Beethoven's Ode „An die Freude“

This Sunday we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the European Union.

Many people don't think highly about the Union these days. They worry about future expansion. Some even reject our new member states Romania and Bulgaria. They worry that integrating poor countries might push down wages. But the solution is not to shut them out, but to help them grow rich. The best way to do so, is to forget about borders and start working together.

Therefore we toast to the European Union and welcome even more new members.

Addition from March 26th: Today I read a fictional article about the 100th anniversary of the Union. So good, I had to laugh and cry and offer you a copy without permission...

From The Economist:

The EU is celebrating its 100th birthday with quiet satisfaction. Predictions when it turned 50 that it was doomed to irrelevance in a world dominated by America, China and India proved wide of the mark. A turning-point was the bursting of America's housing bubble and the collapse of the dollar early in the presidency of Barack Obama in 2010. But even more crucial were Germany's and France's efforts later in that decade, under Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy respectively, to push through economic reforms.

These reforms produced a sharp fall in unemployment just as Europe began to enjoy a productivity spurt from the spread of information technology. The eventual result was a growing labour shortage, which was not resolved until the arrival of Turkey and Ukraine as full members in 2025. The accession soon afterwards of the first north African country, Morocco, helped to prolong Europe's boom.

Of course it was not all plain sailing. The great Italian crisis of 2015, when the government of Gianfranco Fini quit the single currency just as David Miliband's Britain was about to join, cast a long shadow. Yet although Italian bondholders took a hit from the subsequent default and Italy's economy was soon overtaken by Spain's, financial markets proved forgiving, and the government of Walter Veltroni managed to rejoin the euro fairly quickly. Since then no country has been tempted to repeat Italy's painful experiment.

The other cause for quiet satisfaction has been the EU's foreign policy. In the dangerous second decade of the century, when Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as Russian president and stood poised to invade Ukraine, it was the EU that pushed the Obama administration to threaten massive nuclear retaliation. The Ukraine crisis became a triumph for the EU foreign minister, Carl Bildt, prompting the decision to go for a further big round of enlargement. It was ironic that, less than a decade later, Russia itself lodged its first formal application for membership.

At the same time politicians in Brussels and Washington, grappling with the blocked Middle East peace process, had a eureka moment. EU membership had worked, eventually, in Cyprus, which was reunified in 2024; why not try it again? So it was that Israel and Palestine became the EU's 49th and 50th members.

The big challenge now is what to do about Russia. Its application has been pending for 15 years. Some say that it is too big, too poor and not European enough to join. But now that the tsar has been symbolically restored, Russia has an impeccably democratic government. A previous tsar saved Europe from Napoleon nearly 250 years ago. It would be apt to mark the anniversary by welcoming Russia back into the European fold.

posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 link to this post