The New Totalitarian Temptation. Todd Huizinga
one thing is certain: it has never been only about Europe. It began with no lesser aim than ending warfare globally; it was a child of Kant’s ideal of perpetual peace. Thus the opening words of the Schuman Declaration: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.”10 This statement, in almost exactly its original wording, became the first clause of the preamble to the Treaty of Paris, thereby establishing the safeguarding of world peace as the ECSC’s fundamental reason for being.
A radically restructured, supranational Europe heralding the advent of world peace: this dream was a mirror image of the other political ideologies that had made the fate of twentieth-century Europe. In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s genocidal pan-European dystopia of evil, and in the midst of Soviet communism’s ongoing global campaign to subjugate whole nations and peoples to its vision of a brave new world, the European idea was another political utopia brewing in the world. It is a utopianism of good, a soft utopianism, but it is utopian nonetheless.
And despite all the ways the do-gooder utopianism of the European Union is different from the “hard” utopianism of Nazism and communism, it has another thing in common with its totalitarian cousins: its ultimate goals are unachievable. But the pursuit of these impossible goals, like the pursuit of any utopian idea, cannot but cause real damage to real people. Seventy years after the end of World War II, the European idea is shaping up to be a tragedy of unintended consequences – the antidemocratic consequences of good people’s determination to prevent the reoccurrence of the tremendous evil they have witnessed. If the supranationalist vision of the European project prevails, democracy and self-government will steadily be eroded in the vain pursuit of an unachievable world peace.
The European Coal and Steel Community was unprecedented. But from the very beginning it was meant to be only the first step to an integrated, united Europe. Thus it was bound to be supplemented by organizations, institutions and agreements that would bring Europe closer to the integrated continent that the founders and their successors envisioned.
From 1952 to 1957, the ECSC was the only established institution advancing the supranational integration of Europe. During this period, though, there was an attempt to create another integrative organization, the European Defense Community (EDC). This was a truly audacious initiative by the six member states of the ECSC to launch a common European army. It proved to be a step too far, breaking Monnet’s rule of taking incremental steps that would not arouse opposition. The project was dropped in August 1954 when the French National Assembly rejected the EDC treaty.
FROM COMMUNITY TO UNION
Soon, in June 1955, negotiations began toward the next phase of European integration, the European Common Market. The result was treaties in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the latter intended to develop a common market for the peaceful use of atomic energy. The Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (TEEC), commonly known as the Treaty of Rome, is celebrated today as the most significant step toward the European Union until its formal establishment in 1992. Article 2 of the TEEC states:
It shall be the aim of the Community, by establishing a Common Market and progressively approximating the economic policies of Member States, to promote throughout the Community a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increased stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living and closer relations between its Member States.1
At that time, the participants were still only the six founding members of the ECSC: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Another milestone in European integration came in July 1967, when the European Economic Community merged with the European Atomic Energy Community and the European Coal and Steel Community to form the European Communities, also referred to unofficially in the singular, as the European Community (EC).2 The change from “European Economic Community” to “European Community” is an example of how the integrationists use language in artful ways to advance their agenda under the radar. Steeped in their own technocratic universe, they have developed a body of jargon understandable only to insiders. Using this EU-speak, European elites have long been adept at disguising the ongoing process of integration in linguistic subtleties that escape the notice of the uninitiated. Like the Monnet method, EU jargon forestalls opposition by veiling the long-term objective while at the same time quietly asserting it.
In this vein, the disappearance of the word “economic” from “European Economic Community” was highly significant: the European Community was moving beyond the economic sphere and taking on a political dimension. Europe now formed a community, encompassing anything implied in that vague but evocative word, not just the pursuit of better economic performance. Thickening the fog even further, the 1993 Treaty of Maastricht (more on that soon) officially created a European Community within the European Communities. As a European Union website states tersely, “After the Treaty of Maastricht the EEC became the European Community, reflecting the determination of the Member States to expand the Community’s powers to non-economic domains.”3
But European integration moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes taking a step backward and sometimes stalling. The establishment of the EC in 1967 came after much resistance to further integration from the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in the first half of the decade. Concerned to prevent the erosion of French sovereignty, de Gaulle opposed the inclusion of new members in the EEC, especially his cultural rival the United Kingdom. In addition, he was determined to prevent the possibility of France’s being overruled on important policy decisions. De Gaulle’s resistance sparked what is known as the “empty chair crisis,” when France boycotted all EEC meetings for seven months in 1965–1966. The boycott ended only after an agreement was reached to roll back some provisions of the Treaty of Rome, and thus to require unanimity on important issues rather than the qualified majority votes stipulated in the treaty for certain policy areas.
De Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, agreed in 1969 to consider letting new members into the EC. After long negotiations, Denmark, Ireland and the UK joined in 1973, becoming the first additions to the original six member states. This was the beginning of an enlargement process that has continued to the present day, with Greece joining in 1981; Spain and Portugal in 1986; Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995; ten new members – Cyprus, Malta, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – in 2004; Romania and Bulgaria in 2007; and Croatia in 2013. The EU currently counts twenty-eight member states, with the prospect of gaining additional members in the future.
Meanwhile, along with a widening of the EU, there has been a deepening via institutional changes that promote closer integration. After the European Communities were merged in 1967, the next significant institutional step was the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1979, which established the European Currency Unit (ECU), a reference unit valued at the weighted average of all participating European currencies. The EMS required currencies to maintain a value within a narrow band around the ECU in order to reduce exchange-rate fluctuations and lay the basis for an eventual monetary union. That year also saw the first direct elections to the European Parliament, which until then had been an appointed body made up of representatives from national parliaments. Henceforward, all members of the European Parliament would be elected to five-year terms. In 1987, the Single European Act (SEA) came into force; it set a deadline of December 31, 1992 to achieve the single market with free movement of capital, people, goods and services across borders throughout the European Community.4
The European Union was officially birthed with the ratification of the Treaty on European Union, commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty, in 1993. Here I note again the change from “community” to “union.” Few people had the time to reflect on the deeper implications of now being a “union.” The Maastricht Treaty included arrangements for a European Monetary Union (EMU), with a