Europe Day is celebrated to recognize the creation by Robert Schuman, a great French diplomat, of his concept after World War II of a new European construct. It is hard to imagine that the ideas of visionaries like Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul Henri Spaak and Walter Hallstein of what started as a small European coal and steel community with six countries, initially in the European Economic Community after the Treaty of Rome in 1957, would blossom into a union with 28 member states and 500 million people. What has happened with the European Union is absolutely unique. There is no other institution in world history in which sovereign member states have come together, not in a “UN”-type organization, not in a G-7 or G-20, but in which they have pooled whole areas of their sovereignty and given it to a central institution while still maintaining other areas of sovereignty. And after the EU started, it reformed itself with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the 2001 Nice Treaty, and the creation in the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
