European Union: happy birthday and thank you

60 years, a Nobel prize and no wars. We should all thank the European Union for its existence. Personally, my life would not be the same without 4 years in Florence and two and a half in London courtesy of the training and research funds of the Union. But more than this selfish gratitude, we should thank the founders for all these decades of peace and freedom. Without the European institutions that made possible the European dream, Spain would perhaps never have been a democracy. For my mother, it was a great thing to be the first woman to leave her village to go to a University. Her mother spent all her life without never travelling more than 100 km away from her home. For many of the younger generations today, going to Universities in other countries in Europe is routine. It is very sad, especially for us anglophiles, that we cannot celebrate this birthday with our British friends, although so many of them would like to join in the party. Mike Rice-Oxley, writing today in The Guardian, is one of them, and we should pay attention to his message: "Where did it all go wrong? Looking back, it’s clear that this Europeanisation was perhaps only relevant to an outwardly focused, relatively privileged minority, to people interested in a world beyond the end of their street and able to afford to investigate it. The tide turned in the 2000s, though it’s still quite hard to pinpoint precisely why. Immigration? Economics? Euro-crises? Elitism? Complacency? Boredom? Or perhaps simply that those who talked down the EU were just better at doing so than those who talked it up. People say you can love Europe without loving the EU. That’s the wrong end of the telescope for my generation. It was the camaraderie and fraternity the EU fostered that helped us discover and fall in love with Europe. And that makes the divorce so much more bitter." But this was not a marriage, this was brotherhood. Who knows, perhaps we'll be together again in future birthdays.