FRANCE: The French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin went to the house where Europe's grand project was born, to celebrate both EU enlargement and the memory of Jean Monnet, the "Father of Europe" who died here 25 years ago yesterday.
Monnet bought this two-storey thatched cottage in the department of Yvelines, west of Paris, in 1945. It was here that five years later, in April 1950, Monnet and the then French foreign minister Robert Schuman drew up a plan to put the French and German coal and steel industries under a single authority.
Schuman proposed the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community the following month. Monnet presided over this precursor to the European Union until 1955, when he resigned to found the Action Committee for the United States of Europe.
Schuman was born in Luxembourg of French parents from Lorraine, and spoke French and German. Monnet's European vocation went back to the first World War, when he persuaded France and Britain to pool their warships in the battle against German submarines.
It is extraordinary that Monnet, a discreet, self-educated son of a cognac merchant, had such a decisive influence on world history, without ever embarking on a political career or holding high public office.
John F. Kennedy called Monnet "the world's statesman" and Henry Kissinger said that no man left a greater mark on his epoch.
In 1988, on the centenary of Monnet's birth, France moved his ashes to the Pantheon, its temple to great men.
Monnet was a deputy secretary general of the League of Nations in the early 1920s, and headed France's National Planning Board after the second World War. In the meantime, he was a merchant banker and the adviser who persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prepare for war with Germany.
Monnet's strategy was to unite Europe through small, concrete steps in which governments gradually relinquished sovereignty to shared entities. Between 1956 and 1973, his visionary committee planned the holding of direct elections to the European Parliament, the creation of a Council of European heads of state, and a single currency for the Union.
So it was only fitting that Prime Minister Raffarin and 20 of the 24 European ambassadors to France should descend on this pretty hamlet yesterday.
As he shovelled earth on an ash sapling in the garden, Mr Raffarin hailed Ireland's ambassador, Mr Padraic MacKernan, as "Mr President" and passed the spade on to him.
Mr Raffarin started his career in France's most pro-European party, the UDF, founded by the former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Yesterday, Mr Raffarin spoke emotionally of his joy over enlargement and "this need for a future, without which a people cannot move forward."
France held few festivities to celebrate enlargement, because the government feared it would be accused of trying to exploit the historical reunification of Europe to its own advantage in upcoming European elections.
Mr Raffarin now wants to convince the French public that enlargement is a great thing. A little late in the day, you might think, but the prime minister's arguments worked like a charm on the European ambassadors.
"No one gets into Europe through immobility," Mr Raffarin said, alluding to the huge efforts made by Europe's 10 new members. "You don't get into Europe by being a spectator. You have to want to enter Europe."
The French should not begrudge the new Europeans the cost of enlargement, he added. "Look at the lessons of history: those who give are those who receive most."
Mr Raffarin addressed French anxieties more directly than President Chirac did in his enlargement speech last week. "We must ensure that the peoples of our countries are not afraid of this European adventure," he told the ambassadors.
"Nostalgia is not a political project."
Mr Raffarin acknowledged the fear of many Frenchmen that they could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers in Eastern Europe. But poor labourers aspire to a higher standard of living, he said. "The likelihood is not of a two-speed Europe in which a proletarian part would serve an advanced part," he promised. "No, the likelihood is of harmonisation."
On display in one of the glass cases in Jean Monnet's house is a book he wrote in 1955: The United States of Europe Has Begun. When Mr Raffarin was a young politician, he used the phrase "United States of Europe" on his campaign posters.
It went out of fashion with the Treaty of Maastricht, which foresaw instead "a Europe of nation states". Gen Charles de Gaulle disliked Monnet's vision of Europe, a retired French ambassador reminded me, adding with surprising frankness that "a Gaullist is someone who believes Europe can work only if it's run by the French." Despite enlargement, the elderly gentleman complained, "the European spirit has lost ground, because governments, left and right, hang on so desperately to their sovereignty."
