Jean Monnet was a visionary of the twentieth century. Monnet lived the two World Wars and the inability of the League of Nations as Institution to avoid the turmoil of the 1930s and the carnage of the 1940s. Monnet is one of the great men of the twentieth century to whom Europeans owe much of what they have become, including the stability and understanding among nations that once upon a time lived centuries at war. We need a new vision for a European Union in deep crisis. We need new leadership that is able to look forward with the ambition and passion of past leaders that included Jean Monnet or Robert Schuman. We need to become, one more time, dreamers and visionaries of the twenty-first century to continue the legacy of our ancestors, to build a better world out of the world we inherited from our parents and grandparents.
