This coming Sunday will mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which created a mechanism for co-operation and partnership in Europe after centuries of bloodletting and two intra-European civil wars that threatened civilisation itself. How little we regard this achievement. Yet - prosaic though it often seems - how magnificent it is.

As the six founders of the European Economic Community evolved into today's European Union of 27 member states, this extraordinary and infuriating organisation has shown an incomparable ability to spread stability and prosperity. The EU has proved a formidable soft power machine for inducing (generally) positive reform. Bureaucratic and buttoned-down? Yes. Slow and remote? Yes. Too often propelled by utopian rhetoric/crackpot schemes towards the political outer mists? Yes. But we have not seen its like.