Europeans celebrate Europe Day today, more than half a century after the European Economic Community (now the European Union) was formed.
In truth, it should be a day to celebrate or at least to note around the world because the creation and survival of the EU as an economic and political union of almost 30 peaceful and co-operating countries is a modern-day miracle.
It has turned a quarrelsome continent of blood soaked battlefields into a largely peaceful and democratic bloc that has given its 500 million citizens their longest period of peace and co-operation in modern history.
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It is a feat worth celebrating indeed.
Europe Day commemorates the day in 1950 when French foreign minister Robert Schuman first proposed a collaboration of European nations that for centuries had been slaughtering each other’s citizens in seemingly endless wars.
Five years before almost to the day, Germany had surrendered to end the latest slaughter of tens of millions — the Second World War precipitated by German expansionism and genocidal schemes.
When Schuman dared to dream, Europe still was being rebuilt, economies and communities were still shattered and refugees still clogged the countryside or lined up to flee the continent to escape the shattered European madhouse.
His declaration, given the history and the chaos around, was audacious.
“By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensible to the preservation of peace,” it said.
Historic enemies were being called to set aside ancient hatreds for modern brotherhood, to beat swords into plowshares.
It was a dream that took almost nine years to accomplish, but accomplished it was.
The result has been a complicated, multi-layered, nuanced political hodgepodge with a bureaucracy in one country, a parliament in another and complicated national negotiations, often requiring unanimity between close to 30 sovereign countries, to get anything accomplished.
It often has been the bane of foreign governments trying to penetrate the decision-making process and of exporting countries like Canada trying to overcome trade barriers imposed by powerful member states driven by national and protectionist sensitivities.
The EU sometimes is seen derisively as a symbol of over-powerful bureaucracy, obtuse decision-making, policy inertia and political constipation.
And yet what a miracle it is.
In recent conversation with Canadian journalists to mark Europe Day, the EU’s top Canadian diplomat, Matthias Brinkman, spoke of European co-operation as a “tremendous accomplishment,” noting that the flow of goods between once-warring sovereign countries often is easier than between Canadian provinces.
“It happened without bloodshed,” he said. “It is an amazing achievement.”
That is true and it has been a blessing for my generation of Canadians and those that have followed. We have never been forced to go to war because of European quarreling.
For my grandfather’s generation, the First World War and the horrors of Vimy and other European bloodbaths was a defining moment.
For my father’s generation, it was Normandy and Ortona and Holland.
For my generation, Europe is a place to visit and to look at the graves and to cross borders that barely exist anymore between countries so recently at war.
Happy Europe Day indeed.
