The European Union lacks an idea of itself. It is an unimagined community. In seeking to transcend a set of national societies, its potential development and even its survival are threatened if it cannot generate a self-consciousness within the public minds of its constituent societies and in the private minds of the human beings whose social self-constituting it determines.

The process of European integration has been dominated by two of the paradigmatic forms of social self-constituting. It has been the dialectical product of real-world struggles conducted, in particular, by the national governments and by the controllers of the national economies. It has been the product of obsessive traditions of state-centred law and administration. It has been weakly determined by values, purposes and ideals, the forms of a society's ideal self-constituting.

Above all, the European Union has still not been able to resolve and transcend the contradictory categories of democracy and diplomacy by installing an idea of the common interest of all-Europe within and beyond all conceptions of national interest. The value, the purpose and the ideal of common interest is a necessary part of the forming of the idea of a common identity and a common destiny.