EU Celebrates 60th Birthday As European Leaders Scramble To Hold “Fraying” Union Together

Today in Rome, the EU celebrates its 60th anniversary. Leaders hailed the visionary “war generation” of leaders from old foes France and Germany who signed the Treaty of Rome in the same room on March 25, 1957, along with Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; some offered personal memories of their own generation’s debts to the expanding European Union.
The celebration comes at a strange time: just four days earlier, UK Prime Minister Theresa May, absent from the ceremony in the Italian capital, delivered an unprecedented blow to the bloc’s growth by filing Britain’s formal exit papers, an event which underscores the biggest problem facing the EU: as Reuters puts it, it is “fraying”, as former Greek finmin Varoufakis said yesterday, it is “disintegrating.” The truth is somewhere inbetween.
Another irony not lost on cynical observers: today’s celebrations take place in the one European country which boasts the greatest number of EU skeptics.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Mar 25, 2017.