Building on its founding impetus as a peacemaker, the European Union has been in a process of re-establishing itself as a European societal and governmental system and as a global actor, some believe: as a world power, since the end of the Cold War. The question of the justification of the EU demands, for Ludger Kühnhardt, a confrontation with the question of the intellectual shape and the ethical prerequisites of public order in the 21st century. Kühnhardt has identified crises as accelerators of European unification, as long as they remain crises in integration and do not become crises of integration.