This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The thing about birthdays is that you can't choose when they fall. Europe's leaders might have that in mind as they arrive in Italy this weekend to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the founding act of the European Union. The timing of this party is less than ideal.
Next week the U.K. will formally announce its departure from the union — the first such exit in the EU's history. Even putting Brexit aside, Europe has never faced so many different problems all at once: a slow and unbalanced economic recovery; surging populism in France and elsewhere; a revanchist Russia and an erratic, isolationist White House exposing the frailty of Europe's defenses; hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving from the Middle East and Africa, testing the political limits of the free movement of people, one of the principles enshrined in the 1957 treaty.
And the EU's response to all this? So far, unimpressive.
Don't expect that to change this weekend. As well as celebrating the anniversary, Europe's leaders have approaching elections to contend with. France and Germany go to the polls within the next 12 months, and so might Italy. Voters have shown little appetite for the kinds of reforms that the EU needs to be contemplating. However, once those elections are over, Europe had better turn urgently to the repairs the EU needs. And the planning for those reforms can't start too soon.
Strengthening the monetary union ought to be a priority. Next year, the European Central Bank will need to scale back its program of quantitative easing. This policy has helped to assure investors that euro-zone government bonds are relatively safe. As the central bank steps back, fears that the euro system might break up could come to the fore again, calling the safety of some public debts into question and jeopardizing the whole enterprise.
Dealing with this will demand a cautious measure of further integration. At a minimum this ought to include completing the banking union, especially by adopting a common guarantee of deposits; achieving a genuine capital-markets union as part of deepening the single market in goods and services; and closer coordination of fiscal policy, ideally with provision for fiscal transfers across the EU's internal borders to help relieve the stresses of the economic cycle.
Matching what is financially necessary to what is politically feasible won't be easy. Yet so long as the union remains a half-way house — a single-currency area without the full array of supporting institutions — popular discontent will remain, and could worsen.
Despite the bad timing, the EU does have much to celebrate. Building on the ruins of the second world war, never forget, the union has secured peace and prosperity for hundreds of millions of people. It was an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking — and viewed in that light it has succeeded better than its founders had any right to expect. Yet its future success isn't guaranteed. If the EU is to survive, let alone thrive, for another 60 years, its governments will have to summon the will to rebuild.