u/Mevrael

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, on the fourth of July, the greatest instrument of modern liberty, natural law and human rights was declared and adopted.

Yet it was not the founding of the United States of America. The republic we know today, governed by its Constitution, did not come into being until more than a decade later. Among the new Constitution's six central purposes, the first one was the establishment of a more perfect union.

Fewer Europeans know this. Before the America and the new Constitution we recognize today, there stood an institution familiar to every EU citizen. America first bound itself into a weaker union, and that union bore burdens strikingly like those the EU carries now. For years its member states could not enforce their common laws, could not speak to the world with one voice, could not defend themselves, and could not secure liberty equally to their people. It was this failure that led the Americans to seek, in its place, a more perfect union.

The parallel with Europe today is impossible to ignore.

The European Union was founded to end the division of this continent, to lay firm foundations for its future, to combat exclusion and discrimination, and to continue building an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, one in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

Yet as the Union stands today, it cannot fully enforce its own law to protect the blessings of liberty. Member states routinely defy judgments of the Supreme law of the land and the court, and pay little price for it. A citizen cannot seek justice before a federal court without her rights depending on which state she happens to call home. The Union cannot speak to the world with one foreign policy. We cannot vote for a European government of our own choosing, and we cannot elect our own President.

National governments and populists only divide us and strip away our liberties, one border at a time. Yet the age we live in has given us the means to govern ourselves directly, without any middle layer of tyranny, oppression, ignorance, incompetence, corruption or the other evils that have long stood between the citizen and her rights.

The time has come for Europeans to reclaim the unalienable Rights of Life, Safety, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, regardless of race, nationality, language, religion or any other trait. With firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, let Europeans mutually pledge to one another our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, and pledge them to one another alone, not to the many small governments that divide us.

True greatness comes from what people do for one another, in the fight for liberty and the pursuit of happiness, freed from the friction that one people is so often made to feel against another. It requires no politician, no government. Every citizen can be that greatness herself. The safeguarding of democracy for all, without any form of discrimination, and the supreme rule of law, belongs to everyone. It is not a task to be handed off to Brussels, nor left to the national capitals.

The time has come for Europeans to declare their own more perfect union and their own independence from the governments that divide them, to pursue happiness and the blessings of liberty above all else, and to pledge themselves to one another rather than to nationalist governments and their oppression.

That pledge must reach every people who call this continent home. No government shall diminish a person's rights because they are Belgian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish or Swedish. Nor shall any person hold fewer rights because they are Roma, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Catalan, Basque, Sami, Sorbian, Breton, Frisian, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Turkish, Armenian, Tatar, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, or of any other Asian, African or Arab heritage, whether Muslim, Christian, atheist, disabled, LGBTQ+, or of any other heritage, language, faith or community that calls Europe home.

One closing thought, and a fact worth remembering. The US Constitution was never meant to endure unchanged for nearly 250 years. It was written to be reviewed and renewed in time, and that review is long overdue. Perhaps Europe's own founding moment is the chance to write something built for its own age, a pledge, Europeans to Europeans, of what has for too long gone unsaid.