The EU has a motto, did you know that? Well, I didn't, until I read Alain Lamassoure's book called Histoire secrète de la Convention Européenne (I'll review it in a future post). The EU's motto is "United in diversity".
Lamassoure recalls the small internal debate among the members of the Convention to come up with a motto that most would like. At first, some proposed something modeled after the French Liberté, égalité, fraternité, where the 3 main values of the EU would be displayed. The first proposition was "Peace, Freedom, Unity" but is was judged a bit corny.
Then, somebody came up with the idea of keeping the 3-word idea, but using words from several Euro languages. For instance, the following motto was proposed "Friede, Liberty, Solidarnosc". The idea was to use the German word for Peace to show how much progress the friendship between Euro countries had made since 1945, the word Liberty to please to both the French and the British as those two people were the first in Europe to endorse political freedom, and the Polish word for solidarity to remind us of the struggle of Eastern Europeans against totalitarianism. But people objected that the people whose language had not been chosen may not be happy with this motto.
Then, somebody said" What about "All together"? or "Together for tomorrow"?. But people objected that this sounded like a bad political slogan.
Finally, the Convention settled on "United in diversity", a motto to be translated in all the Euro languages.
Yet, as Lamoussoure says, the motto is a bit flat and .... really close to that of the US (E pluribus unum - Out of many, one). In a way, it is very compelling that the union of the 13 colonies be put into parallel with the union of our 25 states. The hard thing is to preserve state rights, while building something above them.
By the way, Wikipedia has some interesting facts about the US motto. Finally, I must add that the US has a second motto, officially adopted in 1956: "In God we trust". Now, I'm not sure that the EU will come with something close to that motto any time soon ;-).