Ten days ago, under the umbrella of the newly-formed Conference on European Responsibility, or COEUR, (the French word for heart), President Roman Herzog of Germany gathered together in Berlin several hundred Europeans, including politicians, academics and journalists, to discuss something at the heart of the European enterprise: European identity.
Among the speakers were President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, the Polish Foreign Minister, Mr Geremek, former Italian prime minister Mr Romano Prodi, former president of the European Monetary Institute Mr Alexander Lamfalussy, and intellectuals from several countries in western and eastern Europe.
Up to four journalists from each of 18 European countries participated. The Irish Times and the Independent group were represented but, significantly, no one was there from the British media!
One could not but be struck by the frequency with which speakers referred to the concept of responsibility, for example:
the need for western Europe to discharge its responsibilities to the countries of central and eastern Europe that emerged from Soviet domination less than a decade ago;
the need for us all to take our responsibilities for peace in Yugoslavia;
the need for Europe to take its global responsibilities, for example, for the developing world and global ecology;
the responsibility of politicians to show "the special kind of courage that will take the risk of failure";
an assertion that the conjunction of freedom and social responsibility is Europe's outstanding achievement.
I have long thought this sense of responsibility and mutual solidarity are characteristic of continental European political thought. By contrast, we tend to talk about our rights vis-a-vis each other more than our responsibilities to each other. Thus we are very clear about our right to EU agricultural subsidies. But little appears in our papers or is heard in the Oireachtas about the responsibility we share to welcome into our European Union the liberated peoples of central and eastern Europe - or about our share of responsibility for securing and maintaining peace in former Yugoslavia.
There is a good deal of evidence that we do not yet see ourselves as an integral part of the Europe under construction. Many people in Ireland seem to see Europe as outside us, a place some way to the southeast, to which we owe no allegiance, but which, for some unexplained reason, owes us financial support.
The idea that we should join in developing a European identity in parallel with our Irish identity does not evoke much response here. Yet the huge net transfers, almost £30 billion in today's money, we have received through the EU budget reflect our partners' sense of solidarity with us.
The problem is that although the sense of a common identity in Europe has been strong enough to carry this level of transfers, it may not be strong enough, or wide enough, to carry the mutual solidarity needed in an enlarged Union with a single currency.
This reflects the reality of the extraordinary cultural diversity that marks our continent, with its multiple ethnic groups and languages. There is some risk that the fissiparous effects of this diversity could outstrip our as yet inadequate sense of a common heritage and value system.
For this sense of what we share in common is still very under-developed. One reason is that European history has been taught nationally - and nationalistically - with more emphasis on past conflicts between our states than what we have shared.
But Europeans have an enormous common cultural heritage - the product of two millennia of Christian civilisation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And to this extraordinary inheritance Western Europe has had the unforeseen intellectual vitality to add, in the second half of this century, an astonishing reversal of the whole tide of its own history, affecting four hugely important areas of public action.
First, through setting up the EU it has abolished war as an instrument of policy amongst its states. Second, for human rights the concept of states' exclusive jurisdiction of their citizens within their territory has happily been transcended. We can now appeal to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against breaches of our rights by our own governments. This has produced echoes beyond Europe, in the form of the weaker UN Code of Human Rights, which lacks the juridical basis of our European system.
These concepts are values exclusive to our continent, which now constitute a significant part of an emerging European identity.
But Europe has also reversed the drift of history in two other crucial respects.
First, it has led the initiative for reversing colonial exploitation of peoples in other continents. The former flow of resources from overseas colonies to Europe has been replaced by a reverse flow of aid to developing countries. By contrast, during the Cold War, Russia and the US (save in the case of Israel) largely confined their aid to credits for military equipment.
Second, the initiative for global ecological action is primarily from Europe: the US has dragged its feet.
It is from Europe that the concept of international law first emerged. In other parts of the world, such as the US, international law is not readily accepted, vide that country's refusal in last decade to accept the International Court of Justice's decision on its mining of Nicaraguan ports.
Thus, although many European breaches and departures from its emerging value system can be cited - states, like people, rarely live fully up to their principles - throughout the past half-century Europe has been almost the only source of new values in international relations.
The trouble is that there is very little consciousness that we in Europe now share this unique set of values - and we have yet to tackle seriously the task of building a European identity upon this foundation. A striking feature of the Berlin meeting was the positive and forward-looking tone of much that was said by speakers from central and eastern Europe, who are far more aware than are we in the west of the intellectual challenges our continent now faces.
As President Havel remarked, because the east was cut off for so long, it sees the need for a united Europe more clearly. And it recognises that European unity cannot safely or effectively be built on an emotional foundation of fears of the world outside, but only on a solid intellectual basis of shared values.
Mr Gieremek of Poland remarked that the proof of the success of the EU is that everyone wants to join it - even the countries of Central Asia. But, he went on, the EU has yet to learn how to become a genuine union of states and peoples.
Mr Gieremek also pointed out that for the development of a European identity - a precondition for the solidarity necessary for a successful Union - there is a need for a European memory and, at the practical level, a need for the elections to the European Parliament to become genuinely European, rather than national - as they still are in Ireland and also elsewhere.
Against the stimulating background of these ideas for the future of our continent, emerging from our fellow-Europeans of central and eastern Europe, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the impending enlargement of the Union is likely to have a welcome revitalising effect.
The new member-states from the east are likely to be both more value conscious and more integrationist than many of the existing members.