For amongst democratic nations each generation is a new people—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)[1117] [1118]
(...) the situation in which Europe finds itself today is similar to that of twenty-six people of a dubious moral and intellectual level who are living in a very small space and armed to the teeth with toxic poisons, bombs, guns and daggers.
All of those who have declined are seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of the others. Spurred by hatred and jealousy, the desire for revenge and envy, they engage in conspiracies, crafting weapons, training with them, and insulting each other, in public and in private, in the most offensive manner. For no price are they willing to renounce what they conceive, wrongly, as freedom. Thus, they prefer a system of absolute anarchy to any organization, determined to settle their opposing interests or their differences of opinion by means of duels or struggles before choosing the path of Justice.—Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894—1972)2If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy [...] We must build a kind of United States of Europe.—Winston Churchill (1874—1965)[1119]
And we know - God knows we know! - that there is a different conception of a European federation under which, in accord with the dreams of those who have conceived it, the countries would lose their national personality and in which... they would be governed by some technocratic, stateless and unaccountable Ares Rock.—Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)[1120]
Above all, we must love Europe; our Europe, sonorous with the roaring laughter of Rabelais, luminous with the smile of Erasmus, sparkling with the wit of Voltaire; in whose
mental skies shine the fiery eyes of Dante, the clear eyes of Shakespeare, the serene eyes of Goethe, the tormented eyes of Dostoyevski; this Europe for whom La Gioconda forever smiles, where Moses and David spring to perennial life from Michelangelo’s marble, and Bach’s genius rises spontaneous to be caught in his intellectual geometry; where Hamlet seeks in thought the mystery of his inaction, and Faust seeks in action comfort for the void in his thought; where Don Juan seeks in women the woman never found, and Don Quixote, spear in hand, gallops to force reality to rise above itself; this Europe where Newton and Leibniz measure the infinitesimal, and whose Cathedrals, as Musset once wrote, pray on their knees in their robes of stone; where rivers, silver threads, link together strings of cities, jewels wrought in the crystal of space by the chisel of time... this Europe must be born.
And she will, when Spaniards will say “our Chartres”, Englishmen “our Krakow”, Italians “our Copenhagen;” when Germans say “our Bruges”, and step back horrorstricken at the idea of laying murderous hands on it. Then will Europe live, for then it will be that the Spirit that leads History will have uttered the creative words: FIAT EUROPA![1121]—Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978).