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The worlds most complex democratic experiment took shape 60 years ago this week in the lingering shadow of the worlds greatest, ugliest war.

From those early days of six members through to todays 28 and soon to be 27 members, its been a rollercoaster ride all the way.

Once harshly divided, Europe is now far more united, and undeniably richer.

Yet as the EU turns 60, just how much of that success is due to the EUs existence and the directives and regulations fashioned in Brussels and adjudicated in Luxembourg is still a matter of fierce debate.

Here are the key moments:

The original Six Nations (the post-war peaceniks, not the rugby tournament) of Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg refashion their coal and steel community into a customs union and the beginnings of a common market based on free movement of capital and goods. They do this via two Treaties of Rome, which establish the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). There are plenty of Founding Fathers, but no Founding Mothers.

Delegations attending the talks before signing the treaties creating the European Economic Community in March, 1957 | AFP via Getty Images

The Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) is established. This is the beginning of six decades of multilingual non-intuitive European acronyms, made-up words, and other forms of cruelty to language. Citizens everywhere, to the extent that they ever pay attention, are flummoxed. From semesters to comitology, from Antici to trilogues, the citizens of Brussels now stumble, punch-drunk, through such sentences as this: The new MPCC for CSDP will be there in the EUMS. Fonctionnaires receive nothing more than a 40 percent tax break to compensate for this hardship.

Throughout the 1960s EFTA exists as a viable (and more worldly) rival to the new European community, and with more members: Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. Its lower and looser ambitions hold back the growth of the European Economic Community that will later become the European Union.

Fifty years of ceaseless scrapping over the Common Agricultural Policy, sovereignty, Brussels-driven taxation and the use of majority voting in the European Council crystallized for the first time in 1965 when a petulant Charles de Gaulle withdrew his permanent representative to the EEC and stomped away from summits until he got his way. The Great National Sulk is now firmly established as a European diplomatic ploy.

French President Charles de Gaulle, in 1966 | AFP via Getty Images

Fearing a dilution of their highly prized sovereignty, won and lost and won again in Arctic conditions, the Norwegians turned their backs on the euro tribe in a referendum on membership. Decades before Tinder was invented, the Norwegians swiped left on the EECs profile before theyd even had a chance to get to know each other. It would be decades before a second date took place. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark had no such qualms (possibly because they skipped the pesky referendum part), and jumped straight into bed with the frisky EEC.

Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil becomes the leader of the first elected European Parliament, and Margaret Thatcher takes over as U.K. prime minister. It will be another decade before anyone thinks to nominate a female European commissioner, another two before there is a second female Parliament president, and three decades before Cathy Ashton and Catherine Day become the EUs chief diplomat and the Commissions top civil servant, respectively. There has never been a female Commission or Council president.

mile Nol retires as secretary general of the Commission after 30 years on the job, dating back to the very first day of the new European Commission. As many as five people hold the post over the next 30 years. The principal legacy of Nols bureaucratic marathon is the influence of French administrative methods and the widespread use of the French language in the European institutions.

The dramatic moment ushers in a new era for Europe, in which East and West converge. Not only that, it leads to the reunification of Germany and reignites the debate over how the rest of Europe can keep Germany now the Gulliver in Lilliput pinned to the ground. One of the solutions will be the euro, as much a shackling device as it is a currency.

West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 | Gerard Malie/AFP via Getty Images

Jacques Delors great achievement, the EU single market, is born the culmination of a tortured six-year pregnancy that began with the Single European Act. Although the policy was partly inspired by Thatcher, she fought Delors on it anyway. Despite its occasional growth spurts and being the apple of the eye of its Europhile parents, the EU single market has suffered from arrested development throughout its young life. In her 1988 Bruges Speech, Thatcher inveighed against a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. The Sun newspaper brings its destructive panache to the EU debate with its front page Up Yours Delors. (The British tabloids have been at war with Brussels ever since.)

Yugoslavia falls apart and war and genocide return to Europes doorstep. The EU, a body set up to ensure peace, watches impotently as its neighbors massacre each other in a series of atavistic meltdowns. The U.S. steps in to knock Balkan heads together and negotiate peace accords. The ethnically motivated conflicts peter out only in 2001, and the EU starts to bring the region under its wing.

Two Bosnian Croat soldiers pass by the corpse of a Bosnian Serb soldier killed in the Croatian attack on the Serb-held town of Drvar in western Bosnia, August 1995 | Tom Dubravec/AFP via Getty Images

This treaty, thrashed out in a snoozy little town at the intersection of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, is a high-water mark of euro-optimism, laying the groundwork for the euro and for ever greater union. Maastricht established clear rules for foreign and security policy as well as justice and home affairs. The European Community officially became the European Union.

Seventy-five years after Austria lost an empire, it is accepted into the EU. Having come to the party far too late, Viennas grand state buildings cant be put to EU use, and the Union is stuck with dreary Strasbourg and Luxembourg as its homes outside Brussels. The next day, Hungary the other wing of the former Austro-Hungarian empire becomes the first former Soviet satellite to apply for membership.

The Schengen Accord is concluded. No more border checks! No more hassle! Europe will live life in the borderless VIP lane. While the EU captures the popular imagination with this step forward, its a shame no one stops to create a coast guard, or a unified software system to monitor those coming and going in the Continents visa-free travel zone. (In a sign of things to come, the U.K. scoffs at Schengen and says no thank you.)

The Schengen Accord was concluded in 1995 | Charles Caratini/AFP via Getty Images

With the establishment of the European Central Bank, the EU joins the global race to elevate central bankers to the status of pinstripe-wearing Gods. The move follows on the heels of the rise of former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Bank of Englands newly granted independence.

Commissioners quit en masse in the wake of allegations of widespread fraud, including against dith Cresson. The French commissioner paid her retirement-aged lover as a staff member and oversaw the disappearance of EU research funds. Under siege, Cresson developed a newfound interest in civil rights, but failed in her effort to establish the right of political elites to sleep with their own kind while sending the bill to taxpayers.

The European Commission recommends that Greece become the 12th member of the eurozone based on falsified economic indicators. Economists everywhere warn that the eurozones governance is incomplete, akin to a half-built house that wont be able to weather a cyclone.

Travelers everywhere celebrate not having to pay extortionate cambio fees while traveling, thanks to the euro, which quickly gains the status of the worlds No. 2 currency behind the U.S. dollar and hands itself a financial time-bomb in the process. Germany, which can cope with the debt, borrows more cheaply than ever to become a global export powerhouse that will dominate other European economies. Others also borrow like the Germans, but fail to remember that they are Spaniards, or Italians, or Greeks.

The Commission blocks a proposed merger between American companies GE and Honeywell, and proves it can set the global agenda on competition policy. The power play infuriates the Americans, who invented the field of antitrust and now see their companies become dartboards for Brussels. Fifteen years later, a string of billion-euro fines, repayment orders, and multi-year investigations will leave the worlds biggest companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Gazprom, Heineken and Saint-Gobain, thoroughly dazed and confused.

There are scenes of exalted celebration in eight former Soviet states, as well as in wee Cyprus and mini Malta, which join the clubs ranks as part of the EUs biggest enlargement effort. For the first time, more than half of European countries are members of the Union. Old Europe starts to get jittery.

A European constitution is drafted with great fanfare. Some of its authors hope it will become Europes version of the U.S. constitution a template for democrats worldwide. But voters in France and the Netherlands ruin the dream, rejecting the constitution and throwing the Union into a period of reflection. The EU emerges from its depression by crafting the Lisbon Treaty which is again rejected, this time by the Irish.

The global financial crisis, which the EU initially blamed on American cowboys, hits home. It sees the EU supervising the rescue of one bank a day, puts the Unions single market at risk, and sends unemployment soaring, growth plummeting and several countries into humiliating EU-funded bailouts. Most European governments have blithely neglected to implement structural reforms that would have helped their economies absorb the shockwaves, but they find it easier to blame Wall Street, George W. Bush and Brussels.

Europe was battered by the 2008 financial crash | Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

The Union strengthens its arsenal by establishing a bailout fund and banking union. It is ruthless in spanking countries that have broken the EUs budget rules and need a bailout, especially Greece. But there are successes in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which take their bitter medicine and turn their budgets around.

Greece has struggled to climb out of an economic hole | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

The EU has a visa-free travel zone without any real migration policy or effective external border. This calamitous oversight becomes apparent in the summer of 2015, as refugees and economic migrants flood into the EU, skirting makeshift border fences and heading for Germany. Mutti Merkel establishes herself as the new face of global liberalism by welcoming them with open arms. Brussels is sidelined as national governments initially come to an agreement on refugee relocation and resettlement, then largely refuse to implement it.

The U.K. votes to leave a union it never fully embraced, setting off an existential crisis among the blocs 27-member rump. Britains vote comes to symbolize a strain of nationalist populism that imperils the Union ahead of a string of national elections. As officials on both sides of the Channel mud-wrestle over the logistics and implications of untangling Britain from Brussels, Brexit becomes the EUs obsession, with negotiations threatening to drag on well past the two-year limit set out by Article 50.

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The rise(s) and fall(s) of the European Union - POLITICO.eu