Instead, we must fully embrace what many of us already sense — that we stand at the dawn of a new, postnational era in which Europeans can go from being laggards to leaders.

If we don’t, Europe risks becoming its stereotype of America: a place with the best hospitals, and millions of people without proper health insurance; with some of the world’s most advanced technology, and many with no access to it; with world-class universities, but generations held back by parochial worldviews.

We are, oddly, the last ones who still doubt our own political project. We complain that Europe is just an abstraction for its citizens, yet we haven’t yet passed the laws to create a European passport worthy of that name, or the framework to enable every European to truly embrace the European Union project.

There is an old Jewish saying, “If you have only two alternatives, then choose the third.” The point is not to replace Europe’s gerontocracies with a dictatorship of the young. This movement must be carried by all those who, regardless of their age, agree that we must shift power more toward youth to successfully reduce the debt we are saddling future generations with.

Younger Europeans have been born into austerity and have grown up as budget cutters and digital natives. Unlike our leaders today, they are well adapted to an increasingly rapid pace of change, and their instinct is to use the most innovative and cost-effective methods to achieve their goals.

In Europe, politics has become too much about how each nation would like the world to be, and too little about what produces tangible results. Rather than bickering over whose policies are preferable, we need a Pan-European effort to determine Europe’s best practices in every field and adopt them across the Continent. What does each country do best? What successful models are scalable? How can we leverage the combined experience, resources and tested solutions of all the European nations?

Europe will not be changed by the elections of 2014. It will change only when European-minded politicians who are elected to national offices agree to transfer power to truly European institutions.