This weekend, the European Union celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, when Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands created the European Economic Community and kicked off the process of European integration as we know it.
Coming less than a week before the United Kingdom leaves the EU, the occasion elicited a heady mixture of hope, concern and anger among the commentariat in the bloc’s six founders — emotions that were echoed by their British counterparts.
France
Le Monde commemorated the anniversary with gusto, publishing a week-long series of profiles on the personalities who have shaped the EU, for better or worse. In the opening article, Alain Serres observed, “European leaders have serious doubts. Debates on a multispeed Europe are dividing East and West, populist parties are multiplying their attacks against the very foundations of the European Union.” Financial woes, Greek debt, refugees and Brexit risk pulling the whole edifice apart. And so, “to try and ward off these fates, the 27 […] hope to rediscover the spirit of Rome. There is a sense of urgency.”
Elsewhere, Le Figaro columnist Natacha Polony lambasted Europe’s leaders for failing to accept that their “promised land of prosperity has turned into a nightmare of mass unemployment and deindustrialization.” She reserved her strongest criticism for Europe’s current leadership: “To celebrate 60 years of the Treaty of Rome, our governments have almost unanimously reelected the dashing Donald Tusk, the incarnation of this treachery. This liberal Atlanticist Pole, a sworn enemy of our Russian ‘foe,’ doesn’t speak French and barely manages English. It’s just not useful in today’s Europe. It’s enough for him to speak German, to subscribe to Angela Merkel’s ordoliberalism and to think he is duty-bound to impose it” on anyone who might dare to imagine an alternative model.
Italy
Most Italian dailies, like Toscana Oggi, indulged in recalling that “rainy Roman day” 60 years ago. “The treaties were signed at the Capitol, in the room of the Horatii and the Curiatii, where huge frescoes told the mythical history of Rome, and two statues, one by Bernini, the other by Algardi, of popes Urban VIII and Innocent X stared down from both sides at the seated statesmen and at the journalists standing in a tight throng due to the lack of space. […] At that time, the embryonic six-states Europe was called the ‘Carolingian Europe,’ not only because it had pretty much the same shape as Charlemagne’s empire, but it seemed to recall the unity between the Holy Roman Empire and the Church of Rome.”
“On Saturday March 25, Europe’s top brass will meet in the same room to celebrate […] with a ‘Rome declaration’ that will set out how to challenge the turbulence ahead,” wrote Chiara Bussi in Il Sole 24 Ore. She adds that Europe is threatened not by war, but by the rise of “Euroskepticism which already has moved London toward Brexit, beginning the divorce process” as soon as the celebrations in Rome end.
Germany
Frank Stocker, Die Welt’s finance editor, described the EU as a “success story,” particularly for the original signatory countries of the Treaty of Rome — Belgium, France, Germany Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — which have seen “pro capita economic performance quadruple” since 1958. They have enjoyed higher growth “not just in comparison with the world as a whole, but also, for example, in comparison with the U.S.” Stocker credited the single market with easing trade and foreign investments, an advantage he said is made all the more noticeable now that the British “are considering how they want to manage their departure from the EU.”
Meanwhile, Die Zeit columnist Thomas Mayer mulled over the possibility of the Union’s end within his lifetime. He criticized generations of politicians for disregarding the aims of the Treaty of Rome — intertwining peace, freedom, democracy and the rule of law — in favor of an “ever closer union” for its own sake. On the prospect of multispeed Europe, Mayer wrote: “I fear that this solution won’t be seriously carried out. In all truthfulness, we must admit that the currency union can only function for a much smaller and more homogenous group of member states. The same goes for the Schengen agreement. Both projects must be scaled back.”
The Netherlands
Mark Peeperkorn wondered in De Volkskrant whether the statement European leaders will make in Rome will be enough to show that “member states still love the EU, 60 years after the Treaty of Rome.” It is an important question, he argued, “now that the Union is under attack from within and from the outside.” Similarities “between Saturday’s statement and the declaration made by member states in 2007 to commemorate the Treaty’s 50th anniversary are “striking,” the columnist added. The EU faces the same challenges as it did then: terrorism, organized crime, illegal migration. And the final sentence of both statements has remained unchanged: “Europe is our common future.”
Belgium
In a column for Belgian daily Le Soir, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel insisted that the anniversary marks a “turning point.” In a world where the “old certainties have disappeared,” Gabriel wrote, “no country in Europe, not even Germany, can succeed alone anymore.” Identifying the need to reinforce security and defense, further harmonize the internal market and develop the “European project’s social dimension,” he concluded with a call to arms: “Let’s get to work, we are committed to Europe, we want to do better! We will succeed if we do not let fear triumph.”
Luxembourg
In a column for Le Quotidien, journalist Nicholas Klein quoted French statesman Pierre Mendès France, who warned that democracy would be eroded by technocratic institutions operating outside of national politics, several months before the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The former Resistance fighter, minister and president of the Council had anticipated “Europe’s democratic deficit, its absence of democratic legitimacy” by seeing that the market would “exert a political power” in the name of a “healthy economy,” Klein argued.
“It is easy to say today that the abyss between European technocracy and its citizens was predictable,” Klein wrote. “The worm was in the fruit from the beginning, and no one listened to Pierre Mendès France.”
United Kingdom
The anniversary’s celebrations show Brits are “not entirely alone in their nostalgia” for simpler times, Philip Stephens, chief political commentator at the Financial Times, claimed. Despite Britain’s impending exit, the best response to the cross-border threats Europe faces is clearly more integration, Stephens wrote, but he was not optimistic about EU leaders’ ability to deliver it: The EU has failed to lay out a vision to mark the Treaty of Rome, with “muddle through and multispeed” as the best options on offer, he argued.
The Economist, meanwhile, suggested Brexit is only one of a cascade of problems threatening the survival of the Union. Gathering in Rome, Europe’s leaders — minus Britain — “know that the club is in deep trouble, not least because so many countries besides Britain have seen an upsurge of populist anti-EU parties.”
In a column for the Times, Scottish National Party MP Stephen Gethins popped his head above the parapet to run through the pro-EU arguments last heard during the U.K. referendum. In short, EU membership has made the U.K. safer, wealthier, fairer, greener and smarter. On Brexit, he argued, “Europe’s flexibility is its strength and has solved more difficult problems than this … It is worth reflecting, just for a moment, on the unprecedented success 60 years on from the signing of a treaty that has touched and benefited us all.”
Simon Pickstone is the English language editor of VoxEurop.