The European Union celebrated its 50th anniversary last week. As we look back on its unprecedented achievements, we must also look forward to new challenges. This anniversary is the moment to update our common project, which, in the age of globalisation, is more relevant than ever.

The case for Europe remains compelling. I could explain the rationale for common approaches on energy policy and climate protection. I could set out why we need the single market to match economic growth with social justice. Or I could defend the need to build a strong and efficient EU, able to shape globalisation according to European values and interests. But I want to focus on the values that define the EU and its history: freedom and solidarity.

Throughout these 50 years, the EU has been an inspiration and a force for freedom and solidarity. Two defining moments in my life illustrate this. The first was the Portuguese Revolution of 1974. I was just 18 years old and, like most young people in Portugal, I wanted to get rid of the dictatorship. The security forces controlled political activity. We lived in a backward and closed society. The revolution changed all that. And thanks to the solidarity of Western democracies, thanks to the perspective of becoming a member of the European family, freedom won the day in Portugal, and at the same time in Spain and Greece, too.

The second experience was the change throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, building on the determination for freedom shown in Budapest, Hungary in 1956 and Prague in former Czechoslovakia in 1968, initiated in Poland and culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in 1989. Here again, freedom was the goal, and Europe the inspiration. And here again, solidarity proved essential.

Through these experiences, I realised that Europe means freedom and solidarity for all Europeans. What started in the six founding member states in the 1950s has in the past 50 years spread to the entire continent. One of the EU’s great achievements is the emergence of a truly European spirit that lives side by side with national, regional, and local identities. European integration has not done away with this diversity; it has enhanced it. By building a common legal, political, and economic order around the cornerstone of the Treaties of Rome, we can live our differences as a source of mutual enrichment.

For centuries, European states made war against one another, but now we live in peace. Not in the peace of a precarious balance of powers and threats but at peace in freedom and solidarity. This is an experiment unique in history. But we must not take this for granted; it has to be nurtured very carefully. We want to achieve a Europe of results, with institutions that are democratic, efficient, and accountable, while promoting our values and accepting our responsibilities in the world. We must commit to put the EU where it belongs: at the service of its citizens. — The Christian Science Monitor