If the assessment of the present situation in Chapter 2 is correct, it means that while Member States will in the future still be in need of the EU, the EU will not be able to help sufficiently, given its present institutional procedures and rules. The logical answer to this dilemma in theory looks obvious: in order to respond to those needs, it would be necessary to modify the present institutions, their procedures and decision-making processes, as well as to try and conceive a more legitimate democratic control. In order to be adequate and to answer effectively the serious present problems and deficiencies, the amendments to the treaties need to be sufficiently bold. In other words, they should take the shape of a substantive revision of the institutional provisions of the current treaties.

Such a revision would be based on the recognition that with twenty-seven heterogeneous members, and the prospect of welcoming Croatia in 2013 (1 July 2013 was chosen during the European Council session of 23–24 June 2011) and possibly Iceland later, the EU has become an entirely new entity. One may add that some or all of the other western Balkan countries might also join the EU, poss-ibly in the 2020s (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia). Some are also referring to Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine, while Turkey is actually negotiating accession now. Such an entity of thirty to thirty-five members could not work properly on the basis of the present system, whose architecture and procedures remain those that were originally conceived for six Member States that had a comparable degree of economic development and the same political desire to integrate. In order to meet this challenge adequately, one should be much more innovative and creative than were the 2003/2004 European Convention and the 2007 IGC on the Lisbon Treaty.