“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” No sign of it so far from the traditional political parties that govern the Euro-America. Wilde’s spirit is alive among the idealistic young people who have come out in protest against the turbo-charged global capitalism that has dominated the world ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The idea of European unity was the offspring of the genocidal war unleashed by the Third Reich and the advent of the ‘cold war’ between the US and the former Soviet Union that followed. At its heart was the notion of Franco-German unity as equals, in contrast to the horrors unleashed by the Treaty of Versailles that followed the First World War.