The New Totalitarian Temptation. Todd Huizinga
of Europe, the war dead numbered 6 million people. The United States mourned 290,000 American soldiers who died in Europe and Asia.
The war’s end finally came in August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing approximately 120,000 people. But the specter of another war, one that could destroy civilization, soon loomed on the horizon. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Now there were two rival world powers armed with nuclear weapons that could cause devastation on a scale unimaginable even in the wake of the recent war.
In the midst of all this, the Schuman Declaration and the ECSC were not just about preventing war between France and Germany. That was only the starting point for building a new Europe – and via this new Europe, for achieving world peace. The very name of the “European Coal and Steel Community” made clear that this new supranational entity was not to be limited to Germany and France. Jean Monnet, who would serve as the ECSC’s first chairman, invited the core Western European nations to the negotiations to establish the ECSC. Great Britain, protective of its national sovereignty, declined. Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg accepted and, with the entry into force of the Treaty of Paris in July 1952, joined France and Germany as the six founding members. They formed the nucleus of what was eventually to become the European Union.
The Schuman Declaration attributes the recent war, at least in part, to the failure to achieve “a united Europe,” and takes as a presupposition that Franco-German reconciliation is only a first step to the greater goal of uniting Europe: “The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany.”2 Likewise, the preamble to the Treaty of Paris establishing the ECSC speaks of building Europe, saying it can be done “only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity, and through the establishment of common bases for economic development . . . .”3
From the beginning, the primary movers behind the ECSC were aiming toward a united, post-nation-state Europe. “The indispensable first principle,” according to Jean Monnet, was “the abnegation of sovereignty in a limited but decisive field.” Cooperation alone was not enough; there must be “a fusion of the interests of the European peoples and not merely another effort to maintain an equilibrium of those interests . . . .”4 The signatories to the Treaty of Paris, in founding the ECSC, declared themselves resolved “to create, by establishing an economic community, the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the foundation for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared. . . .”5
The ECSC High Authority was perhaps the first example of a supranational institution that was endowed with real authority over its member states. The six member states of the ECSC had truly ceded a significant aspect of their sovereign powers – control of the production of coal and steel. This was something not only central to their economies in general, but also necessary for building the weapons and machinery to wage war successfully. Clearly, the ECSC was meant to usher in a radically new, united Europe.
FROM EUROPEAN DREAMS TO INSTITUTIONAL REALITY
The idea of European unity did not appear out of nowhere with the ECSC. It has a long history. Perhaps the most significant intellectual antecedent of the European idea came from the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, with his proposal for achieving perpetual peace through “a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of peace (fœdus pacificum), and which . . . seeks to make an end of all wars forever.” Kant suggested that this concept of federation “should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace . . . .”6
Before and after Kant published his idea for a league of peace, many people had thought about or proposed a unification of some kind among European nations, or some sort of “United States of Europe.” After World War I and until the ECSC’s founding, the idea of European unification picked up steam. The Austrian count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the International Paneuropean Union in the 1920s, with the goal of uniting Europe. The French prime minister Aristide Briand advocated a federation of European nations at the League of Nations in 1929. Several books were written in several countries promoting a United States of Europe. Seeking a way to achieve lasting peace, Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in 1946, said, “We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” In 1948, Churchill was honorary president of a Congress of Europe, which preceded the founding of the Council of Europe the next year. Today the Council of Europe has forty-seven member states, including all of the member states of the EU.
The idea of union among nations for the purpose of achieving world peace was not solely a European one. It was President Woodrow Wilson who proposed the first aspirationally global organization, the League of Nations, with the aim of securing a lasting international peace after World War I. In his “Fourteen Points” speech before Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson called for a “general association of nations . . . formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”7 Because of opposition in the Congress, though, the United States itself never joined. For this and other reasons, the League was weak and ineffectual from the beginning. By the time World War II broke out, the League was all but defunct. It was formally dissolved in 1945 when the United Nations officially took over its functions.
The United States was also central to the establishment of the United Nations. In fact, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who first coined the term “United Nations,” referring to the twenty-six countries allied against the Axis powers during World War II. Over the course of the war, the idea of the UN was developed under American leadership, and the UN Charter was agreed upon at a conference in San Francisco, in June 1945, entering into force on October 24.
The United States also played a large part in getting Europe on a practical path to unity. Tired of war and wary of Soviet designs on Western Europe, the U.S. promoted European economic integration with the Marshall Plan. U.S. officials also supported the idea of political and military integration. The ECSC enjoyed U.S. support and the U.S. even backed the idea of a supranational European army. As we will see, the war-weary Americans did not fully realize what kind of project they were helping to set in motion.
The key to translating the aspirations for European unity into institutional reality was Jean Monnet and his brilliant modus operandi, dubbed the “Monnet method.”8 Monnet embedded the utopian objective in a gradualist strategy that slowly moved forward toward the supranationalist goal but never clearly defined it. The strategy was to begin in the economic realm, avoiding openly political proposals, and with care never to take a step that would be unacceptable to people at any given stage of integration. A British Conservative author, Adrian Hilton, characterized the Monnet method so well that for years his words were wrongly attributed to Monnet himself: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”9
So a secret to the EU’s success has been its eschewal of any Great Leap Forward. Instead, the EU is moving toward its utopian goal in small, achievable steps, occasionally taking an unavoidable step backward. Charitably, one might say that a kind of benign deception is at the heart of this strategy. The purpose of proceeding incrementally is to avoid alerting average citizens to the fact that the objective is slowly to hollow out the power of their country and its government, the power that they best understand and that is accountable to them. Only the insiders – who see themselves as long-range thinkers and believe they understand best the complexities of international relations – can be allowed to know what is really happening. The EU would not be the EU without this culture of government by insiders and elites.
But the elites are deceiving themselves too. Neither Monnet nor most of his followers have seemed to know exactly what they are striving for. And even if they think they do, can anything based on deception – including self-deception – be good?
THE UTOPIAN IDEA OF WORLD PEACE
While