We may not yet sleepwalking, but we are just short of it. Swamped in the illusion of our well-being, we Western peoples are not realizing that we have come to the threshold of what history will record as a before and after. And we are in danger of going through such threshold without any direction.

When humanity is faced with hairpin turns like these, there are two desirable conditions for navigating the sea of uncharted waters. The first one is that we can rely on people who can give a humanistic orientation to the dawning of new times. An orientation able to resist the enchantment of dreams of power, and to take humanity by hand along a patient path of diplomatic settlement of conflicts.

The European Union was born precisely thanks to the vision of some great statesmen who decided to invent a politics capable of renouncing the violence of war as form of world’s domination.

Today, of such political figures we have none.

We must therefore resort to the second desirable option: that of people forged by the challenge of the times. People who is willing and able to pick up the baton of a dream of peace that has become reality for more than half of century. People who is willing and able to break out of the great slumber of excessive and selfish well-being and prosperity, to take charge of the destiny of a world that is sleepwalking toward a catastrophe – announced but unheeded.

Just few months before the elections that will renew its Parliament, this is precisely the task of the people of the European Union. Our duty today is not to sleepwalk as we did on the eve of the outbreak of World War I.

Our duty, facing the history handed down to us by the Founding Fathers of the European Union, is not to make Europe the bargaining chip for the deliriums of power that are already dividing it among themselves.

Few weeks ago, Mario Draghi has made it clear: no European nation is big and strong enough to survive alone the upheavals in the world order that have followed the pandemic. If we passively accept being puppets of Trump’s american-nationalism and Putin’s neo-imperialism, we will become just that: a puppet people delivered to the mighty hands of an hegemonic master.

Paradoxically, it is even the European nations most hostile to the Union’s duties that have the greatest interest in preserving and innovating the European Union by giving it full political – and not only economic – status.

Today, Hungary and Poland have no alternative to the European Union if they do not want to see the Red Army in their squares and the Russian ruble in their banks.

Facing an America that has decided to isolate itself in the chaos of its own identity without history; facing a Russia that as decided to rewrite history for its own justification; and facing a China that is lost in fumbling to understand what is happening in the West; only an European Union capable of cohesion and able to imagine a new political project can offer a real alternative to the destiny of war that is opening like a chasm in face of our world.

But doing that requires the citizens of the Union to make the upcoming European elections the writing of their own constitutional order: We the People of the European Union…