Abstract

The European Union’s history has an unique character: it has achieved the creation of unity without cancelling the singularities that uphold it; it has the capability of action without depriving its member states of their functions. Carl Schmitt is hereby confuted: sovereignty can be divided. Europe thus appears as a laboratory for international political history. In more than two millennia Europeans have carried out experiments with themselves developing a self-understanding as representatives of humanity. Now they can again understand themselves as an example that they show to themselves, such as each one should be, in his own person, an example for humanity. He who becomes a model for others cannot obtain pretences from it. He can only be satisfied in establishing that he is understood