European Integration. Mark Gilbert
notoriously identified as “Whig history.”7 The study of European integration has sometimes been the last redoubt of history of this kind. In much the same way that scholars once depicted English constitutional history as a seesaw battle between reformist “Whigs” (Liberals) and reactionary “Tories” (in which British parliamentary democracy was at length perfected by Whig statesmen despite the low cunning and the self-interested opportunism of the Tories), many scholars of European integration have portrayed European integration as a historical process whose forward march has been hampered by states and national leaders (de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher—indeed British leaders more generally—have a starring role as villains) irrationally attached to the principles of national sovereignty, which has resulted nevertheless in a unique polity that is an example to the rest of the world.
The problem with seeing any history in terms of reactionaries versus progressives is that it “abridges”—to use Butterfield’s term—the historical process. According to Butterfield, the historian’s job is rather the “analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.” It is to “recapture the richness of the moments, the humanity of the men, the setting of the external circumstances, and the implications of events.” When writing general history, which is of necessity a compressed summary of the whole, we have the right to expect, Butterfield adds, that the historian has not, by the selection and organization of the facts, “interpolated a theory . . . particularly one that would never be feasible if all the story were told in all its detail.”8
I agree with Butterfield’s injunctions on how to write general history. I have accordingly concentrated on capturing the much that was contingent about European integration and on evoking the drama of its many crises. Europe might have taken any number of forks in the road: striving to convey how easily things might have turned out differently at every important juncture was the book’s major challenge (and the one, whatever the book’s defects, which I am most confident of having met). In addition, as I hinted earlier, I have made a deliberate choice not to advance a broad theory to explain the dynamic of European integration but to concentrate on clarifying the issues at stake at any given moment in the EU’s emergence and explaining specific outcomes in such detail as was possible, given the amount of space available.
All the same, it is important for a general text not to become too immersed in detail. Detail for the sake of detail is an occupational hazard for professional historians, and scholarship on the history of European integration—if a gentle euphemism may be permitted—is not immune from this failing. Just as the EU itself can seem forbidding and opaque to its citizens, so can the EU’s history. Specialists who focus on a particular policy or event dominate the corpus of scholarship on the EU’s history. This book, by contrast, attempts to outline what European integration has amounted to. I would be the first person to advocate supplementing this book with more detailed studies on individual chapters in the EU’s story.
This caveat aside, I hope this book’s attempt to sketch what the Polish-British historian Lewis Namier called “the nature of the thing” is regarded as plausible. Historiography is ultimately portraiture, not scientific explanation. If a subject is drawn too boldly, it easily becomes a caricature; if drawn too fussily, it loses the character of the sitter. If it is drawn too remorselessly—warts and all—it will likely be relegated to the attic and kept out of public view. This book is not always a flattering portrait, but it is a sincere attempt to capture a very complex character in an impartial way. And if the finished portrait has too many wrinkles for the taste of some, it will at least act as a corrective to the many extant portrayals of a thriving subject blooming with health.
2
The Ideal of European Unity
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The idea of European political and economic integration was born of the historical experience of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Europe’s two civil wars embedded the conviction among policy makers and intellectuals that it was necessary to supersede the nationalism, both economic and political, that had destroyed the European continent almost beyond repair and had led to the loss of its global primacy.
There was, however, nothing inevitable about the postwar “European construction.” It is a mistake to think that greater integration of Europe’s nation-states was ordained by History, as some accounts imply. History is made by human agents: it does not unfold in an ineluctable pattern. Integration happened because European politicians decided it was a means of solving concrete economic and political problems for their peoples. From the first, the notion of greater European political and economic unity was concerned with establishing security through prosperity: a concrete objective. Whenever Europe’s politicians have forgotten this fact, and have given a loose rein to their idealism (or will to power), their peoples have reminded them brusquely of the core goal. “Europe,” as a political project, will always stand or fall by its ability to generate prosperity and to make the lives of the peoples of Europe safer and better. Many of the troubles of the European Union now can be attributed to the fact that the political elites decried by today’s populists have given their peoples the impression that reinforcing the EU’s powers has become an end in itself, not a means.
Europeans are unsurprisingly suspicious of political projects that sacrifice their immediate personal welfare for shadowy future goals. Nationalism, fascism, and communism—the three dominating ideologies of twentieth-century Europe—all imposed huge sacrifices. To use Arthur Koestler’s metaphor, all three ideologies conducted great “vivisectionist” experiments on the people of Europe (and beyond), but they left behind them only catastrophic destruction, millions of dead, and a moral desert. The optimism of the nineteenth century ended abruptly in the despair of the twentieth: Verdun, the Great Depression, racial hatred, and the abyss of genocide and total war. European integration was a moral response to these evils: it was an attempt to show the rest of the world (and to prove to Europeans themselves) that Europe could construct political institutions worthy of its civilization’s greatest achievements and of its peoples’ genius, to employ a word that statesmen used quite naturally in the 1940s.
THE AGE OF NATIONS
The intellectual roots of European integration go back to well before 1945. Throughout the nineteenth century there were sporadic attempts to imagine a Europe where the nation-state was subordinated to commonly agreed rules, or even supranational institutions. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, thinkers such as the French novelist Victor Hugo were advocating the “United States of Europe.” In a speech to the International Peace Conference in August 1849, Hugo said:
A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.1
Hugo’s speech was prophecy, not a coherent political project. Other prominent nineteenth-century thinkers and scholars, notably the distinguished British historian Sir John Seeley, were more concrete. Seeley specifically evoked the United States as an example to be imitated:
The special lesson which is taught by the experience of the Americans is that the decrees of the federation must not be handed over for execution to the officials of the separate States, but that the federation must have an independent and separate executive, through which its authority must be brought to bear directly upon individuals. The individual must be distinctly conscious of his obligations to the federation, and of his membership in it: all federations are mockeries that are mere understandings between governments.
I infer that we shall never abolish war in Europe unless we can make up our minds to take up a completely new citizenship. We must cease to be mere Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and must begin to take as much pride in calling ourselves Europeans. Europe must have a constitution, as well as the States that compose it. There must be