Beneath all strategic calculations and institutional architecture, beyond questions of economic competitiveness or military capability, there exists a single defining purpose that gives Generation Europe its raison d’être: to contribute to the recovery of our freedom.

 

We must be precise in defining what we mean by freedom, for the word has been so thoroughly domesticated that its deepest meaning has nearly been forgotten.

 

We do not speak merely of liberal freedom — the procedural rights and civil liberties enshrined in our constitutions, essential though these are. Nor do we invoke negative liberty — the simple absence of constraint. These familiar freedoms, however precious, presuppose a more fundamental condition that modern Europe has allowed to wither: the freedom of a people to determine its own collective destiny.

 

This is freedom in its most profound and irreducible sense. Not the freedom to choose between options that others have already delimited, but the freedom to define the terms of choice itself. It is the capacity of a civilization to determine what it shall become and to shape its place in the world as an autonomous agent rather than as the object of others' designs.

 

This is the freedom that provinces, by definition, cannot possess.

 

For seven decades, Europe has existed as a geopolitical province: prosperous, stable, and fundamentally subordinate. We have internalized our own marginality so completely that strategic irrelevance has come to feel like the natural order of things.

 

Generation Europe seeks to help end this condition by building support for European unification — so that Europeans may once again be free. And we harbour no illusions about the nature of this undertaking. Freedom of this magnitude is never granted by those who benefit from its absence. It cannot be recovered through appeals to justice or invocations of shared values alone; it can only be reclaimed through organised, sustained, collective effort.

 

In this sense, Generation Europe aims to help return the pen of history to European hands.