In the spring of 2006, when the Allianz Cultural Foundation first launched the event series "Debate on Europe" in Munich, Europe was plunged in depression. The shock that a majority of French and Dutch citizens voted against the European Union constitution treaty still weighed heavily on the minds of all dedicated Europeans. With the basic treaty negotiated in June of 2007 by the German European Union Council Presidency, the crisis and the laming halt to the European integration process that followed seemed overcome at first. But does this treaty without general policy conditions, euphorically signed as a "collaborative effort", really give rise to joy and satisfaction?

A missing nearness to citizens and a democracy deficit, two critically important points of the EU’s bureaucratic control mode, continue to exist as dominate issues. In order to convey the meaningfulness of the Europe Project and give it new legitimacy, the most important issues regarding the unification process have to be discussed and shaped by a European public. Only a European civil society can grant the future-oriented Europe Project the nearness to citizens and the legitimacy that it lacks today.

With "Debate on Europe" we hope to enrich a European public sphere in which significant issues concerning the unification process are debated and—at some point in the future, perhaps—decided upon. Europe remains a future-oriented project that we must constantly redefine from different perspectives and convey in the public realm. This is essential because the next generation will only find its European identity when it no longer perceives Europe as a sum of national interests and historical representations competing among themselves, but rather reinvents it from a mutual expectation level.

In conjunction with the opening event, the newly founded think tank devoted to European foreign politics, the "European Council on Foreign Relations", was presented as well.