The back of the ESEC headquarters building, the Palais d’Iena, looks out over a fairly scruffy modern office block (picture). Until a few days ago, the building housed the officials of a European organization, Western European Union, which has now, thanks to the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on a common foreign and security policy, disappeared (it will disappear completely as of July this year, I believe). It is, if you like, a piece of history in the unmaking. It reminds me of our own ‘shrine’ to the European Coal and Steel Community (born 1952, died 2002) on the third floor of the Jacques Delors Building in Brussels. The difference is that the initial Treaty of Paris was signed for a duration of fifty years. Thus, the ECSC simply expired. The WEU, on the other hand, was created by an open-ended Treaty (the 1948 Treaty of Brussels) that was simply overtaken by events and therefore dissolved: a rare example of a disappearing organisation.
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