25 March Intergovernmental Conference and anniversary celebrations, Rome

Date: 03/04/1997

EU foreign ministers who travelled to Rome for the 40th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome held a four-hour meeting to examine the Dutch presidency's latest proposals for EU reform, focusing on its ideas for improving the Union's handling of judicial and interior policies. Also on the table were Franco-German plans to strengthen the EU's overall foreign policy and defence capabilities. Confirming his government's determination to speed up the talks, Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo announced that he would be summoning his colleagues to a series of extra IGC negotiating sessions, beginning in the Netherlands on 6 and 7 April.

FOR once, however, the IGC talks took second place to formal celebrations as assembled dignitaries commemorated the events of 40 years ago, when the EU's founding treaty was signed. In a series of speeches, the current generation of Union leaders - gathering in the very room in Rome's city hall where the original treaty was signed in 1957 - paid tribute to their predecessors who laid the foundations for the present Union.

“LIFE for the Union begins at 40,” said Van Mierlo, while European Commission President Jacques Santer looked to the future as well as the past. “Europe has a historic chance to bring the whole continent together. Let us take inspiration from the birth of the European Economic Community and build the Europe of the 21st century, a Europe for Europeans with Europeans,” he said.

ONE of the most comprehensive tributes to the past 40 years came in the form of a two-day symposium which brought together almost 100 key players to relive the events they had personally witnessed during the past four decades of European integration. Speaking at the symposium, organised by the Commission and the Jean Monnet European University Council for Action, former Commission President Jacques Delors emphasised the constant need for the Union to pay heed to the heritage of the past, warning that the European edifice now in place could only be threatened by “an absence of memory or by carelessness”.

A RANGE of flanking measures to bring the celebrations to a wider audience ran either side of the 25 March birthday party. They included exhibitions, poster campaigns, concerts, the sale of commemorative stamps and medals, documentary footage of the events of 40 years ago and public flower-beds decked out in blue and yellow plants in tribute to the European flag.

SEVERAL other EU institutions were also represented at the formal celebrations. After the party, the European Commission held its normal weekly meeting in the Italian capital and the European Parliament's President José María Gil-Robles organised a working session with his counterparts from national parliaments throughout the Union.