The idea of a united Europe has a long history, its origins dating back to at least the time of the Holy Roman Empire. Attempts were made in the last two centuries to unite the continent by force, under first Napoleon and then Hitler, but they were unsuccessful. More peaceful schemes have been advanced, with proposals for a Pan-European Union and a common market being made in 1923.
However, it was the failure of the Führer’s bid to dominate Europe which proved to be the inspiration for a new initiative.
World War Two was a catastrophe which discredited the old international order and for many Europeans the basic ingredient of that order: the independent nation state. Indeed, according to one commentator:
[the] past failure and current weakness of nation states in 1945 is a prime wellspring of what was to become known as the European movement, dedicated to the broad notion of seeking to unite the states and people of Europe through some new entity . . . which might have the size and strength to avoid the calamities which had befallen the post-1919 state system. (1)
With the exceptions of Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, every European state either had witnessed the relatively violent overthrow of its constitutional arrangements or had been militarily occupied by an enemy or both.
By 1945, many people saw that it was the time to lay aside the old rivalries and create new bonds of cooperation and friendship between Germany and the other countries of the continent. In particular, it was necessary to ensure that France and Germany should live and work together in peaceful cooperation, for they had been at war three times in less than one hundred years.
There was in 1945 and the years immediately following a most unusual willingness to think in European rather than in national terms, helped by the fact that politicians such as Adenauer in West Germany, De Gasperi in Italy and Monnet and Schuman in France were, in varying degrees, internationalists. If reconstruction was their immediate goal, they also realized the need for this to be underpinned by peace in Europe. Without this, economic recovery would merely serve to fuel the engines of future war. European leaders, therefore, had to address themselves to twin tasks:
1. How to promote economic recovery and provide a decent standard of living for the people of Europe
2. How to bring about reconciliation so that old hatreds would not resurface and move forward by creating a new political stability on the continent.
In this section, we explore the way in which six nations in Western Europe tried to effect a transformation of the continent, thereby introducing a new era of peace and prosperity.
Glossary
Holy Roman Empire A mainly Germanic conglomeration of lands, created at the time of Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor in 800 and lasting until 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars.
