At 50, EU defies doubters

The European Union turns 50 tomorrow, confounding skeptics and disappointing supporters at nearly every step along the way.

Leaders of the 27-nation alliance that some say put the “EU” in family feud gather today in Berlin for a two-day summit and anniversary celebration, one that predictably has provoked its own public squabbles about politics, God and the future of the continent.

The party is taking place in tandem with just the latest round of soul-searching for the European Union, divided over whether and when to revive a stalled drive for a continental constitution and over who should be invited to join in the future. Critics calls the current funk a sign of deeper rot, while EU partisans say the confusion is just business as usual in Brussels.

Jose Manuel Barroso, who heads the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said the European Union is the victim of its single greatest success — making major-power conflict unthinkable on the continent that sparked two global wars in the first half of the 20th century.

“Sixty years of peace means that the image of the EU as a bastion against war is losing its resonance,” Mr. Barroso said last week.

John Bruton, the EU ambassador to Washington and former Irish prime minister, calls the European Union “the world’s greatest peace process.”

Not only is war between the major Western powers now a distant memory, he said in an interview last week, but still-antagonistic countries in regions such as the Balkans are far less likely to resort to arms, knowing it will kill their chances for EU membership.

Ukraine, a former Soviet republic whose EU hopes are years, if not decades, in the future, is pursuing internal economic, legal and political reforms today just to keep its hopes alive, new Foreign Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said last week.

“Europe is not the aim in and of itself,” he said. “European values are the aim.”

Emotional challenge

But Mr. Bruton said the EU’s biggest challenge in the next 50 years may not be political, but emotional. Polls show that while many Europeans are grateful for the economic and political benefits delivered through the European Union, few love it as an institution.

“We will never take away the sense of ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Germanness,’ but I think a European Union identity is something every citizen should instinctively feel,” he said. “Right now, that is not true.”

In fact, “Euro-skepticism” is one of the dozens of terms introduced into political discourse by the bureaucratic behemoth of Brussels. The feeling, especially strong in countries such as Britain, is rooted in a feeling that the EU’s elite have gotten too far ahead of their own constituents, pursuing not just economic reforms, but a more grandiose program to build a “United States of Europe.”

EU leaders are still dealing with the shock of the rejection of the proposed EU constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands two years ago, putting on ice ambitious plans to create a new EU president, a permanent foreign service and other changes.

Still, the European Union has been defying predictions of institutional gridlock and imminent collapse since the leaders of six Western European powers — France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg — signed the Treaty of Rome creating the European Economic Community on March 25, 1957.

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