German Chancellor Angela Merkel, EU Commission President Jose
Manuel Barroso and EU Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering
sealed the
Berlin Declaration on Sunday sending forth a
common call for a "renewed common basis" for the 27-member bloc by
2009.
The ceremony was the chef d'oeuvre of the EU's 50th birthday
party marking the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957,
which established the European Economic Community and direct
forebear to the EU.
Despite this buoyant mood of European unity, even before the ink
on the treaty had dried, policy-makers were already showing signs
of the division which brought down the constitution in France and
the Netherlands during the 2005 referendum.
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi declared that Europe's
"period of mourning" was over, and stated that the EU would need to
recover its "creative madness" to foster discussion once again.
European officials will need to determine how much of the old
draft to repose on before moving forward, with Prodi advising that
the old draft, slammed for being too clumsy and inaccessible, be
kept with new rules being added.?
He called the old treaty "a very solid basis" to work from, but
others counter-pointed that the rejected version must be
reworked.?
Commemorating the EU's successes in bolstering European
democracy, Merkel waxed lyrical about her childhood in East Germany
to remind people about the eternal hope of change.
?
"I never believed that I would be able to travel freely to the West
before I was old enough to retire," she said at the ceremony in
central Berlin, a few blocks from where the Berlin Wall once cast
its ominous shadow.
The EU's half-century declaration omitted any reference to
religion on the insistence of France and other secular-minded
states, but Merkel, whose father is a Protestant minister, said in
her speech, "for me personally, this understanding of humanity
results from Europe's Judeo-Christian roots."
EU finance ministers will now analyze Europe's economic outlook
over two days, looking to bolster investor confidence in the old
world’s financial markets after February's global market crash.
The ministers, convening in Brussels, are expected to support a
slew of plans that would create a level playing field for payments
across all EU nations and ease restrictions on cross-border banking
mergers.
Whilst the strong European economy did not instill the fear in
investors, concerns of a knock-on effect have slowed any rise from
the existing torpor.
The European Commission said "the recent turbulence in global
equity markets was too limited to have impacted significantly on
the aggregate euro area or EU economic performance."
(China Daily via agencies March 26, 2007)
