Europe's 1960s protest movement sought to chart a path to political power in the interest of a socialist agenda—a “long march through the institutions” is what they called it. But in his street fighting days, it’s safe to say that Dany Cohn-Bendit, the former enfant terrible of 1968’s Paris May, never imagined where this march would deliver him: ensconced at the European Parliament in Brussels, at the very pinnacle of the European establishment.

Of course, the staid atmosphere that the European Union’s political establishment—which has evolved from the somber pathos of the World War II generation, to the empirical anonymity of central bankers who now hold sway—stands in stark contrast with Cohn-Bendit’s signature air of effervescent energy. But there are those who argue that Europe’s top-down political project will only survive if the continent’s infamous generation of grassroots political agitators is allowed to have its say. Indeed, after 50 years on the political scene, this may prove to be these tenacious former street revolutionaries’ final political intervention—and it’s only fitting that they’re putting up one last fight.

“THE EU HAS ALWAYS made its greatest strides in times of crisis. This one’s no different,” Cohn-Bendit explains in urgent, rapid-fire sentences of Francophone-twinged German above the din at Café Leonhardt, a buzzing coffee shop deep in old West Berlin. “The EU’s doing just fine.”

At 67 years of age, one can still discern a reddish tint in Dany le Rouge’s short-cropped gray hair. The freckles, too, are there. But what’s changed decidedly is the substance of his political vision. No longer is it a libertine, classless society at the heart of his revolutionary plan for the continent; today the object of his considerable energy is a strong centralized United States of Europe, one that’s done away with mischievous nationalisms.

Though Cohn-Bendit today personifies a confident European Union—he is the front man for the continent’s Green Party in the European Parliament—he and others of the ’68 generation didn’t love the EU at first sight. Indeed, when the revolutionary utopias of the New Left withered in the aftermath of the student revolts, Cohn-Bendit and the Frankfurt-based anarchist group with which he was affiliated recalibrated their efforts to local, small-bore projects. Together with his friend from Frankfurt’s squatter scene—and Germany’s future foreign minister—Joschka Fischer, Cohn-Bendit infiltrated the assembly lines of automakers, published the agit-prop newspapers, and ran the Karl Marx Bookshop. Fischer went to work as an undercover factory agitator, while Cohn-Bendit took up the cause in an anti-authoritarian nursery school.