Europe Day is celebrated on 9 May, marking the Schuman Declaration of 1950, the political act that set the process of European integration in motion. It is an opportunity to return to the origins of a project that transformed cooperation between States into a stable framework for peace, law, economic growth and international presence.

The proposal put forward by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman was to place Franco-German coal and steel production under joint control, opening the initiative to other European countries. From that first nucleus came the European Coal and Steel Community, the premise for the later European Communities and today’s European Union. The choice was not merely economic: coal and steel lay at the heart of industry, reconstruction and the very possibility of waging war. Placing them under common management meant creating a concrete bond between countries that, only a few years earlier, had fought one another.

“With the Declaration of 9 May 1950,” observes Georg Meyr, Professor of History of International Relations, “Robert Schuman proposed a new model of international relations, going far beyond the logic of simple economic cooperation between States.” The context was that of a Europe struggling to recover from the Second World War and from the decline of its global primacy, consumed by the fractures of the first half of the twentieth century.

The strength of the proposal lay precisely in its visionary realism. It did not imagine Europe as a finished construction, but as a process: starting from essential functions, building common institutions, and gradually making what once seemed impossible both advantageous and necessary. The coal and steel sector, Meyr recalls, had been one of the most sensitive areas of tension between France and Germany; its supranational management pointed to a new path, open to those States ready to join. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands did so immediately, while the geopolitics of the time effectively excluded countries under Soviet influence.

One of the most original features of European integration can be found in this method: not the abolition of States, but the gradual construction of shared sovereignty. “Only the functionalist approach,” Meyr underlines, “makes the realisation of the United States of Europe imaginable in perspective.”

Over time, that political intuition has acquired an increasingly broad legal form. “The European Union,” explains Giuseppe Pascale, Professor of International Law, “has not always been a Union.” Its roots lie in the European Economic Communities, established in 1957 by the Treaties of Rome, in which States acted mainly according to the intergovernmental method and decisions were almost always adopted unanimously.

Since then, the framework has changed profoundly. The European Union as we know it today is governed by the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, that is, by the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Above all, however, it has extended its field of action well beyond the original common market. “The Communities,” Pascale recalls, “had no competence in the protection of fundamental rights, nor did they provide for a common European citizenship. In these areas, by contrast, the European Union is now competent, with countless advantages for anyone living on European soil.”

This is one of the less visible, yet most far-reaching, steps in the European construction: the market has also become a space of citizenship, and economic institutions have generated rights, procedures, safeguards, forms of representation and instruments for common action. The decision-making process also reflects this transformation. Most EU acts, Pascale notes, are no longer adopted unanimously but by majority vote, a sign of the growing interconnection among Member States and of an institutional solidarity that has become part of the European legal order.

The EU has also equipped itself with legal rules in the field of diplomatic relations and with its own diplomatic agents, who represent it in third countries and before other international organisations within the framework of the European External Action Service. “From 1957 to today,” Pascale concludes, “the federalist framework has therefore made significant progress, including and above all on the legal level.”

The question today is whether this architecture is sufficient in a more fragmented and competitive international context. For Federico Donelli, Professor of International Relations, the European Union remains “one of the few actors capable of combining economic weight, regulatory strength and a multilateral vocation.” This is a rare combination, which has made Europe influential not only for what it produces or trades, but also for the rules, standards and principles it is able to project externally.

The crises of recent years, however, have revealed the limits of a model that, in order to truly matter, must be supported by a greater capacity for action. Industry, energy, technology and security have become central dimensions in global power relations. In this perspective, Donelli refers to the Draghi agenda, which places common investment, innovation, defence, the reduction of strategic dependencies and deeper integration of European markets at the centre.

“If it is to truly count in the world,” Donelli observes, “the EU must transform its internal interdependence into external political power, overcoming decision-making fragmentation and delays in the implementation of common policies.” The challenge is not to replicate traditional models of force, but to acquire the capacity to defend and promote its interests without giving up its own normative specificity.

In a system in which trade, energy and technology are increasingly used by global actors as levers of power, Europe cannot limit itself to being a large regulated market. It must continue to be a project founded on law, cooperation and values, but with faster, more cohesive and more incisive instruments.

There is also another aspect that is often overlooked in public debate: Europe’s role in progressively bringing closer together economies that started from very different conditions. “Those who criticise the European Union,” says Luciano Mauro, Professor of Political Economy, “often forget that its history is also a history of convergence, that is, of reducing economic distances among Europeans.”

Since the Treaty of Rome of 1957, integration has fostered growth and helped less wealthy countries catch up. The accession of Ireland in 1973, Greece in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986 brought into the Communities economies that were still far from the more developed core. In the 1980s, Mauro recalls, Spain stood at around 70–75% of the European average, while Portugal was around 55–60%. After the single market of 1992, structural funds and foreign investment helped narrow the gap.

A similar process took place after the eastern enlargement of 2004–2007. Poland, for example, rose from around 51–52% of the EU average in 2004 to approximately 80% in recent years. “This is what convergence means,” Mauro explains: “those who start further behind can move closer to the wealthier countries. In concrete terms, it means more equality among European citizens.”

In this reading, the economic dimension is not separate from the political one. European integration has not only created a larger market; it has also helped reduce historical differences between countries, territories and citizens. For Mauro, rejecting the Union often also means rejecting this reduction of distances: “perhaps this is precisely what nationalisms do not like.”

What emerges is an image of Europe that is far removed both from rhetorical celebration and from oversimplified criticism. The Union is at once historical memory, legal order, economic space of convergence and an international actor still in the making. Its strength has been to transform national interests into common institutions; its difficulty today is to do so quickly enough in a world where strategic competition, technological transitions, energy dependencies and new political fractures call for more timely decisions.

This reflection is also part of the history of the University of Trieste and of its presence in Gorizia. The degree programme in International and Diplomatic Sciences, established in 1989 at the Gorizia University Campus and celebrated in 2024 on the thirty-fifth anniversary of its foundation, has long been a space for education and analysis dedicated to international relations, diplomacy, European politics, international economics and comparative political systems.

Gorizia, a border city and today a European laboratory, makes the meaning of this reflection particularly concrete. Here, Europe is not only an institutional framework, but a reality that crosses territories, languages, memories and everyday practices. In a place marked by the history of the twentieth century and by its dividing lines, studying Europe means looking closely at what integration has made possible and at the questions that remain open.

For this reason too, Europe Day offers an opportunity to connect memory, education and civic responsibility. In Gorizia, within the degree programme in International and Diplomatic Sciences, the European project continues to be studied not as an acquired legacy, but as a historical, legal, economic and political process to be understood in its evolution and in the challenges it faces today.