Creating a masterpiece

It was raining in Rome on 25 March 1957 as hundreds of photographers made the journey to the Campidoglio Palace. The signing of the treaty which gave birth to what became the European Union was held in the room of the Horatii and Curiatii. It takes its name from one of the frescos on the wall, depicting the combat between the Horatii and Curiatii which settled the war between the rival cities of Rome and Alba.

So it was that 12 men from six European countries which had been at war with each other less than 12 years earlier signed the Treaty of Rome. One of those 12 men, Maurice Faure, who signed the treaty for France along with Christian Pineau, can still recall the great emotion of the moment. "It was one of those days that one rarely lives in one’s life," Faure says. "The decoration was magnificent - the room of the Horatii and Curiatii - the number of people there, plus there were, in front of us, 500 photographers…all this was lifting our souls and made us think that we were doing something great, that we were laying the first stones of the EU construction."

The negotiations on the treaties which set up the European Economic Communities and Euratom had started in June 1956 in Brussels, with an ambitious mandate, set out in the Messina Declaration of 1955, to create a common market. The negotiations were beset with difficulties. France arrived at the talks with a list of exorbitant demands. But, following the failure of the European Defence Community, which was rejected by the French assembly in 1954, the six decided that they had no option other than to make the negotiations a success. Nine months later, the treaties were ready to be signed - or so it appeared. In fact, on 25 March 1957, the layout of the treaty text was not ready and the 12 men put their signatures on to a pack of white sheets of paper. Faure, secretary of state in the French foreign ministry at the time, laughs at a suggestion that what they were signing was a blank cheque for the future development of the European project that they set in motion.

The absence of Great Britain from the signing ceremony did not detract from its importance. "In 1957, the British question was not posed anymore: it had withdrawn from negotiations in 1955. So we did not think of England anymore."

Faure says that the men who signed the treaty of Rome for France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands knew exactly the importance of what they were doing. "We were absolutely convinced that we were creating a masterpiece."

But half a century later, the EU is very different from how Faure envisaged it at that time. He never imagined that the EU was going to spread, geographically, so far as to encompass countries from Poland and Romania in the east and Greece and Cyprus in the south.

"In our vision then, Europe could encompass Spain and Portugal, once they had got rid of their dictators. In our opinion, they were part of western Europe," he says. "We did not even think of Greece…for us, Greece was completely outside [Western Europe]."

The countries behind the Iron Curtain were not on the political map of those who launched the European project. "We were not even thinking of the communist states," says Faure.

Back in 1957 he imagined that those founding six members of the European Economic Community would deepen their political integration faster than they did and that the EU would become more homogenous than it is today.

"We thought that Europe would have a common defence much earlier, a single currency, a common diplomacy," he says.

Faure blames his compatriot Charles de Gaulle, French president in 1958-69, for stalling European integration. "It was de Gaulle and his unanimity rule that made Europe advance very slowly." When in 1965, under the terms of the Rome treaty, qualified majority voting was introduced, instead of unanimity, to advance the common market, de Gaulle precipitated the "empty chair crisis". He ordered a French boycott of the Council of Ministers, withdrew France’s permanent representative to the Community and instructed his party’s representatives to absent themselves from the European assembly.

Faure admits that over the last 50 years, France has been "the rogue pupil of Europe". "It was always France which made problems: the rejection of the European Defence Community, de Gaulle and the crisis of the empty chair, now the rejection of the EU constitution…so many faux pas, while France took the initiative [on Europe]."

"It hurts to say it," he adds.

But he admits, with sadness, that he cannot himself identify with today’s Europe. "It does not resemble at all to what we designed, what we wanted. People do not feel Europe. And governments do everything so that they feel Europe less and less. I am disillusioned."

Faure will be attending the festivities in Berlin on 25 March to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rome treaty, but he laughs ironically as he points out that the Berlin Declaration will be far less ambitious that the Messina Declaration, which gave him and his counterparts from the other five founding nations the mandate to draft the Rome treaty.

"How do you want us to be as visionary at 27 as we were at six?" he says, adding that if he were taking part in the drafting of the Berlin Declaration he would set as objectives for the future of the Union: "Harmonisation of social charges, tax harmonisation, a common EU diplomacy, a common EU defence."

Speaking from his country retreat in Cahors, in the south-west of France, Faure still thinks that that rainy day of March 1957 was the most glorious of his life. His fondest memory is of Konrad Adenauer, the then German chancellor. "Adenauer, who was sitting at my left side, wrote a message for me, in German, on the piece of paper which was before him. He wrote: ‘In Europe’s interest, you should be in government in France’. I was the youngest among them there. I just answered ‘thank you’."

• Dana Spinant is editor of European Voice.

It was raining in Rome on 25 March 1957 as hundreds of photographers made the journey to the Campidoglio Palace. The signing of the treaty which gave birth to what became the European Union was held in the room of the Horatii and Curiatii. It takes its name from one of the frescos on the wall, depicting the combat between the Horatii and Curiatii which settled the war between the rival cities of Rome and Alba.