THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY HAS BEEN IN A STATE OF ALMOST perpetual crisis since 1979: a financial crisis, institutional drift, the lack of long-term objectives. Nevertheless the patient efforts to bring back order into its affairs which were undertaken after the European Council at Stuttgart (1983) and tenaciously pursued by the European Commission under Mr Thorn's presidency, as well as by the successive presidents of the Council of Ministers, are at last coming to fruition. For the first time in many years, the heads of state or of government have been able to devote themselves in Milan to genuinely political reflections – to concentrate their thoughts on the future Europe and the means of building it. Even if the dialogue was only too often replaced by confrontation, nevertheless, the debate has begun and is bound to continue.