Jürgen Habermas inaugurated the new year of 2011 by reviewing in some critical detail agitated discussion in Germany since the previous summer of integration, multi-culturalism, and the culture of reference (Leitkultur). He also called fresh attention to a fundamental requirement of democracy in Europe today. “What we need in Europe today,” he wrote, “is a revitalized political class that overcomes its own defeatism with a little more perspective, resolution, and spirit of cooperation. Democracy,” he continued, “depends on a people's capacity to believe that a certain margin of opportunity exists that allows us to fashion a future and to confront its challenges.”

This margin of opportunity includes the chance to think second thoughts about just what is the character of the basic ethical values that must constitute the foundations of an eventually harmonized EU social policy, including the urgent problem of how to eradicate persisting child destitution. And it also includes the idea of seizing the present EU moment of very great crisis to help renew a more efficacious understanding of the nature of social justice today.