He was not alone.

He was not alone. Across the marble corridor of the St. Servaas Basilica, a young journalist named Ana Ribeiro from Lisbon was setting up a tape recorder, determined to capture the words that might rewrite Europe’s future. In the same room, Professor Elena Gruber, a political economist from Berlin, was already sketching the equations that would later become the “convergence criteria.” Their paths would intersect as the Treaty on European Union, now known as the Maastricht Treaty, unfolded—step by step, clause by clause, hope by hope.