If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.
Well, that's the way democracy works. We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy.
A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.
