BRUSSELS/ROME (Reuters) ? Failed by squabbling politicians, wracked by faithless financial markets, the European Union may flinch these days in the glare of world scrutiny. Its beginnings were very different. The "European Project" was born in the secrecy of a sealed-off chateau and a dusty turret room clattering with typewriters and high ideals.
"We worked day and night," says Marie Helene von Mach, who as a 20-year-old bilingual secretary was drafted in 1956 to the Chateau de Val Duchesse near Brussels to help prepare the founding Treaty of Rome. "I was so enthusiastic because I thought finally we might have lasting peace in Europe."
Now von Mach, like others infected by that early zeal, fears the project could be lost in a banal, consuming battle to save a euro currency meant to tie nations closer together.
"It's such a shame, such a disgrace that such a fantastic project has come down to no more than a currency. There has been a loss of idealism, vision."
A nimble and vivacious 75-year-old, von Mach stands in the small square turret room of the Chateau de Val Duchesse where she spent five months of her life. Now a store room cluttered with furniture, white walls yellowed and scuffed, it carries still the feel of the convent it once was.
Narrow slat-like windows are set high up in the thick walls. Light intrudes below high ceilings, but there is no view on the world outside.
"I remember the stench from the old oil stove."
"The officials down below would hammer out their drafts of the articles and send them up to us on this to translate and type out," she says, pointing to a recess in the wall that was once a 'dumb waiter', a small rope-driven lift used in the chateau's aristocratic days to move plates between floors.
"I would type them out in four copies on my old Remington typewriter. We would then send them back down, they would debate them, change them and send them back up, every full stop, every comma debated, and always the sense of fear it could all fall apart."
"SHE CAN TYPE A BIT"
That the Rome treaty was then signed with such public grandeur in Rome's 15th century Palazzo dei Conservatori testified to the hopes it embodied just 12 years after a devastating European war. The six-state 'common market' it founded grew into a 27-nation European Union ranging from Ireland's Atlantic shores to the borders of Russia.
Von Mach's generation had known war at first hand, her father nine years in Soviet captivity. On returning to Germany he joined the foreign service and, seconded to the inter-governmental conference, proposed a role for his daughter, writing history.
"He said 'my daughter is 20. She can type a bit. She might be useful'." A German, She also spoke fluent French.
"I was sworn to secrecy," she says. "I couldn't even give the address of the place to a taxi driver.
"The USSR was very suspicious about what was going on in Brussels. Remember this was just after the Hungarian uprising."
The Cold War was in full train after Soviet tanks put down an anti-communist rebellion in Budapest. Western countries led by the United States had formed the NATO military alliance, the Kremlin responded with the Warsaw Pact. Moscow watched warily for further moves to closer Western collaboration, alert to anything ceding influence to 'revanchist' West Germany.
Soviet suspicions were only deepened by work on a parallel Euratom Treaty creating a cross-border nuclear energy agency.
"There was great courage on the part of a small group of men to push ahead with a project that was often viewed with indifference or hostility even in their own countries."
This was no popular movement to tear down frontiers. Just as the nations of the 19th century were forged largely by elites, so this supra-national drive to bury the nationalism that had wrought destruction on the continent was drafted by a relatively small group, here physically isolated in chateau de Val Duchesse.
Many in France were still uneasy about linking their fate to a country that had conquered and occupied it so recently. Colonial entanglements were still occupying the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. Britain showed scarcely any interest, smarting from humiliation in Suez but turned still to Empire.
If the European project was born in Rome, it had been conceived six years earlier in Paris when Germany and France signed a treaty forming a common coal and steel community with other countries.
Paul Collowald was a French journalist reporting for Le Monde newspaper on the genesis of the European project. He interviewed French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman about his 1950 declaration outlining a vision of a community of nations.
"The Schuman declaration was 36 typed lines on an A4 page. Therein, was a text, a vision and a political will," said Collowald. "Nowadays, you get 10 texts, no vision and no political will."
SEEING OFF THE TRUCKS
The vision has waxed and waned almost cyclically. With the expansion to take in former Soviet client states after the collapse of communism, it took on a pan-European rather than a western European aspect. The seeds of the current euro crisis, however, were sown in a weakening of the push to political integration in a later Maastricht treaty.
Johnny-come-latelies such as Britain may never have subscribed with such enthusiasm as Germany to the vision of tempering national vanities with European aspirations. Their ideas remain grounded in more sobre notions of a trading community of sovereign nations.
Von Mach recalls seeing off the trucks that took the boxes with the typed copies of the treaty, her five months' work, off toward Rome. Years later she heard tell that not all went as smoothly as it might have in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.
The documents had been misdirected and delayed. In Rome, the printers had trouble getting the text set onto the ceremonial paper for the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to sign. The deadline was missed.
"It turns out they signed a blank piece of paper," she says with a laugh. "There was only the title page and the signature page."
Von Mach is saddened that the chateau bears little reference, beyond a modest plaque, to the events she lived through and their place in the history of the European project. But she has lost none of the pan-European zeal that marked her days at Chateau de Val Duchesse and sees the European dream surviving the trials of the euro crisis.
"Those days...would make a movie," she says.
She shares the optimism of her friend and fellow European Paul Collowald.
"I am an impatient and worried European but I've not given up hope," Collowald says. "In Chinese, when you draw the word crisis, the image means risk and opportunity at the same time."
(Writing by Ralph Boulton; editing by Janet McBride; additional reporting by Brian Love in Paris)
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