BriefingEurope

Happy Birthday EU: Will the Next 50 Be Bright as the Last?

Happy Birthday EU: Will the Next 50 Be Bright as the Last?

BRUSSELS -- A man with tattered trousers, tousled hair and a blood-stained T-shirt
wanders through a post-nuclear landscape. "Where am I?" he asks a veiled woman. "Belgium," replies the Muslim lady. "What are those sand dunes over there?" "The Ardennes," she replies, insinuating that climate change has turned this rain-soaked country into a desert. "And what's this heap of rubble I'm standing on?" "The remains of the Berlaymont" (the European Commission's star-shaped headquarters.)

Welcome to Europe 2057 -- the centenary of the EU's birth -- seen through the eyes of a troupe of Brussels-based correspondents.

If last month's annual EU press review is a reliable barometer of the mood in Brussels, the 27-member bloc is exceptionally jittery as it prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the document that gave birth to the current Union.

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