It is interesting, from time to time, to get a completely different perspective on Europe from the one that tends to prevail in Britain, and where better to go than the newest Member State, Romania?

A well-known Romanian newspaper editor, Dana Spinant, has just penned an article on her country’s accession to the EU and why it meant so much to her fellow compatriots.

It concentrated on the freedoms and stability the EU can guarantee, attributes of he Union many of us in the western half of Europe take for granted. It is perhaps a sign of just how successful the EU has been, that its primary objective, to first create, then maintain and most recently to spread peace, stability and democracy, is rarely celebrated by the older EU members.

Spinant writes: “For Romanians, as for Bulgarians or others who lived behind the Iron Curtain, the chance to read more than one newspaper and the right [even!] to a fair weather forecast, let alone the right to hold a passport and travel abroad, are not to be taken for granted.

“So Romanians still do not find obsolete the arguments that the EU is good because it brought peace and contributes to spreading freedom and democracy. They see the point – since most of them were born in a world where none of those existed.”

In Britain for more than a hundred years, and even during the world wars, we have enjoyed a fairly democratic political system, something which makes us, with the Swedes, almost unique in Europe - and uniquely complacent about it! Dana Spinant points out that it is this stability, which the EU has gone on to foster across the continent that is craved so much by new EU members.

Spinant goes further: “The EU’s role was never meant to be just making Romanians richer. That would be a welcome side effect, but the EU’s primary role should be to provide a solid guarantee against bad governance of Romania by Romanians.

“A rather cynical conclusion would that the more strings there are attached to EU membership, the better for Romanians. Italians’ high enthusiasm for the EU is no different. Ordinary Italians have traditionally seen the Union as a welcome constraint on Rome’s volatile and untrustworthy politics…. Tying the hands of their politicians with EU rules that are good enough to be applied in Germany and Sweden sounds like a very good plan to most Romanians.”

Hmm! One certainly doesn't need to go that far as regards most Member States, including, one hopes, Britain. But Dana's general point remains valid.

She concludes: “The admission of these new EU citizens should lead older members of the Union to revisit their perception that the EU’s initial virtues – consolidating peace and spreading freedoms – are passé. As an earlier generation of Europeans, who remember war, who lost their parents or close family on the front between France and Germany, bows out, younger generations start to question, coldly and pragmatically, the EU’s existence.”

“The EU’s raison d’être is perhaps more fragile now as the generation of those who ‘know why’ the Union is good for them departs the scene. But Europe’s newest citizens still know why.”