SINCE THE DAYS OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE, AMSTERDAM HAS LOST HER FREEDOM TWICE: TO NAPOLEON, AND MORE RECENTLY TO HITLER.

THE GENERATION THAT REMEMBERS THE GERMAN OCCUPATION IS DYING OUT. MOST OF US DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LOSE OUR FREEDOM. WE TEND TO TAKE IT FOR GRANTED. WHICH IS WHY DAYS LIKE REMEMBRANCE DAY ARE SO IMPORTANT.

THE ZUIDERKERK WAS USED AS A MORTUARY FOR BODIES WHICH COULD NOT BE BURIED DUE TO THE FROZEN GROUND, DURING THE TERRIBLE HUNGERWINTER OF 1944-45. THIS BRINGS THE REALITY OF THE LOSS OF FREEDOM CLOSE TO US ALL.

TOMORROW, MAY 9, IS THE OFFICIAL BIRTHDAY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION!

And she’s only 66 years young. At least, that’s according to the decision of EU leaders meeting in Milan in 1985, when they decided to recognise this day as the birth of the movement that has led to the current EU.

However, this birthday remains one of Europe’s best kept secrets. Few Europeans are aware that on May 9, 1950, the first move was made towards the creation of what is now known as the European Union.

This past week across Europe celebrations were held in many countries commemorating the end of World War Two. We’re all familiar with the photos of the Allied soldiers liberating towns and villages, giving out chocolate and kissing the girls. But once the chocolate and kisses had been given out, did everybody simply go home and live happily ever after?

While we know who won the war, do we know who won the peace? The five years after the war were tumultuous years. Hatred and bitterness, mistrust and fear was rife. Hearts, lives, families and communities were broken. Most of Amsterdam’s Jews had been taken away to the gas chambers.

An Iron Curtain came down across Europe; the Berlin Airlift had to be mobilised to save a besieged city. Trade unions in France, Italy and the Ruhr Valley, masterminded from the Kremlin, did their utmost to bring governments down and to create chaos generally.

Europe was suffering a severe case of post-trauma stress disorder.

Against this background, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman surprised the world on the evening of May 9 by announcing a plan for France, Germany and other European countries to pool together their coal and steel production as ‘the first concrete foundation of a European federation’.

Calling upon those countries that had almost destroyed each other, he proposed the creation of a supranational European Institution to manage the coal and steel industry, the basis of any military power.

That day was the turning point in post-war European history. Hence the decision to celebrate 9 May each year as ‘Europe Day’.

Europe of course has existed for centuries, even millennia. But over those centuries, many terrible tragedies have happened. What began on May 9, 1950, was a process to break the old cycle of vengeance and violence, and a movement to build a community of nations.

Schuman envisioned ‘a community of peoples deeply rooted in the basic Christian values of equality, freedom, solidarity and peace’. He wrote that ‘loving your neighbour as yourself’ was a democratic principle which, applied to nations, meant being prepared to serve and love neighbouring peoples. If Christianity taught that we were all children of the same God, he wrote, ‘regardless of race, colour, social status or profession’, states too should be treated as equals. No race or nation could claim greater importance in God’s
eyes.

But this community, he warned, ‘cannot and must not remain an economic and technical enterprise; it needs a soul, the conscience of its historical affinities and of its responsibilities in the present and in the future, and a political will at the service of the same human ideal’.

The European Movement would only be successful, he argued, if future generations ‘managed to tear themselves away from the temptation of materialism which corrupted society by cutting it off from its spiritual roots’.

So if Schuman were here today, would he be celebrating Europe’s ‘birthday’? On the one hand he would be delighted by the unbroken sixty-six years of peace among the EU members, and by its expansion into Central Europe.

But surely he would be appalled by the false ethic of greed in the financial sector, and the ‘culture of death’ expressed in youth suicides, pre-natal infanticides (abortions), assisted suicides (euthanasia), low birth rates, rising murder rates, signs of deep spiritual poverty.

Surely he would be gravely concerned about the threats to our freedom today.