I’m glad the Today programme is coming from Brussels this morning, because so too are some fundamental questions about our future. A whole series of events – the French and Dutch no votes, the shelving of the European constitution, and continuing arguments about budgets, rebates, and the common agricultural policy – have left the European idea facing one of its biggest crises.

That much seems clear, yet so much else about the European Union seems very obscure. There’s been crisis after crisis about Europe. It’s haunted almost every British government I can remember. And yet I never felt I fully understood the issues. Was the point of Europe economic or political? Was it to help countries defeat poverty or to create a global power? Did the European parliament give Britain more influence or less? It reminds me of the joke about that difficult philosophical movement, postmodernism. What’s the difference between a postmodernist and the mafia? The mafia make you an offer you can’t refuse. A post modernist makes you an offer you can’t understand. Sometimes Europe makes us an offer we can’t understand.

If I’ve learned one thing from the biblical story of Moses and the exodus, it’s that a leader must be an educator. To this day we call Moses not our lawgiver or liberator, our hero or prophet, but Moshe rabbenu, Moses our teacher. There are two kinds of problem, technical and adaptive. For a technical challenge all we have to do is find a solution. But for an adaptive challenge, we ourselves are part of the problem; and we ourselves have to change. That’s why the great figures– Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela – not only led their people but taught them as well.

European union owes its existence to the vision of one remarkable man, the late Jean Monnet, who after two devastating world wars, sought to create a Europe in which nations, especially Germany and France, were locked into a common destiny so that they became partners not adversaries. And to a remarkable extent it’s happened. Today if France and Germany clash, it’s on the football field, not the battlefield. That’s a monumental achievement.

But are the problems in 2005 the same as they were in 1945? To what question is European union the answer? If the disarray in Brussels forces us reconsider these fundamentals, I would count it a blessing. And to Europe’s politicians I would say in the spirit of the Bible: help us not just to decide but also to understand.

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