Some time ago, our slightly crazy national hero, Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader from the 1980s, and a man always full of surprises, announced that Poland and Germany should unite into one country, under the name “Europe.” As Freud noted, gaffes can help us discern intentions hidden to us.

Mr. Walesa’s comments about Poland and Germany are a vivid illustration of just how much has changed in the minds of both nations, and of all Europeans. In 2011, Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, gave a speech expressing alarm not about an overly strong Germany, but about a Germany (Europe’s “indispensable nation,” he said) too timid and reluctant to take responsibility for the Continent. Who, in previous generations, could have imagined this?

I bring it up to challenge Europeans to expand their imagination again.

On Nov. 28, the European Union and Ukraine will hold a summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania. On the table is an agreement under which Ukraine would move toward integration with the union. Many in Europe, in fact, doubt that full integration will occur, in the face of Russia’s jealousy over its borderlands and questions about the bare-knuckle quality of democracy in Ukraine, where President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s government has jailed a popular rival, the former prime minister Yulia V. Timoshenko, on political charges.

Ironically, the country that seems the least doubtful about the prospects for Ukrainian integration into Europe is Russia, as revealed by the embargo that it recently slapped on Ukrainian and Moldovan goods. It was a clumsy effort to cow those countries into favoring Russia’s nascent customs union, but it has only served to increase Ukrainian and Moldovan antipathy.