Welcome to Fungolia—a fictional European nation best known for producing bureaucrats with severe stationery addictions, national holidays dedicated to committee meetings, and the invention of the “Mutually Suspicious Cooperation Accord” (which mostly involved not poisoning each other’s water supply). In Fungolia, difference isn’t just tolerated—it’s enshrined in law, embossed in gold, and swiftly ignored in practice.
This article is about unity. Not the fluffy kind that fits neatly on a banner at a protest you forget to attend, but the kind you earn by wading through the muck of genuine difference. In a Europe increasingly divided by wealth, history, ideology, and the collective trauma of having to agree on cheese standards, the idea of unity can feel more like a punchline than a plan.
And yet—despite the mess, or perhaps because of it—there’s something powerful in building bridges across difference. So let’s scale this thing: from the individual Fungolian, who’s just trying to survive the dinner table without starting a war, all the way to the geopolitical chessboard, where everyone’s still arguing about whether the board is even square.
Differences within
In Fungolia, it starts small. You versus your own thoughts. One part of you wants to help your neighbour fix their compost bin. The other part wants to never speak to them again after they referred to your home-brewed nettle tea as “bog juice”. Unity here isn’t about pretending to be one cohesive blob of agreeable traits—it’s about acknowledging the internal contradictions and finding a way to live with them. Preferably without setting anything on fire.
Real unity begins with psychological honesty. You hold multitudes. Sometimes those multitudes fight. That’s not a flaw; that’s a functioning brain. Learning to unify across inner differences—ambition versus rest, pride versus humility, coffee versus herbal delusion—is the foundation for everything else.
If the average Fungolian could learn to listen to their own conflicting selves without immediately constructing a national referendum, perhaps they could extend that patience outward. And yes, that includes the bit of you that secretly agrees with your uncle’s rants about bicycle lanes. Acknowledge it. Then offer it tea and a seat in the back row.
Unity in the everyday warzone
Next stop on the Fungolian Unity Tour: the household. Here, ideologies clash daily over dishes, thermostats, and who left the back door open. The home, as any anthropologist with a death wish would tell you, is the frontline of difference.
Unity in a home doesn’t mean perfect agreement. In Fungolia, it means functional chaos. Families there embrace a style of domestic diplomacy known as “passive agreement”—a complex manoeuvre involving raised eyebrows, strategic tea offerings, and the occasional emotional hostage negotiation over dinner.
Real unity at home is forged through active engagement with difference. You don’t have to love your housemate’s vegan tripe stew, but you might learn something from why they cook it. Maybe it’s ancestral. Maybe it’s revenge. Either way, listening matters.
Embracing unity at home often means lowering the volume on your righteousness and increasing your curiosity. Your teenage child thinks capitalism is a prison? Don’t panic. Ask them which corner they’d redecorate. You might even find a shared vision under the rubble of mutual misunderstanding.
Meetings, memos, and mayhem
Enter the Fungolian workplace. An open-plan inferno of differing egos, clashing priorities, and at least one person who still thinks “Reply All” is a form of self-expression.
In theory, organisations want diversity. In practice, they want people who think differently but act exactly the same. True unity in an organisation isn’t achieved by enforcing uniformity—it’s achieved by creating spaces where disagreement isn’t seen as a threat, but as a source of insight. Even if that insight comes from Darren in Accounting, who only communicates through Excel macros.
Fungolia has pioneered “strategic disunity protocols,” wherein teams are required to disagree at least once a week before making any decisions. It slows things down wonderfully, but surprisingly, decisions made under such conditions tend to stick. Why? Because everyone was heard. Or at least yelled equally.
Unity at work thrives on well-held tensions. The visionary and the realist. The dreamer and the documentation gremlin. The loud and the listener. It’s not kumbaya—it’s constructive collision. Organisations that treat difference as a design feature, not a flaw, are the ones still standing when the quarterly nonsense rolls in.
Alliance across absurdity
Now, we ascend to the majestic absurdity of international cooperation, where Fungolia shines brightest. After all, it was a Fungolian diplomat who once said, “Let’s all agree to disagree—publicly, in twenty-seven languages, with matching stationery.”
Europe is a patchwork quilt of empires, grudges, and fondness for overcomplicated pastries. Yet somehow, it hasn’t torn itself entirely apart. Credit where credit’s due: the EU, despite its flaws, is a monumental experiment in holding difference together with bureaucracy and blind optimism.
But we’re at a breaking point. The rise of autocracy, war on the continent, economic inequality, climate breakdown, and digital colonisation are stretching the seams of this quilt so far they now function more like stress fractures.
So what could unity look like?
Imagine Fungolia proposing a radical new alliance: cities from the EU, Africa, and the Middle East cooperating not just on border control, but on mutual aid infrastructure. Centres that provide housing, language education, and medical care to displaced people—built together, staffed together, governed together. Less Fortress Europe, more Neighbourhood Watch on a global scale. And fewer people drowning and/or taken advantage of by traffickers.
Or consider climate adaptation. Instead of hoarding carbon credits and wagging fingers, Fungolia might team up with Bangladesh, Kenya, and Indonesia to trial floating farms, regenerative cities, and distributed energy networks. Not charity—collaboration. Because nothing unites quite like shared existential dread.
There’s also room for cultural diplomacy with teeth. A pan-European media cooperative that funds investigative journalism and artistic collaboration across ideological lines, from Moldovan poets to Catalan documentarians. Built to counter both Kremlin-style disinformation and Silicon Valley monoculture, it would remind us that culture can stitch together what politics unravels.
And yes, in the darkest recesses of the Unity Labs of Fungolia, a project is underway to replace the G7 with a new coalition called “The Mostly Functional Thirteen”—a rotating council of unlikely partners (think Estonia and Ghana co-chairing a committee on AI ethics). Because frankly, the old guard is out of ideas, and the world deserves better scripts.
Unity at this scale requires what Fungolians call optimistic realism. Expect the worst, but organise for the best. Keep the doors open, even when someone’s shouting through them. Especially then.
From compost to cosmos
So what have we learned from our grand tour through Fungolia?
That unity isn’t about sameness—it’s about solidarity in motion. About choosing, every day, to stay in dialogue, even when your inner voices are arguing, your partner has hidden the remote, your team is a mess, and the international order is being rearranged by billionaires and Bond villains.
Difference isn’t the enemy. Indifference is.
Unity across difference requires courage, patience, and a willingness to look ridiculous now and then. It’s compost, not marble. It breaks down. It stinks. But give it time and care, and it becomes the thing everything else grows from.
Fungolia may be fictional, but its lessons are not. In a world increasingly seduced by neat divisions and easy enemies, building messy, durable, dynamic unity is one of the most radical acts still available to us.
We should take it.