EU's Celebration of 50Th Birthday Avoids Difficult Issues

EU's celebration of 50th birthday avoids difficult issues Declaration planned for Berlin summit highlights divisions By Dan Bilefsky and Carter Dougherty

Published: March 23, 2007

BRUSSELS: The European Union's 50th birthday declaration — meant to unite the 489 million citizens of the EU behind the ideals of a unified Europe — is a three-page document that avoids mentioning the faltering constitution, has no reference to religion and does not affirm the bloc's further expansion, according to a draft copy obtained Friday.

The declaration was conceived by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help the 27- member Union overcome the drift that has plagued the bloc since the French and the Dutch rejected the proposed constitution two years ago. It will be the centerpiece at celebrations this weekend in Berlin that will also include a Muslim-Catholic hip-hop group from Denmark, a Beethoven performance and free beer and sausages on the streets.

But rather than unifying Europe, the document celebrating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome appears to highlight its divisions.

Poland, a large Catholic country, pleaded unsuccessfully for the declaration to mention the Christian roots of Europe. Britain, which has retained its currency, the pound, lobbied for the document to downplay the euro. France and the Netherlands — whose voters rejected the constitution — insisted that it omit mention of the charter.

The result, some EU officials said, is a compromise document that is pithy and concise by EU standards but as unlikely to cause offense as it is to inspire. "We have ended up with a fish soup that has ingredients for almost everybody, but no taste," Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, said Friday. "People will shrug and say, 'So what?'"

Written in lofty but clear German, the draft's beginning invokes the preamble to the U.S. Constitution — "We, the citizens of the European Union" — before lauding the European social model and praising the success of the euro. But it avoids mentioning the EU's constitution by name and instead calls for the European Union to be put on "a renewed common basis" by 2009. "With European unification, a dream of earlier generations has become a reality," says the draft, a copy of which was obtained by the International Herald Tribune. "Our history reminds us that we must protect this for the good of future generations. For that reason, we must always renew the political shape of Europe in keeping with the times." Merkel hoped the anniversary declaration would revive a debate over the constitution, leading to a new conference on the charter in June and its ratification two years later. But countries remain deeply divided over the document, which would streamline the EU decision-making system and was supposed to extend the bloc's influence internationally by creating an EU foreign minister. In addition to France and the Netherlands, Britain, Poland, and the Czech Republic all fear that efforts to revive it would inspire a public backlash. The draft Berlin declaration also omits any explicit reference to EU "enlargement," although this is viewed by many as the bloc's greatest foreign policy achievement since the end of the Cold War. And in apparent acknowledgment of growing public opposition to new candidate countries like Turkey, the document does not say how much further the bloc should expand. Instead, it thanks the EU's 10 latest entrants from the former communist bloc for "finally overcoming the unnatural division of Europe." "The European Union will continue to thrive both on openness and on the will of its member states to consolidate the Union's internal development," the draft says. "The European Union will continue to promote democracy, stability, and prosperity beyond its borders." The drafting process was marked by so much squabbling that Merkel came up with another compromise to placate all 27 guests at the ceremony in Berlin: They will not have to sign the birthday card. The Berlin declaration, the centerpiece of the ceremony, will carry only three signatures. Merkel will sign for Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency. The document will be countersigned by the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and by Hans-Gert Pottering, president of the European Parliament. An EU official involved in organizing the event said having all 27 members sign the declaration would take too long. "We want this ceremony to be snappy." But others said privately that getting all EU governments to sign it would have been politically difficult. As it is, German officials said Friday, countries were still bickering over the final translations of the text, which will be available in each of the EU's 23 official languages, including Romanian and Gaelic. "There have been all sorts of queries; was a comma really necessary in one sentence, should a comma be included in another," said one official close to the drafting process. "It is not easy. German sentences and words can be longer than English and the way of expressing even a text is different in French." The maverick Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, no ardent EU supporter, was still equivocating Friday over whether to sign the text, prompting Merkel to phone him and Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic to make sure they would not break ranks and create an unpleasant scene Sunday.

Merkel used diplomacy to get the Poles on board during her visit last weekend to Warsaw, where she held talks with President Lech Kaczynski and his brother Jaroslaw, the prime minister, both of whom wanted the declaration to include a reference to the Christian heritage of the bloc.

Merkel, a Christian Democrat, persuaded them to back down because such a reference would give the impression that the EU was a Christian club. Yet Germany did refrain from inviting Turkey to attend the ceremony officially, prompting that country, which is in negotiations to join the Union, to protest that it had been snubbed. "The ceremony on Sunday is current EU member states only," one EU official said.

*Carter Dougherty reported from Frankfurt and Judy Dempsey contributed reporting from Berlin.