Читать книгу European Integration - Mark Gilbert - Страница 22

World War II is usually seen by proponents of European integration as being the “wages of sin” for European nations’ obsession with national sovereignty. If European democratic politicians had only had the good sense to realize that a larger market governed by collective political institutions was better than fragmented, restricted markets where every nation played by its own rules, then Europe would have attained greater prosperity and avoided fascism and Nazism, which are seen as the last great paroxysm of Europe’s age of nations: national sovereignty with the gloves off, as it were. There is something comforting about this belief, which is based upon a certain progressive generalization about human beings or, at any rate, Europeans; namely, that their political instincts tend naturally toward liberalism and internationalism so long as they are secure and well fed. If this belief is true, it naturally becomes the task of political leaders to provide these primary social goods. Between the wars, Europe’s democratic leaders are accused of having “inexplicably squandered” a great opportunity to set Europe on the road to greater prosperity and hence of having plunged Europe into the abyss.¹³

The progressive generalization can be traced back to the many intellectuals who proposed plans for European political unity and economic integration as an ideological and propaganda weapon against the militaristic and supremacist visions promoted by the fascist powers. British intellectuals—who had been ardent advocates of the League of Nations—were the principal originators of these plans. In Britain, the failure of the League in the 1930s only strengthened the search for internationalist solutions to the eternal problems posed by national sovereignty. The doctrine that wars broke out because of the insecurity engendered by the nature of the state system and by economic nationalism continued to hold sway. A “New League” of socialist states, the radical journalist H. N. Brailsford contended in 1936, dedicated to raising the standards of living of its citizens by economic planning on a Soviet scale but via British standards of parliamentary government, would set in motion a dynamic that would entice the peoples of Italy and Germany back to the path of democracy. The institutions Brailsford envisaged for the “League”—a parliament of delegates drawn from national assemblies and a technocratic central directorate—bore a remarkable resemblance to those subsequently proposed for the European Coal and Steel Community.¹⁴ Similar arguments were made by the Federal Union movement, an organization started by mostly British academics, thinkers, and churchmen at the beginning of 1939. Intellectuals associated with Federal Union produced pamphlets that enjoyed great intellectual influence and, by the standards of political texts, a very large sale. W. B. Curry’s The Case for Federal Union (1939) sold one hundred thousand copies in a few weeks (although the American journalist’s book was the target of one of George Orwell’s most scathing review essays), while Barbara Wootton’s Socialism and Federalism (1941) launched the powerful idea that socialism could only be carried out on a pan-European, not national, scale.¹⁵

When war broke out, drafting schemes for European integration became every British intellectual’s favorite pastime. Political thinkers like Harold J. Laski, G. D. H. Cole, and, above all, the historian and Times’ journalist E. H. Carr made the serious point that if Europe was to avoid a return to fascism in the future, it needed to make boosting production and the welfare of citizens the centerpiece of its postwar economic strategy. It was necessary to plan on a continental scale and avoid a return to national units of production at all costs. Carr, in particular, envisaged a European planning authority that would coordinate economic and monetary policy.¹⁶

This same idea fascinated the Nazis themselves, although they of course saw centralized planning of the European economy as a way of boosting the war effort and consolidating German hegemony. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister for propaganda, made a notorious speech in September 1940 stating that Germany, together with Italy, would “take over the leadership of Europe.” He told his audience that they were “already part” of a “great Reich which is preparing to reorganize Europe, tearing down the barriers that still separate the European peoples.” Goebbels professed to see the Nazis’ military expansion as part of a “work of reform” to unify the European continent.¹⁷ This was self-serving, of course, but the spectacle of German armies overrunning the nations of Europe in the summer of 1940 did contribute to a widespread belief that such small territorial units were bound to be superseded and that the doctrine of national sovereignty had become a myth. In the age of the Blitzkrieg, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and even Poland and France had proven to be anachronisms: they were no longer sovereign states in any meaningful way since they were unable even to secure their borders.¹⁸

The notion that nation-states were a dangerous anachronism that neither could nor should survive influenced a generation of continental intellectuals active in the resistance against fascism. Wartime pamphlets, articles, and leaflets show that many resisters to Nazism expressed a “revulsion against the system of nation states that had led to their downfall.” The exceptions were communists, who blamed “Europe’s misery” on the Germans instead of the exaggerated nationalism of the interwar years, and the British and Scandinavians, “where the general public had much less reason to draw far-reaching conclusions about the catastrophe of war.”¹⁹

The most important pamphlet produced by the resistance movement is probably the Manifesto di Ventotene (1941), which has become one of the canonical documents of the European integration movement (albeit one that is more referenced than read, especially in the original Italian). Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, the imprisoned antifascist authors of the Manifesto, took the debate in Britain as the starting point for their powerful appeal to the socialist movements of Europe to make the struggle for revolution across Europe and the establishment of a socialist federation of Europe the cardinal purpose of their political action. In the Manifesto, a socialist federation was represented as being a moral and historical imperative that even justified the use of dictatorial methods against advocates of a return to the traditional nation-states of the pre-totalitarian period.²⁰ After the fall of Benito Mussolini in July 1943, one of the leading components of the partisan movement in Italy, the Partito d’Azione (Action Party), made European unity the core of its political program. Action Party intellectuals were prominent in the Movimento federalista europeo (MFE), which was founded in August 1943 and contributed to the movement’s journal, L’unità europea. Italian federalists successfully managed to diffuse their ideas. A pamphlet, L’Europe de demain, was smuggled into the rest of occupied Europe in 1944, and a conference of federalists, with delegations from resistance movements across Europe, was held by the MFE in Geneva in May 1944.²¹

The diffusion of federalist ideas by intellectuals unquestionably mattered. They spoke directly to the desire of Europe’s peoples to avert further war. But at war’s end, the principal issues for both peoples and intellectuals were more pragmatic: getting enough to eat and staying warm. May 1945 was Year Zero. The war had left the continent’s infrastructure in pieces and its peoples divided by ideological conflict and nationalist resentments. The continent had been devastated. Konrad Adenauer, a conservative opponent of the Nazis who became chancellor of Germany in 1949, gave a bleak description in his memoirs of what Cologne looked like when he returned as mayor in April 1945:

The task confronting me . . . was a huge and extraordinarily difficult one. The extent of the damage suffered by the city in air raids and from the other effects of war was enormous . . . more than half the houses and public buildings were totally destroyed . . . only 300 houses had escaped unscathed. . . . There was no gas, no water, no electric current, and no means of transport. The bridges across the Rhine had been destroyed. There were mountains of rubble in the streets. Everywhere there were gigantic areas of debris from bombed and shelled buildings. With its razed churches, many of them a thousand years old, its bombed-out cathedral . . . Cologne was a ghost city.²²

Yet Adenauer nevertheless believed that in 1945, “the unification of Europe seemed far more feasible now than in the 1920s. The idea of international cooperation must succeed.”²³ This conviction was especially pronounced among Christian Democrats, who emerged after 1945 in France, Italy, West Germany, and several other states as the principal political party. For leaders like Adenauer, or the Italian Alcide De Gas-peri, or the Frenchman Robert Schuman, there was no choice but to supersede national rivalries if Europe was ever to return to civilized life.

In the meantime, however, it was touch and go whether Europe could survive at all. Key economic and transport hubs such as Rotterdam and Hamburg had been blitzed into the preindustrial age. The 1945 harvest was little more than half of the last prewar harvest in 1938, and getting it to market was a task of surpassing difficulty since roads, bridges, and canals were blocked with the detritus of war. During the winter of 1945 to 1946, Europe’s urban areas were reduced to near-famine conditions.²⁴ Across Western Europe, millions of people survived on one thousand calories a day, or little more (in central and eastern Europe, conditions were even worse). Only Britain and the Nordic countries provided their citizens with the 2,400 to 2,800 calories consumed by the average sedentary man in a normal day—and as Europe rebuilt, few people were living sedentary lives.²⁵ At first, reconstruction simply meant digging enough coal, growing enough crops, and rebuilding war-blasted infrastructure. It soon became clear, however, that reconstruction necessitated a common market that would guarantee economies of scale and would signal a rejection of the economic nationalism of the 1930s. The economic success of the United States provided a compelling argument for the benefits of a large domestic market. Robert Marjolin, a French economist who became secretary-general of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948 and was a French representative on the first Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958, wrote that in the immediate postwar years, “America hypnotized us, her material success was our ideal; we had almost no other aim than to bridge the gap between European industry and American industry.”²⁶

Western Europeans were fortunate that American policy makers shared this goal. US leaders were themselves anxious to promote economic and political integration in Western Europe as the Cold War became a fact of international life in 1947. As Diane Kunz has remarked, “European unity continued to appeal to Americans for several reasons, not the least of which was the conviction, tapping deep into the American psyche, that Europe’s best course was to imitate the United States as closely as possible.”²⁷ On the other hand, both the American and European advocates of European political unity would quickly discover that national sovereignty was still a key factor in decision making. Rumors of its decease had been greatly exaggerated.