BERLIN: France and Germany yesterday marked 50 years since a landmark treaty sealed their post-war reconciliation with a day of pomp, symbolism and celebration while papering over their differences.
French President Francois Hollande has traveled to the snowy German capital to join Chancellor Angela Merkel to fete the Elysee Treaty, inked in 1963, which heralded a new era of friendship between the former foes.
Eighteen years after the end of World War II, then French president Charles de Gaulle and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer formalized on Jan. 22 the cooperation that has since been a building block of European unity.
But the half-century milestone comes amid strains in the Franco-German partnership and as the European Union faces testing times over the eurozone debt crisis and euroscepticism in Britain.
France and Germany’s foreign ministers jointly insisted in a German newspaper that Europe was “not the problem, but it must be the solution” and urged a modernisation of the “European reflex” of former generations.
France, Germany fete 50 years of friendship
