for the briefest second, passengers glance up from their laptops and wonder, half-joking, if this is the moment the whole European project finally derails. Then the lights return, the wine is topped up, and someone’s ringtone blares La Marseillaise. We glide onward, continental drift at 300 km/h, hoping the track ahead stays straighter than the politics above it.
