So, how does Europe stand at 50? Today the founding six are 27, the 230 million membership, now 490 million. This weekend EU leaders gather to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome which set the ball rolling, establishing the European Economic Community and the unique institutional framework that made the project possible.
They will back a statement of fundamental values that, it is hoped, will provide the basis for a relaunch of stalled debate on institutional reform and the constitutional treaty, although the word "constitutional", toxic to some, has been omitted from the draft text.
"We are not forming coalitions between states, but union among peoples," Jean Monnet said in 1952 in explaining both the leap of imagination the founding of the EEC would represent and the fundamental difference between the "intergovernmental" method of traditional diplomacy and the emerging "community" method. The latter is the "supranational" decision-making rock on which the Union is built, expressed in the Treaty of Rome as the institutional balance between the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and the Commission, protector of the collective interest.
The complex edifice that is now the EU is a rambling building with many pillars and annexes, but essentially reflects, however inelegantly, the working out of the Rome idea of "ever closer union". Taking the long view, this incremental pooling of sovereignty has been an extraordinary economic and political success story, and the model is now being imitated by other groups of states in southeast Asia, Africa, and south America.
Monnet's community method is reflected in more than the structure - the visionary idea that old enemies, primarily France and Germany, could and should be reconciled through the gradual enmeshing of their economic and political interests is as relevant today in the EU's embracing into the fold of the states of eastern Europe and in its neighbourhood policy towards countries like Ukraine. The exercise of "soft power" has become the distinctive hallmark of the EU diplomatic style.
But, on this day, it is important also to remember the place played by the EU in our development as a sovereign State. Our membership of the EEC was the watershed in asserting our independence from Britain, overcoming our historical inferiority complex and showing our confidence in ourselves as an independent State.
Today's generation of "old" Europeans have lost the sense of imminence of war that their parents and grandparents lived through - that reality is the EU's success story and its Achilles heel. The challenge for today's generation of EU leaders is to forge a new vision or narrative out of the new reality. They can only do that by beginning to demonstrate their ability to act collectively on the global challenges that threaten us today as Nazism threatened previous generations, and which can only be confronted collectively - climate change, terrorism, migration, Africa's development and the destruction of our environment. When the EU begins to prove that it can make a difference, the voters will understand the need to make it fit for purpose.