Читать книгу European Integration - Mark Gilbert - Страница 21

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 a European legislature and executive as strong and as important as those that meet and act at Washington. Nor will all this succeed unless the discrepancies of language, race, culture, and religion can be so far overcome, that by slow degrees the members of the new State may come to value their new citizenship as much, and at last more, than their old; so that when any great trial comes, when State membership draws one way, and Federal membership another, they may, as the Americans did in their trial, deliberately prefer the Union to the State.²

Seeley was no more able than Hugo to suggest a plausible method of achieving this state of affairs, although his remark that a federation founded upon intergovernmental cooperation is a mockery was a powerful idea that continues to drive the desire for “more Europe”—that is, more supranationalism—to this day. In the late nineteenth century, there was no willingness among the statesmen of Europe to put such generic plans into practice. The emblematic political figure of the age was Bismarck, the epitome of realpolitik, and war was regarded by every European cabinet as an instrument of policy, not as a pathology to be eradicated by purposeful statesmanship. Although a precarious peace was maintained by competing alliances, general war was an ever-present prospect. European nations constantly threatened one another with war over colonial disputes or over the conflicting aspirations of the peoples of the Balkans. A newly literate population was titillated by newspapers espousing inflammatory doctrines of national superiority. All nations except the British maintained large and wasteful armies: the British maintained a huge navy and spent money liberally to ensure that no other power, especially Germany, could challenge their dominance at sea. In August 1914, the tensions accumulating in European societies found an outlet. People went to war with joy in their hearts, but soon learned that killing, like the mass production of commercial goods, could now take place on an industrial scale.

The nations of Europe resorted to war despite the fact that they had become economically interdependent. The late nineteenth century was an age of realpolitik, imperialism, and racialism, but it was also a period where trade flows increased rapidly and where the transfer of people, goods, and capital was exceptionally free. Britain was Europe’s banker and still the workshop of the world; Germany was its industrial powerhouse and engineer; Eastern Europe provided grain and raw materials; France and Italy sold high-quality consumer goods to Britain and Germany. The gold standard, which was the basis for all national currencies, facilitated trade.

Passports were not necessarily a requirement for travelers.³ If an upper-class English family wanted to spend a half year at a pensione in Florence, enjoying a “room with a view,” it could set off from Victoria Station with a purse full of gold sovereigns, or an address to which money could be wired, with the same ease that tourists today can fly by Ryan Air and pay by credit card or euro banknotes. The only real difference was that they traveled far more comfortably. Some contemporary thinkers, notably Norman Angell, a British scholar and journalist, wrote bestsellers that contended—on the eve of the Great War—that war between the major states of Europe had been made futile (and perhaps impossible) by virtue of the closeness of their economic and cultural ties.⁴

World War I broke the Europe of dynastic monarchies for good. Russia became a communist state; Italy became fascist. Germany became a humiliated republic whose leaders never fully established their right to rule. Austria-Hungary was dissolved, and its successor states, after an initial fling with constitutional government, mostly became authoritarian regimes.⁵ Maintaining the peace was the task of the League of Nations, which was based in Geneva and which aroused great hopes among the political elites of Europe, despite the decision of the Congress of the United States not to join an organization that President Woodrow Wilson had done so much to create. Liberal thinkers and statesmen advocated intensifying political cooperation within the broader framework for security established by the League. In fascist Italy, the country’s leading political economist (and future president of the republic of Italy), Turin professor Luigi Einaudi, was a stern critic of unchecked national sovereignty: constraints on the power of states to do as they willed were essential for peace, he believed.⁶ An Austrian aristocrat with a Japanese mother, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the “Pan-Europe” movement, won many adherents among the elites of all the major European countries by advocating greater continental European political unity against the menace of Bolshevism.⁷

The time seemed ripe for such ideas. Encouraging developments such as the Locarno Pact (October 1925), whereby the nations of Western Europe promised to resolve their differences through the League of Nations and to respect the borders established by the 1919 Versailles Treaty, were hailed as a major step toward greater European unity by its chief architects, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, the foreign ministers of France and Germany.⁸ Germany entered the League of Nations on September 10, 1926. Simultaneously, business leaders, alarmed by the growing economic power of the United States, began to argue that continental Europe needed a larger domestic market and a customs union to protect and develop its economy. In May 1927, the World Economic Conference in Geneva, attended by delegates from over fifty nations and held under the auspices of the League, gave European businessmen a platform to argue for a United Europe capable of resisting Anglo-American domination of world trade—but also for the American delegates to add their voices to calls for a European Zollverein. The end of the 1920s was also the heyday of what two Dutch scholars have called “technocratic internationalism,” that is to say, of the belief of many business leaders, engineers, scholars, and civil servants that peace and political unity in Europe would be served by transnational infrastructure projects such as cross-frontier highways or electricity generation.⁹

The culmination of this growing conviction in the utility of European political and economic unity was the so-called Briand Plan, which was initiated in September 1929 when the French leader, speaking in Geneva, issued a “dramatic call for European Union.”¹⁰ There was an element of realpolitik in this move—Briand feared that Germany was regaining strength and wanted to ensure that there were institutional safeguards for France’s interests—but there was also interest and sympathy from his listeners. The French statesman was tasked with drafting a concrete proposal, and on May 17, 1930, France published the “Plan for the Federation of Europe.” It envisaged the League’s European states being united in a “European Conference,” with a rotating presidency and a “Permanent Political Committee” of the more important states serving as the federation’s “instrument of action.” Briand underlined that such political institutions were a necessary condition for any kind of economic union since without them Europe’s “weaker states” would fear “domination” by the stronger ones.¹¹ Moreover, the prospective federation was to be “built upon” the idea of “union” rather than “unity,” by which the French statesman meant that it would be “sufficiently supple” to “respect the independence and national sovereignty of each of the states” while “assuring to all the benefit of collective solidarity for the settlement of political questions.” Briand identified the “creation of a common market” as the goal to aim for. In the meantime, the federation should handle general economic questions; “the establishment of coordination between great public works undertaken by European states”; communications and transit by “land, water and air”; economic development for Europe’s poorer regions; labor questions; hygiene matters such as the prevention of epidemics; and “intellectual cooperation” as matters of urgent priority.

The Briand Plan concluded by expressing the French government’s “firm hope” that Europe was “ready for a positive effort” to achieve greater unity and prosperity.¹² The timing was off for such proclamations. The age of Locarno was over. Stresemann died in October 1929, the target of vitriolic criticism in Germany from the forces of German nationalism; Wall Street crashed in the same month: economic growth financed by easy credit from the United States was about to shudder to a halt. On September 14, 1930, as Europe’s states discussed Briand’s initiative at Geneva, a hitherto little-known party called the National Socialists won 107 seats in elections to the German Reichstag and became Germany’s second-largest political party. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, had other kinds of European unity in mind.