BBC World Service, this is James Fletcher with The Inquiry.

This week, what happened to the European Dream? On June 23rd this year, British voters will go to the polls.

On the ballot will be a simple question.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union.

No matter the result, the mere fact that for the first time in 40 years a member country is seriously considering leaving

is a sign of the problems Europe is facing.

Across the continent, anti-EU political parties are on the rise.

In April, Dutch voters rejected an EU deal with Ukraine.

Even the President of the European Commission admitted recently that the EU project had lost part of its attractiveness.

Bureaucrats are fond of phrases like the European Project, but what does it actually mean and has it lost its shine?

This week we're asking what happened to the European Dream.

Part 1, a continent rebuilds.

Pointing to Western Europe as a shattered ruin,

from which great masses of the people could never hope to rise without American aid.

France had miraculously emerged from general strikes which paralyzed her national life.

But civil war had barely been averted.

Those days were grim, the circumstances were bad, Europe faced an enormous challenge of reconstruction immediately after the war.

Our search for the European dream begins in the aftermath of World War II.

And the men who would go on to become the so-called founding fathers of the European community

were very much immersed in that challenge.

Professor Desmond Dinan works at George Mason University in the United States

where he holds a chair named after one of those founding fathers, French civil

...