Robert Schuman Monument

The block in front of you carries, cut into its sides, the words that started the European Union. Above it, three steel beams rise and split at the top into six points — one for each of the six countries that signed up. The architect Robert Lentz designed it, and it was unveiled on the 24th of October 1966, the same day as the Red Bridge beside it, on the boulevard that carries the man's name. Robert Schuman was, in a very literal sense, a product of the borderlands he spent his career trying to dissolve.

Schuman was born in Clausen, in Luxembourg City, in 1886, to a Lorraine-born father who had taken German nationality after France ceded Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and a Luxembourgish mother. He grew up German-speaking under German administration, only became a French citizen after the First World War, and went on to serve as France's foreign minister — the man who, on the 9th of May 1950, put forward the Schuman Declaration proposing joint control of coal and steel production between France and Germany, so that war between them would become "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". That plan became the European Coal and Steel Community, the direct ancestor of today's EU.

It's easy to see, standing here, why Luxembourg claims a share of that legacy: a small, trilingual country wedged between France and Germany producing one of the architects of European integration feels less like coincidence and more like biography. Luxembourg City today hosts several EU institutions on the Kirchberg plateau, a few kilometres from here — a direct continuation of the project Schuman first proposed.