Europe's mission of reconciliation has not ended

May 9 was the day the Second World War ended in Europe, a war whose outcome was to cast its long shadow across our continent for decades to come. Pax americana and the Marshall Plan offered the war-ravaged Western Europe a security guarantee and the beginnings of a fresh start as the Iron Curtain was drawn across the face of the continent by the Soviet Empire.

This US engagement was a necessary and indispensable prerequisite to modern European integration but it was five years later that the sufficient condition, which marked a true European renaissance, was met on May 9, 1950.

Inspired by Jean Monnet, the foundational declaration delivered by Robert Schuman on that day 56 years ago is now celebrated as Europe Day. It offered a new dynamic. It developed the idea of new supranational institutions to manage Europe's coal and steel industries to sustain the peace from those sectors that had helped fashion the weapons of war. It preached creative reconciliation between former enemies as the core of its hopeful message.

That message of creative reconciliation has endured to this day with in particular the recent enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe being its most dynamic contemporary expression.

The twin defeats of the referenda in France and the Netherlands last year have exposed a crisis of popular legitimacy of national politics and their political elites as much or more than they have revealed anxious attitudes about the EU and its policy direction.

Europe needs to listen but, given the complex roots of the problem, should avoid knee-jerk reactions that simply misunderstand the challenge and respond by overcompensating and going too far.

One of the debates now engaged as a result is the question of the limits to Europe. I regret to observe that there is now a risk in some political quarters of a drift to neo-protectionist policy preferences. For Europe and its peoples this I believe would be a road to nowhere.

The neo protectionist policies to which I refer cover a broad front and include social policy anti-reform conservatism, promoting national champions when Europe sorely needs to foster global champions, trade protectionism, tightening up on immigration and slowing down or stopping enlargement as a response to voter concerns.

Europe open and free has served us well in recent decades. Narrow national or sectional interests are not the way forward. This is the lesson from Europe's past.

The EU needs to consolidate its approach to its relations with its near neighbours and to honour, subject to strict conditionality, the commitments it has entered into. We also need to explain better to public opinion the extraordinary and positive transformative power that the prospect of EU membership has brought to so many fellow Europeans.

This is the first time in the history of our old continent when on such a significant sub-continental scale we are united around a common vision and set of values neither at the point of a sword nor from the barrel of a totalitarian or imperial gun, but by the free will of free and sovereign governments and peoples. It is a truly historic achievement to be celebrated not disdained.

Economically it is a win-win situation for older and newer member states alike, and yet struggles to find expression in our current political process. Indeed, at the level of the individual, consider the example that today General Ante Gotovina of Croatia is in jail in The Hague awaiting trial while the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk is walking free.

Both of these circumstances happily are the product of the transformative power of the enlargement process.

We should not abandon this because of populist angst but rather must resolve to confront that angst through calm and deliberative debate and explanation. The challenges posed by the Western Balkans and Turkey, currently on the EU enlargement list, are very different from each other but in a world filled with tensions they remind us that Europe's mission of reconciliation is not yet complete.

The EU's own absorption capacity increasingly is debated and will necessitate a renewal of our Constitutional Treaty debate as indispensable to carrying effectively the burden of decision making in a larger future Union. It is contradictory to want enlargement but to refuse the necessary accommodating reforms.

We are now in a period of reflection. Even though significant national electoral deadlines are pending in different EU states, the time is approaching when reflection needs to be transformed into focus and follow through. Uncertainty feeds doubt, which in its turn undermines an already fragile self confidence.

Yet on one thing personally I have no doubt. Monnet, Schuman and the other founding fathers of European integration understood the centrality of the process of reconciliation to the idea and ideals of a new Europe. Now is not the time for this generation of politicians to abandon this enlightened inheritance from our recent past. As I have already remarked above, Europe's mission of reconciliation is not yet complete.

Mr Cox is president of the European Movement.