Long before there was a Europe of the European Union, there was a Europe of the European Mind. Europeans have spoken to each other in a permanent conversation across frontiers, the kind of conversation which generates the subjectivity of a community. The future of Europe is not merely the future of the European Union but the future of the European mind. It is possible to identify the constituent elements of Europe's mental unity with which Europeans have designed the architecture of a true European community, a community of unity-in-diversity.

It is possible also to see that Europe's mind is in a pathological state, sclerotic and defeatist in the face of a recent past of which we have reason both to be proud and ashamed, and in the face of a world which has passed beyond Europe's mental and political control.

The European mind can be cured, reasserting an identity in relation to hegemonic powers outside Europe, restoring the social role of the scholar and the intellectual, resuming responsibility for the development of the ideas required for new kinds of social existence in a new kind of human world, asserting a special responsibility for the development of society and law at the global level, the level of all-humanity.