It is a matter of fact that the Treaty of Rome is 50 years old. However, to take the short step from there to celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the European Union would be to distort the history of Europe and its current reality–that is, to denigrate the past and to be mistaken about the present.

Denigrating the Past

There is a sacred history of Europe written and continually embellished by obsequious zealots. Like the other sacred story, it has its patriarchs and its prophets, its holy texts and its Red Seas crossed with dry feet, its periods in the wilderness and its promised land flowing with milk and honey. And, like this other, Europe’s story is the infallible accomplishment of an immutable design, wonderful, edifying and filled with marvel. Its only fault is that it has but the most tenuous connection with reality.

Although today’s Europe bears the same name as the original one, it is not her offspring. It has neither completed nor is continuing that which was started with the Treaty of Rome–indeed, it has taken the opposite course and is a mere imitation of it. Whoever thinks otherwise can never have known Europe at the time of the Common Market, or must have forgotten about it. Europe at that time had both the ardour of youth and the wisdom of experience. Having seen the European Defence Community explode in full flight and a common European policy left on the launch pad, incapable of taking off, that Europe was cured of utopian ideas for a long time. Rather than yielding again to a higher authority, member states decided to keep things under their own control: they gave the conductor’s baton to a Commission of independent individuals but only so that the latter could conduct the orchestra whose scores the states themselves had written. Whenever the Commission took the initiative to play a piece of music of its own composition, it was sharply put back in its place.