ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s vision for Europe forms a unity in virtue of the general societal goals it pursues – the public good and the glory of God – and the intellectual ethics that governs it, which is essentially an ethics of reciprocity, moderation and Enlightenment. An essential precondition of flourishing and Enlightenment was “balance in Christianity and tranquility in Europe”. Leibniz saw the urgent need for a stable peace in Europe, based on a less volatile foundation than the accumulation of fragile treatises that were constantly violated, each time throwing the region off balance. Leibniz’s vision of Europe cannot be separated from the fact that he was a staunch defender of the Holy Roman Empire. Leibniz suggests an European deposit bank in order to establish a punitive mechanism allowing the established, positive laws of a European union to be enforced, to the extent that such a federation in itself does not have any coercive power.
