Even if it doesn't sound like it at first, that's an identity that Europe can go out into the world with and take a leading role.

I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.

Why should an intellectual have to renounce the pleasures of life? I am not a hermit. I am a man of flesh and blood. In fact, if you look at my name in French, that schizophrenia, that aspiration to several lives is contained in my name. Lévy is also les vies - "the lives".

Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.

When you believe in what you are doing, when you are seeking justice for the killing of Daniel Pearl, when you want to alert public opinion to the plight of the massacred people of Darfur, or in the recently martyred former Soviet republic Georgia, it makes more sense to use the media than to work in silence.

The European Union should not be prescribing an identity. We know what that's like, when a government tells its people how it should look; what it should be doing. That's the first step towards totalitarianism.

I really like the United State, its relationship to space and time, its interest in mobility, its cosmopolitanism.