The “dream” of the fathers

An international conference on Europe to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome and the 25th of the foundation of the Robert Schuman Institute for Europe: the initiative, promoted by the Schuman Institute itself, began in Rome on 21 March and will end on 23 March, in tandem with the institutional celebrations marking the half-century of the founding Treaties of the European Community. The three-day conference dedicated to Europe opened with a “presentation of messages and of the vision of the Fathers of Europe”; speeches were given by Annita Garibaldi, general secretary of the Italian Council of the European Movement, on Alcide De Gasperi; Sabine Rohmann, Mission of Cross-Border Cooperation, on Konrad Adenauer; the historian Maria Grazia Melchionni, on Jean Monnet; and the Jesuit Maurice Rieutord, secretary of the Schuman Institute, on Robert Schumann. CHRISTIANS AND EUROPEANS. “We were linked by a common aversion to exaggerated nationalism. We considered the aim of our foreign policy was the unification of Europe, since it represented the only chance of asserting and safeguarding our Western and Christian civilization against the totalitarian forces”. These words of Konrad Adenauer, pronounced in 1954 in memory of ALCIDE DE GASPERI , who died in Sella di Valsugana on 19 August of the same year, were recalled by Annita Garibaldi in describing the human and political virtues of the great Italian statesman. Foreign policy was the “most important part of the action of De Gasperi”, continued Garibaldi. “He played his role with great dignity and institutional sense, such as to deserve the tribute paid to him by Pope Pius XII, who underlined De Gasperi’s distinguished qualities of leadership and integrity of personal life that had won him admiration both at home and abroad”. “German, European, Christian”: these were the three salient features of KONRAD ADENAUER , according to Sabine Rohmann. “The founder of the German Federal Republic – she continued – loved power but in a detached way; he was religious and modest, opposing all forms of emphasis; but he was also bold when it came to ensuring his political ideas were turned into action… His conception of the world was humanist and Christian. He spoke of his love of gardening as a metaphor of the role of politics, which ought to embellish society just as the gardener cultivates and embellishes the garden… The enormous challenges he had to tackle included that of Nazi guilt for crimes against humanity, as well as the ardent desire for the reunification of Germany and relations with Israel”. TWO “VISIONARIES” OF UNITED EUROPE. “ JEAN MONNET was won over by the spirit of the pioneers of the American Far West, a people whose aspiration was not to control what already existed, but to develop new opportunities without cease. He maintained that wherever change was accepted, development was certain”, said Maria Grazia Melchionni, in summing up the constructive drive of this third “founding father”. “He was – added Melchionni – a visionary leader of a new Europe, a Europe that had to be built from zero. A political animator endowed with particular charismatic power, Monnet maintained that Europe was neither a myth, nor a false idea, but a historical necessity”. He had intuited that “after the first steps on the economic level, others would inevitably follow on the political and military level”. He declared: “We have the duty not to give up in the face of difficulties, because our supreme duty is to leave to the following generations a strong, prosperous and independent Europe and spare them the sufferings and futilities of two world wars”. “The founding vocations of Europe are two: political and cultural”. It was left to the Jesuit Maurice Rieutord to sum up the life and work of ROBERT SCHUMAN , who said of the future Union: “The European Community will be created in the image neither of an empire, nor of a Holy Alliance. It will, on the contrary, rest its democratic legality on relations between nations. Only a Europe of spirit and of peoples can acquire the capacity to surmount the barriers of violence linked to national pride”. Rieutord then exhorted European states to be inspired by the example of Schuman’s perseverance and “to pursue the process of European unification, overcoming the crisis of growth and implementing the European Constitution”. He concluded by urging the European peoples to “develop a capacity for action so as to be a credible player at the world level, and to create a real sense of solidarity, a concept – stressed Rieutord – we can associate with Schuman and that was close to his heart”.