So now we must live with the awful truth – the Treaty of Rome wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t even printed on. Due to the rush to secure Europe’s future before Charles de Gaulle’s election in France scuppered the entire project, the Italian printers had no time to deliver six complete treaties for signature by the heads of the founding nations on March 25 1957. Just the top page and the last page were printed, to keep up appearances: the rest were blank.

Nobody noticed: not one camera or onlooker spotted the delicious deception. Those in the know said nothing for half a century. What was to say? They overcame a technical hitch quietly and efficiently.

They could, of course, because they were unfettered by the obligations of administrative and bureaucratic accountability implicit in the terms of the document they were trying to get printed. Such pragmatism and corner-cutting today would be exposed as a major scandal and the perpetrators banished to the depths of the paper-clips department.

Still, at the EU’s 50th anniversary bash in Berlin on March 25, the world’s media hoped for similar intrigue to be exposed when the original treaty’s latest offspring, the Berlin declaration, took the spotlight.

To save time and ink, the EU’s 27 leaders were spared the duty of signing it: just three presidents of Europe performed the task – German Chancellor Angela Merkel, president-in-office of the European Council; Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament; and José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. Wouldn’t it be fun, we all said, if what they were signing turned out to be blank?And sure enough, it was.

Not blank as in bereft of print, but blank as in bereft of clearly defined purpose. There are many things that the Berlin declaration is not. It is not to be consulted as a legally binding text. It is not intended to be stapled to the front of the original Treaty of Rome. It is not, the authors insist, making any new promises.

So what is it? It is there to be consulted occasionally, according to UK Europe Minister Geoff Hoon, as a reminder of Europe’s past achievements and future hopes. Asked if the declaration should refer to the constitution, Hoon said that if it did, it would have to be a “not-too-specific reference to a document whose status has yet to be resolved”. In the end it didn’t, which was just as well, because even the most basic of sentiments in the declaration have caused controversy.

In the final version, in the original German language, it says: “We, the citizens of the European Union, are united in happiness.” In the Danish version, the joyful German tone has been amended to read: “…have united for the common good”. And in English it has changed to: “…have united for the better”.

These variations, according to Professor Henning Koch from Copenhagen University, are no coincidence: “It would come as a big surprise to me if the translators are bad at Germ......