German Chancellor Angela Merkel, EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering sealed the Berlin Declaration on Sunday sending forth a common call for a "renewed common basis" for the 27-member bloc by 2009.

The ceremony was the chef d'oeuvre of the EU's 50th birthday party marking the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which established the European Economic Community and direct forebear to the EU.

Despite this buoyant mood of European unity, even before the ink on the treaty had dried, policy-makers were already showing signs of the division which brought down the constitution in France and the Netherlands during the 2005 referendum.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi declared that Europe's "period of mourning" was over, and stated that the EU would need to recover its "creative madness" to foster discussion once again.

European officials will need to determine how much of the old draft to repose on before moving forward, with Prodi advising that the old draft, slammed for being too clumsy and inaccessible, be kept with new rules being added. 

He called the old treaty "a very solid basis" to work from, but others counter-pointed that the rejected version must be reworked. 

Commemorating the EU's successes in bolstering European democracy, Merkel waxed lyrical about her childhood in East Germany to remind people about the eternal hope of change.
 
"I never believed that I would be able to travel freely to the West before I was old enough to retire," she said at the ceremony in central Berlin, a few blocks from where the Berlin Wall once cast its ominous shadow.

The EU's half-century declaration omitted any reference to religion on the insistence of France and other secular-minded states, but Merkel, whose father is a Protestant minister, said in her speech, "for me personally, this understanding of humanity results from Europe's Judeo-Christian roots."

EU finance ministers will now analyze Europe's economic outlook over two days, looking to bolster investor confidence in the old world’s financial markets after February's global market crash.

The ministers, convening in Brussels, are expected to support a slew of plans that would create a level playing field for payments across all EU nations and ease restrictions on cross-border banking mergers.

Whilst the strong European economy did not instill the fear in investors, concerns of a knock-on effect have slowed any rise from the existing torpor.

The European Commission said "the recent turbulence in global equity markets was too limited to have impacted significantly on the aggregate euro area or EU economic performance."

(China Daily via agencies March 26, 2007)