“Till death do us part”

The introduction of the right to divorce was never an innocent act. In England of all places this should come as no surprise. The country’s tumultuous first “exit” from a pan-European order, by means of the 1534 Act of Supremacy, was the result of a Tudor king’s wish to divorce his queen. It was Brexit avant la lettre. The political and legal order challenged by Henry VIII, the Church, was called “Rome”. Today’s second exit, Anno Domini 2019, will be from another order founded in “Rome”, the Rome of the Treaties.

In 1957, at that Roman founding moment, membership of the European Economic Community was entered into for an indefinite period. For eternity, in other words. The six founding states stepped into a new era. To celebrate the rite of passage, on 25 March all the bells of the Eternal City rang out. The perpetuity stipulation was exceptional. The coal and steel treaty signed by those same six states in Paris six years before was for a mere 50 years. This infinite duration was an invention of Belgian minister Paul-Henri Spaak, chair of the treaty negotiations. Lawyers protested, but Spaak stuck to his guns. Ties with the Community had to be irreversible and indissoluble, as in a marriage.