To mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome, Agence EUROPE has dipped into its unparalleled archives and is republishing articles from 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007 that reported on the celebrations of this event. EUROPE is also publishing the editorials of its own 'founding fathers', which analysed the match between the treaties and the challenges faced, decade by decade, in the European integration project.
See the two first instalments of our commemorative series: 1957 (see EUROPE 11748), 1967 (see EUROPE 11749)
Background
Economic and political crises have shaken the Community but have not broken it. Member states already seem to be lacking the political will to extend its areas of competence, with decisions being taken unanimously by the nine members. For Agence Europe editor-in-chief Emmanuele Gazzo, there is no alternative: Europe must strengthen the way it is organised and enlarge in the South or be destined to fail.
EDITORIAL – TWENTY YEARS ON: (1) THE COMMUNITY HAS DONE MORE THAN SURVIVE
Celebration of this twentieth anniversary should be an opportunity for reflection, a sort of spiritual preparation not only for the meeting of the European Council to be held in the afternoon but for the future of the European project in the broadest meaning of the term.
It goes without saying that the new phase of the project will differ – it has to be different: to refuse change is to deny life – at the same time, it must remain faithful to its beginnings. Because what is stated in the preamble, setting out the vision of the founders of Europe, marks a turning point in European history, a turning point from which there is no going back.
It is not possible, however, to neglect here certain aspects of the celebration, where head and heart are closely linked in one’s memory. We were there on 25 March 1957 in the Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii on Capitoline Hill where the signing took place. We were able to walk in from the square, simply showing our journalist’s card. Now, to be able to move around “outside”, a pass with full colour photo is required. There were no big crowds anyway: journalists and photographers mingled with other spectators, held back only by a red cord, right in front of a long table at which, seated along one side only, the plenipotentiaries conducted the signing. It was six o’clock in the evening and light rain was falling.
We were also in Rome (but journalists were no longer allowed into the room – they had become too numerous) for the celebration of the tenth anniversary, which took place on 29 May 1967, on the eve of a “summit” meeting. The ceremony in the Capitol was frosty, despite the warmth of the speech delivered by President of the Italian Republic Giuseppe Saragat. An “oversight” meant that Jean Monnet had not been invited. As Council President, Paul Vanden Boeynants refused to speak because the Commission President had not been allowed to address the gathering. At the summit meeting the next day, 30 May, General de Gaulle, repeated what he had said at a press conference twelve days previously, that France would, for the second time, oppose the opening of accession negotiations with Great Britain.
Ten years have passed: most of the political leaders are no longer here. Casting a new look over things is very useful, so long as one bears in mind the profound reasons that pushed Europe to unite, the circumstances in which the treaties were signed and implemented, and the events that have marked these last twenty years.
Those who have watched – as we have done from the beginning, looking in from outside as observers – the different, successive stages of this project and its travails know that the treaties have been a successful attempt to reconcile views that seemed irreconcilable. The Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC) has been accused of being both an instrument of free trade and of protectionism. The truth is that it is seated in a reality, that of the market economy in which still find ourselves today.
But it provided, sometimes explicitly and in many cases implicitly, the means that were necessary to adapt the Community construction process to the natural development of things. The common agricultural policy is not the only example. The role of the institutions was crucial. The economic and institutional crises have had a negative impact but they showed that the Community may be shaken but not destroyed.
Today, the Community must open its doors to new democratic states: this will be a sort of trial by fire. It will come through so long as it regenerates, renews itself and redesigns itself while always remaining faithful to its origins.
Emmanuele Gazzo
EDITORIAL – TWENTY YEARS ON: (2) THE COMMUNITY RESHAPED
For some time now, it has been felt that the European treaties, which date back 20 or 25 years, are no longer fit for the new prevailing conditions. They would result in paralysis for the Community: once free trade, planned according to a strict timetable, has been achieved, implementing policies that could make the market genuinely “common” and make possible the transition from the free-trade stage to one meriting the name of “community” becomes virtually impossible since, every time, it requires agreement among the governments. Difficult enough to achieve with six member states and practically impossible with nine.
All this, which has been the subject of debate for years, is partly true. But, as we said yesterday, those who drafted the treaties used all the possibilities at their disposal at the time when they were bringing together, one by one, the clauses of the treaties. The failure of the European Defence Community not long earlier made them very cautious. In their view, an incomplete treaty, but one which the force of things and institutional dynamism would transform into a flexible and effective instrument, was far preferable to a further failure. And they were right.
However, a newspaper at the time wrote, the same day as the signing, that “the experts and their people … strove to find the plan which least disrupted national situations”. That is to say, more accurately, that they tried to achieve the best result possible with disruption to as few people as possible while setting out a whole range of mechanisms that could be triggered as and when circumstances or political possibility allowed. To mention only one case, Article 235 EEC would (so long as unanimity was reached on a broad interpretation of “the objectives of the Community”) make it possible to extend the scope of the treaty practically endlessly.
However, what was missing is precisely the external support, that is to say, the political will from the member states and institutional dynamism. As far as the latter is concerned, one merely has to recall that the principal decision-making mechanism – Articles 148 and more especially 149 of the EEC Treaty – has been broken and that direct election of the European Parliament has been (and continues to be) on hold for twenty years. Nor have attempts to put in place the “European Council” been able to break the stalemate.
The world is changing fast and Europe risks losing its way and its purpose. The extreme weakness of national governments ought to chasten and give cause for reflection to those who malign the European institutions.
The new Commission has perfectly understood the changes in the world around us. It has realised that short-term actions – where the Treaty paints the Community into a corner – do not lead very far. It realises that action now has to be taken on structural issues and that “coordination” of economic policies, even if it happened, is not enough. Coordination of funding and intervention instruments is a first step in the right direction. The prominence given to the necessary restructuration in the steel industry is further evidence of this realisation, although sectoral action must not be confused with fundamental economic restructuring.
This transformation is not an academics’ dream or a reformers’ utopia. It is demanded by reality as it evolves and changes. Those who can’t see this are blind. And this reality is also enlargement of Europe to the South. This enlargement is a matter of life or death for the Community.
A real community of Europe could be born of it but on the crucial stipulation that, under appropriate conditions, there be a “re-founding”, a re-design of the Community using the instruments that are available and that are needed. It is up to the political and social groups to decide and not to miss this opportunity.
It will in all probability be a massive undertaking, one that cannot be done in one fell swoop, but will require years of work. But it has to be begun right away.
The Community needs to start and to make steady progress in that direction. Let us hope that Roy Jenkins, the sixth European Commission president, will be able to persuade his interlocutors in Rome that there is no time to be wasted.
Emmanuele Gazzo
MESSAGES FROM PRESIDENT CARTER FOR TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF TREATIES
BRUSSELS AND LONDON (EU), Friday 25 March 1977 – The president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, sent a message to the president of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome. In his message, Mr Carter states that the United States will continue to support the efforts of the Community and expresses his conviction that close cooperation between the United States and the EEC is “vital for both”.
DECLARATIONS BY EUROPEAN COUNCIL AND PRESIDENT JENKINS ON COMMUNITY PRIORITIES
ROME (EU), Friday 25 March 1977 – Before the start of discussions, the European Council published a “declaration on the occasion of the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Treaties of Rome” which stresses two points in particular: - the need for and urgency of economic action in order to achieve a number of priority goals (which include cohesion, tackling unemployment, discipline and austerity in countries with deficits); - the need, alongside these economic goals, for progress to made towards a “Europe of people and citizens”.
CEREMONY IN CAPITOL CELEBRATING TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF SIGNING OF TREATIES
ROME (EU), Friday 25 March 1977 – The anniversary of the signing of the treaties was celebrated today in the same Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii in the Capitol where, twenty years ago, the treaties were signed by the six countries which, already members of the European Coal and Steel Community, would form the EEC and Euratom.
The sun, veiled fleetingly by passing clouds, shone on the square dominated by the statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius where, between eleven o’clock and midday, the invited guests began to arrive.
They took their places in the hall: on either side of the small central platform sat those among the original signatories still with us: Messrs Walter Hallstein, Maurice Faure, Jean-Charles Snoy et d’Oppuers, Hans Linthorst Homan (Christian Pineau could not attend) and representatives of the major institutions of the Italian state and of the European institutions. Opposite the platform, the nine heads of state and/or government and, behind them, the foreign ministers and, then, seated in several rows, parliamentary diplomats and people who had worked or who are working on the construction of Europe.
At 12 o’clock, President of the Italian Republic Giovanni Leone took his seat, flanked by James Callaghan, President in office of the Council, on his right and Giulio Carlo Argan, Mayor of Rome, on his left.
The mayor of Rome was first to speak, declaring that “Rome has placed 25 March 1957 among the most glorious and memorable dates of its long history. It is delighted to see its name linked symbolically and factually to the founding articles of the first – as it happens European – supranational political institution”.
President Leone said that the great achievement of the visionaries who subscribed to the Treaty of Rome has been to “provide the peoples of Western Europe with the assurance that the days of warring nations have now been consigned to the past”. Demonstration of the vitality of European construction is given in the decision on European Parliament elections by universal suffrage and in the power of attraction the community holds for others on the outside. There is the growing prospect of enlargement to the South of Europe, “a prerequisite for better geo-political and geo-economic balance”.
President Leone laid great stress on young people: “Young people”, he declared, “are both the ones who will carry on the European project and those to whom it is addressed”. And this is what Italy expects of Europe: “We must – it is good to point it out – stride forward together. A Europe stripped of solidarity, a Europe which took the path of selection and hegemony would be destined, sooner or later, to repeat the experiences of a past on which, twenty years ago in Rome, we turned out backs”.
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