In the early 1960s, there was a discussion about whether Franco’s fascist Spain could be a member of the European Economic Community. There were quite a few people who said, well, it’s an economic community, so, of course, Spain can be a member. But ultimately, the argument that it’s a community of democracies prevailed.

What has happened since is that in the self-understanding of the European Union, democracy has become absolutely central. If you look at the consolidated treaties of the European Union, Article 2 talks about its values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and so on. Then, there’s Article 6, Article 7, Article 10. There aren’t that many constitutions that say so much about democracies. Member States should be a democracy and the EU itself should be a democratic community of democracies with a directly elected European Parliament so that, at least in its constitutional theory, the European Union is a democracy of democracies, or it’s nothing. The reality, of course, is another question.

We have a fundamental charter for the European Union. We have the rule of law mechanism. We have various other provisions. The trouble is that we haven’t ultimately made the effective linkage between the Europe of values and the Europe of money.

For years now, Viktor Orbán in Hungary has been able to have his cake and eat it. He’s been able to go on getting billions of euros in European funds while effectively dismantling democracy and even running an election campaign against Brussels under the slogan Stop Brussels! Only now, in the early 2020s, are we beginning to really try and make that linkage between the values and the money – but we haven’t yet succeeded.

The European Union is a community of democracies and a community of law, or it is nothing. The more complex the European Union becomes, the more variable geometry you have and the more important those two core things – next to the single market and freedom of movement – actually become. If you no longer have the rule of law in Hungary and Poland – and there have now been cases where courts in Germany and Ireland have said you can’t extradite someone to Poland because they can’t be guaranteed a fair trial – if there is a contract with a company or an individual court case and you can’t be sure of justice in a Member State, then the whole legal order of the entire European Union is under threat.

What happens every time we have a European Council or European Summit in Brussels? The idea is the elected representatives of 27 democracies get together to make democratic decisions around the table in Brussels. But what if one of those people is not actually democratically elected? He’s an authoritarian ruler, but he’s part of the soi-disant democratic decision-making around the table in Brussels. If you have two or three or four not genuinely democratically elected rulers, it also calls into question the legitimacy of the entire democratic decision-making of the European Union. So, this is a threat as fundamental to the future of the European Union as a challenge from Vladimir Putin or China or climate change.

So far, the record has not been that encouraging, partly because Europe has had so much else on its plate: the eurozone crisis, Brexit, the refugee crisis, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. There’s not been much time to think about problems in a couple of Central and Eastern European countries. Partly because the way internal democracy of the European Union works, it has actually made it slightly more difficult to get serious about the erosion of democracy in a country like Hungary. So, to facilitate more democracy in the European Parliament, in the European Union, we said we’re going to have European political parties. We’re going to have what we’re going to call Spitzenkandidaten, leading candidates from the leading European parties. It then became very important to be the biggest European political party.

Viktor Orbán has a few key members of the European Parliament who are members of the biggest centre-right grouping, the European People’s Party, the EPP. The EPP was very keen to hang onto those votes, so it actually became more reluctant to get tough with Orbán as a result.

There’s a long tradition going right the way back to the enlightenment of a certain cultural arrogance from Western European countries like France particularly, but also Belgium and others, towards the Eastern European countries, as if they’ve never quite been part of the true enlightenment Europe. So, there’s been a certain tendency to say, well, what do you expect? They were always sort of authoritarian under the skin. That, in my view, is a very great mistake.

Ten years ago, euroscepticism seemed to be a British peculiarity and it was the British right-wing papers that were constantly complaining about Brussels. Now, it’s become a Europe-wide phenomenon and you even hear extreme euro-sceptics in Poland comparing the European Union to the Soviet Union. Yesterday Moscow; today Brussels, they say. I think the message to Brussels, to the central institutions of the EU, is wake up. You’ve really got to start reforming the institutions of the European Union.

I’ve done quite a lot of work on this in my research project here at Oxford called Europe Stories. We’ve done polling across the entire EU and in the UK, which shows that what European citizens want, above all, is for the EU to deliver things they hold valuable. In one extraordinary result, 74% of those asked in the EU 27, plus the UK, said, ‘The EU would not be worth having if it didn’t deliver the freedom to travel, work, study and live in other Member States.’ That’s a message to Brussels. It’s about what the EU really gives and does for most European citizens and not about the evermore perfect functioning of the institutions far away in Brussels.

One thing the populus has taught us is that it really matters to have a good narrative. There was a growing sense in the European Union in recent years that the EU had lost the plot, that it was no longer clear. There had been the great story of bringing peace to Europe, the great story of bringing freedom and democracy to the other half of Europe, the story of monetary union. What is the story now? The temptation has always been for people at the centre in Brussels to decide among themselves round a committee table what that story should be. I take a radical, different approach. I think we need to start by asking Europeans themselves – you and me, ordinary Europeans, people out in the streets and particularly young Europeans – what story they want Europe to tell, what they want Europe to do by 2030. That’s the enterprise in the research project I’m engaged in with my wonderful team of young Europeans.

If you ask what’s emerging, it’s to defend the achievements we have so far. Freedom of movement is absolutely paramount, which is why the COVID experience of lockdown has been such a shock. Addressing the climate crisis is immensely important, defending democracy in all our countries, ensuring good jobs and a basic level of social security – a European social model. These are elements that then have to be taken by a wordsmith and put together into a compelling story.

If you look at those we think of as great Europeans since 1945, almost all of them are men and women shaped by war, dictatorship, adversity and by very difficult circumstances: from Churchill and Schuman all the way through to Kohl, Mitterand and indeed Jacques Delors, all of whom remembered the war and immediate post-war years; to those great figures who I so much admired, people like Bronisław Geremek from Poland, Václav Havel in particular, the Polish pope and others, all shaped by the experience of adversity.

Now, for the first time, we have a generation of Europeans, most of whom have known nothing but a Europe that is largely whole and free. So, where are those leaders going to come from? Perhaps we have to accept that there may no longer be these towering historic figures. Maybe it’s up to all of us to tell these stories to one another in slightly different ways.

To understand your own country, your own tradition, your own community, you need to know some others; but beyond that, we need two more things. One is simply to know some basics about the European Union and other European countries, to understand the community we’re part of. Most Europeans know much more about American politics than they know about other European countries’ politics. More importantly, because we’ve now achieved in large measure the Europe that generations were striving for – a Europe which is mainly liberal democracies with freedom of movement, where you can wake up one morning and travel from one end of the continent to the other – it must be made clear that none of this is inevitable or secure.