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50 Years After Landmark Treaty, Can France and Germany Save Europe? From Time of January 22, 2013 Coming just 24 hours after Barack Obama’s star-studded presidential inauguration that drew millions of TV viewers around the globe, Tuesday’s celebrations in Berlin of the 1963 Franco-German friendship treaty never stood much chance of commanding the world’s rapt attention. The world would do well to stifle its yawn and reconsider. Fine, the anniversary festivities may not be the stuff of banner headlines or hours of live TV news coverage — not even Tuesday afternoon’s joint session of the two countries’ Parliaments (yes, that was the climax event). But despite that, the future of the Franco-German partnership and its historically central role in E.U. construction will be essential in shaping whether news coming out of Europe — and affecting the rest of the world — is mostly good or bad in coming years. It will also determine whether the recent clashes over the euro are troubling signs of things to come or a passing exception to the wider, 50-year rule of close partnership. The élysée Treaty feted Tuesday in Berlin was signed Jan. 22, 1963, by French President Charles de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The accord sought to closely bind the two continental powers in mutual projects as a means of averting the clashes of interests that led them to wage three wars against each other during in the previous century. Though it followed the 1957 Treaty of Rome that laid the foundations for what became the E.U., the Franco-German partnership has served as the motor driving rising ambitions, expanding borders and deepening integration of what’s now a 27-nation, 500 million-person bloc. That’s not to say serious friction in the E.U.’s version of the U.S.-British “special relationship” hasn’t arisen over time. Then French President Fran?ois Mitterrand actively sought to prevent German reunification he feared would leave the former foe too economically and politic