text: It is time for the Transatlantic chattering class to realize that there is a time for problematizing, and a time for strategizing and that its first order of business should be to stop mistaking a simple transatlantic time lag for a metaphysical problem. In the wake of 9/11, there was an extreme disconnect between an America that had just experienced its first continental aggression since the "second war of independence" (the war of 1812) and a Europe convinced that the then-imminent opening of the Brussels constitutional convention was, if not the beginning of universal peace, at least the world's most important event since the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.