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This month marks the 50th anniversary of the European Union's founding agreement, the Treaty of Rome, but Europeans remain deeply divided about what the union is, who should be let in and what Europe's global role should be. How they resolve these disputes will determine the continent's fate for the next half-century.

It is important to recall that the Treaty of Rome was preceded by an earlier attempt at a coal and steel union, which tells us a great deal about its purpose. After the Second World War, the political leadership of France, Germany, and the other countries of Europe understood that any durable peace required pooling their ability to manufacture the implements of war.

Yet, partial integration was not enough. Integration in one area quickly spilled over into others. This powerful logic pushed Germany, France, the rest of Europe toward much deeper economic and political co-operation – a logic, incidentally, that is now just as much at work in North America as in Europe.

The end result is impressive by any standard. A European bloc with a single currency that is rich and at peace. Young people now travel effortlessly from Spain to Slovenia without ever noticing a border, and senior citizens from England retire in France or Portugal, receiving their pension cheques by local post and health care from local doctors without thinking twice.

Beyond peace between Germany and France, Europe's biggest success may be in taking poor or authoritarian states and helping them become rich democracies. Ireland, which joined Europe in 1973 as an economic basket case, is now known as the Celtic tiger. Spain and Portugal, which entered in 1986 as wobbly post-fascist democracies with Third World economies, are now the California and Oregon of Europe. And who would have thought Belgian and German economists would envy Poland and Estonia for their economic flexibility?

Even with these successes, the middle-aged EU is facing new and daunting challenges, some of which do not appear to have easy solutions. First is the question of legitimacy. From the outset, European integration has been an elite-driven project, negotiated by diplomats in treaty language impenetrable even to trained lawyers. As long as the union didn't appear to affect the lives of ordinary Europeans, nobody cared. But regulations pouring out of Brussels now includes everything from domestic security to the transportation of geese.

Both member states and citizens have begun to push back, asking, “What is the EU?” Some Europeans see it primarily a free-trade zone of sovereign states. Others consider it a new kind of federal state. Brussels bureaucrats carefully tiptoe around this question, but the failure of the European Constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 signalled that the gap between European institutions and the citizenry is now dangerously large. This week, leading European philosopher Juergen Habermas called for the creation of a directly elected EU president and foreign minister, a good idea that will probably go nowhere.

The public-opinion gap is especially large on the question of further enlargement. Bulgaria and Romania barely made it in at the beginning of this year, with Europe's leaders increasingly feeling that the union has grown too large and too fast. Although negotiations formally continue on Turkey, actual admission will require a sea change in public opinion, especially in a country such as France, where a referendum will be held on the matter.

Europe's political elites have refused to do the necessary spade work of preparing public opinion for Turkish membership. Instead, they remain inward looking, uncomfortable with multiculturalism, always worried about the next domestic election. In doing so, they fail to consider the broader implications of refusing Turkey altogether. If left out, Turkey will pursue its own security agenda, and in the context of a nuclearizing Iran, that can only mean developing its own nuclear program. Who could blame them?

In fact, the inability to engage in geopolitics is probably the EU's most serious problem. Defending the union's most basic interests will one day require warfare, and that is something the bloc refuses to consider. The EU's basic security documents do not even discuss the use of force. Instead they require any military operation to win the approval of the United Nations Security Council, effectively giving China a veto over EU foreign policy. As long as the EU possesses neither the ability nor the collective will to use hard power, it will not be taken as seriously as it desires on the international stage.

Fifty years after its “founding,” Europe needs to re-engage. But thinking geopolitically will require some sort of compelling vision that exceeds the union's original vision. Europe's mandate is no longer just about peace. Ironically, what the continent looks like 50 years from now will depend upon the power of the European imagination to think beyond its own borders.

Jeffrey Kopstein is director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.