On Eve of E.U. Anniversary, Pope Warns of Bloc’s Fragility

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/world/europe/pope-francis-european-union.html

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ROME — On the eve of celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of treaties that led to the creation of the European Union, Pope Francis warned the bloc’s leaders on Friday that while their countries may be “inseparably linked,” the project could still fail.

Francis, addressing leaders including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France at the Vatican, offered a blessing for the Continent and a warning about the forces of populism and extremism. He said that too many Europeans took the benefits of peace for granted and that the unification project could run aground as nations, and citizens, turned inward.

There is “fearfulness” in Europe, the pontiff said, according to his prepared remarks. “Today’s prosperity seems to have clipped the continent’s wings and lowered its gaze.”

Francis, a staunch advocate of migrants’ rights, said that although European civilization had its roots in Christianity, Europeans must embrace a “multicultural world.” He urged leaders and citizens to rediscover a deeper capacity for empathy and tolerance.

Forgotten, he said, “is the tragedy of separated families, poverty and destitution born of that division.”

“Where generations longed to see the fall of those signs of forced hostility,” he added, “these days we debate how to keep out the ‘dangers’ of our time: beginning with the long file of women, men and children fleeing war and poverty, seeking only a future for themselves and their loved ones.”

His comments appeared to be aimed at least partly at Eastern European countries that have resisted the influx of migrants — many from war-torn and poverty-stricken regions in the Middle East and Africa — that fled to the Continent in record numbers in recent years.

Twenty-seven European Union leaders — representing all of the bloc’s members except Britain, which is preparing to leave the union — met with Francis in an ornate, marbled hall in Vatican City on Friday evening. That gathering was ahead of formal celebrations on Saturday of the Treaty of Rome, which was signed March 25, 1957, by six nations and established the European Economic Community, a major precursor to the European Union.

The idea of the weekend meeting was for the heads of state to break away from the seemingly endless crises of the past decade — and perhaps even rediscover a sense of aspiration and optimism. Beata Szydlo, the Polish prime minister, was among the most enthusiastic in her greetings of the pope, stooping to deliver what appeared to be a kiss to the papal ring.

Central to the proceedings is the Rome Declaration, a grand statement of the bloc’s renewed aspirations for the future without Britain. The document is supposed to help repurpose the union as a community of 27 nations without Britain, its second largest economy and one of two nuclear powers.

Its decision to leave plunged the union into another crisis, even as the bloc’s leaders struggled to manage a flood of migrants whose arrival strengthened the appeal of populist anti-European Union and anti-immigrant politicians in countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Yet there was dissension in the run-up to the gathering, with Poland and Greece threatening to block the Rome Declaration. The bloc is also still reeling from a debt crisis earlier in the decade and efforts to save the euro that led to crushing levels of austerity in countries like Greece.

More than 25,000 protesters, many of them angered by years of cutbacks and belt-tightening, were expected to march on Saturday through central Rome, where security is expected to be doubly tight in light of the deadly attack in central London on Wednesday.

The Treaty of Rome was the start of the longest period of peace in recent centuries, Francis reminded the leaders on Friday. European integration had its basis in a “clear, well-defined and carefully pondered project,” he said. But there has been a “lapse in memory,” he said, and many ordinary people no longer identify with the idea that arose from the ashes of the Second World War and the end of the Soviet Union.

The European Union is in danger of stagnation, even collapse, if leaders fail to inspire confidence in the project and to overcome populism and extremism, the pope warned.

“When a body loses its sense of direction and is no longer able to look ahead,” he said, “it experiences a regression and, in the long run, risks dying.”

In an interview this year with the Spanish newspaper El País, Francis invoked the example of 1930s Germany. “Hitler didn’t steal power, he was elected by his people, and later destroyed his people,” he said. “That is the danger.”