EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

Origins, Evolution, and Prospects

How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.

Psalms 133:1

The concept of European integration has been a topic for discussion among European intellectuals since the early 1920s. (1)

The idea, however, can betraced back to the Middle Ages. At the start of the 14th century, Dante Alighieri argued in his book "On Monarchy" in favor of a supranational power that would respect diversity between different peoples and their traditions, while Pierre Dubois had the idea of a Christian Republic. In 1849, Victor Hugo was in favor of a pan-European integration in which nations of the continent would not lose their individuality. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi argued in 1923 for the creation of a Pan-European Union.

An emerging ‘European movement’ assembled about 2000 participants from 24 countries in a Congress in Vienna in 1926. They approved the Pan-European Manifesto that was, among other things, in favor of a customs union, common currency, military alliance and the protection of national minorities. Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, was in charge of the Government Memorandum on organization of the Federal Union in Europe in 1930, at the time when Adolf Hitler scored his first electoral victories. The memorandum considered issues such as a common market; customs union; free movement of goods, capital and people; and a community of European people (Sidjanski, 2000, pp. 7–9).

Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, although deported to the island of Ventotene (west of Naples) in 1941, founded the European Federalist Movement and secretly circulated the Ventotene Manifesto. At its first meeting in Milan in 1943, the movement established a structure and strategy for action. To avoid international anarchy and safeguard freedom in Europe, they claimed, one needs to establish a federal Europe to which nation states should transfer certain sovereign rights in the common interest of all Europeans (Sidjanski, 2000, p. 10).

Following the Second World War, the British and Americans would restore nation states in their old form. As was often the case in the past, this would again permit the British and now the Americans to shape the European continent in a pattern and form that would serve their own economic and geopolitical interests. Therefore, this had to be resisted. According to the Manifesto, federalists must snatch the opportunity created by the turmoil and uncertainty that would accompany the end of the war in order to establish a European Federation.

In Nazi Germany in March 1943, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler circulated within the German resistance movement a secret paper on European unification. He proposed that an economic union with a permanent council should be created immediately after the war, and political union would follow. There should be a European ministry of the economy, a European army and a European ministry for foreign affairs.

A democratic Germany should join the integration process with France. If Germany were integrated in a democratic community, this would prevent it from undertaking another military adventure (Sidjanski, 2000, p. 11).

The Second World War left many deep scars in Europe. These included not only the destruction of a large part of the population and potential production, but also the presence of foreign troops in many countries. There was also a danger that after their joint elimination of Nazism, the confronting forces of the Red Army and the armies of the West would create an open conflict between East and West.

That was clearly seen by Winston Churchill, who called for a closing of the ranks in the West. In a speech in Zurich on 19 September 1946 he said: “I am going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the recreation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany ” (Jansen, 1975, p. 7). It was a revival of many earlier visions that cooperation between former adversaries could defuse potential conflicts in the future.

Intellectuals on the European continent continued to develop the integration idea after the Second World War. The European Federalist Union was created in Paris in 1946. This multiparty movement was matched by the creation of similar partisan movements among the Christian democrats and socialists. The establishment of the European League supplemented political issues for Economic Cooperation on the initiative of Paul van Zeeland in 1947.

The League prepared studies on issues such as capital mobility, monopolies, enterprises and currencies. In the same year, the Hague Congress considered two prominent reports dealing with possible ways for European integration. The first one was on federalist issues, by Denis de Rougemont, and the second on economic issues, by Maurice Allais.

All these activities by European intellectuals and government oficials point to the fact that ideas about European integration were sincere and that post-Second World War regional integration was a real prospect. (2)

Declassified documents by the United States (US) government reveal that the US intelligence community ran a covert operation during the 1950s and 1960s to build a momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European Federalist Movement, the most important federalist organisation at the time.

In 1958, for example, it provided over half of the movement’s funds(3). Our text is structured as follows: