SUsealThis evening I gave a talk to a great bunch of young Syracuse students. I told them, truthfully, that I have been giving such talks for a long time now, but that the ‘narrative’ of my talk has changed over time. If you talk to young people today about the avoidance of war or the maintenance of peace, they will of course recognise this as a noble end, but it no longer resonates in the way it once did. Real experience of war between most European countries is, thankfully, far away. But, then, if you seek to aspire, what might be the new narrative? I increasingly believe that we should start to return to the aspirations of the first federalists, who believed in world, rather than European, federation. It’s not going to happen on a world scale in the foreseeable future, but regional groupings are already evolving, many of them modelled on the European experience. Increasingly, humans face global challenges. What better than to evolve towards global mechanisms for global solutions?