Would it have been possible?

In May each year the European institutions, and with them the European Movement, celebrate Europe Day.The Council of Europe was established on 5 May 1949: this was the first institutional organ aimed at promoting the unification of Europe. All the states of free Europe (i.e. Western Europe) belonged to it. However, the unification that the Council of Europe was able to achieve was exhausted with a process of legal harmonization and cultural cooperation. The creation of any unified political action was not envisaged by its programme. That’s why in the following year, more precisely on 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, former French Foreign Minister, adopted an initiative aimed at the foundation of another institution that was intended to take a new direction in the pursuit of the unification of Europe. With the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which began its activity in 1952 and in which France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg took part, the heart of our present European Union was created. Even if this foundation materially concerned cooperation and joint management in the production of coal and steel, its ideal motivation was especially addressed at the creation of peace, the defence of freedom and the consolidation of solidarity between the participating nations and peoples, five years after the end of a world war that had destroyed Europe and in view of the new threat posed by aggressive Communism. The European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), instituted by the Treaties of Rome in 1957, represented further developments of the European Coal and Steel Community, as also did all the successive reforms of the fundamental treaties that distinguished the various stages in the creation of a European Union: the fusion of the three European Communities (1967), the Single European Act (1987), the Treaty of Maastricht (1993), the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), the Treaty of Nice (2003) and, finally, the Treaty of Lisbon that will come into force in January of next year, assuming that all member states of the EU have ratified it by then. The six original members of the European Community, which alone supported the process of unification during its first twenty years, have now grown to 27 member states. Europe’s development has been breathtaking, in particular over the last two decades, during which Europeans were impelled towards an accelerated adjustment of their own political systems as a consequence of the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the technological revolution and globalization. It was inevitable that in the course of this development the original constitution of the Community, as also the ideals that had been shared by its founding fathers, suffered some weakening and different interpretations. The essential aspect of the initiative of May 1950, however, seems to have remained intact in spite of numerous challenges: namely, the capacity of the system then introduced, which (as Robert Schuman had defined it) was supposed to be founded on “de facto solidarity”, to realise policy in a collective manner. Would it otherwise have been possible always to emerge reinforced from the crises that the Community/Union has experienced during its almost sixty years of life? Would it otherwise have been possible to make the extraordinary effort linked to the successive inclusion of a large number of new member states? And would it have been possible to achieve in the European Convention (2002/2003) a wide consensus on the new Constitution of the Union, whose essential values and contents, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights, are now incorporated in the Treaty of Lisbon as the new foundation of its own modus operandi and institutional system?