Susanna Vogt
Head of Greece Office
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
60 years after the signing of the Treaties of Rome the European Union has to open a thorough and serious debate on its future – without forgetting its achievements.
2017 will be marked as a special year in European integration history: For the first time, a EU member state has started the process of leaving the Union. At the same time, we are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, the “birth certificate” of the EU. Great Britain leaving the European Union will surely not be the “death certificate” for the EU – but it will leave its mark in the conflicting poles of European integration.
Economic considerations stood very much at the center of the endeavor to integrate areas of primarily national sovereignty – a disruptive move at the time, but especially from a German perspective the only way to move on, after two devastating wars. For the first Chancellor of the just-founded State, Konrad Adenauer, this path was clear: A deep commitment to tie the democratic Federal Republic to the West and its values. Values which have driven the European integration process ever since.
And we have come a very long way in Europe since 1957: Substantial steps of deepening the integration process have taken place, on a political, economic as well as social and societal level. EU integration as well as enlargement have improved the living conditions for European citizens in multiple ways, and in a manner which has become part of millions of peoples’ everyday lives: travelling, working, studying and paying without borders, to name a few. This everyday European integration tends to be simply forgotten by the same majority of people living it so naturally – because it has achieved its goal: real integration. The downside becomes clear at once: We take it for granted. The European idea is threatened to be let down due to its own success. Young British voters, the very “Erasmus generation”, not casting their votes in the Brexit referendum might serve as one example.
The EU surely has had difficulties to find political solutions in the same pace crisis events have come up in recent years, be it the fiscal debt or the migration and refugee crisis. And the repeated mantra of “more Europe” has not helped to counter anti-European populist forces at all. A serious and honest debate will be needed to find a common future path – but achievements of the past must not be forgotten. So today still is true what Konrad Adenauer said at the signing of the Treaties of Rome: “Too much of the tasks are still ahead.”
