European Integration. Mark Gilbert

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      The Ideal of European Unity

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      The idea of European political and economic integration was born of the historical experience of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Europe’s two civil wars embedded the conviction among policy makers and intellectuals that it was necessary to supersede the nationalism, both economic and political, that had destroyed the European continent almost beyond repair and had led to the loss of its global primacy.

      There was, however, nothing inevitable about the postwar “European construction.” It is a mistake to think that greater integration of Europe’s nation-states was ordained by History, as some accounts imply. History is made by human agents: it does not unfold in an ineluctable pattern. Integration happened because European politicians decided it was a means of solving concrete economic and political problems for their peoples. From the first, the notion of greater European political and economic unity was concerned with establishing security through prosperity: a concrete objective. Whenever Europe’s politicians have forgotten this fact, and have given a loose rein to their idealism (or will to power), their peoples have reminded them brusquely of the core goal. “Europe,” as a political project, will always stand or fall by its ability to generate prosperity and to make the lives of the peoples of Europe safer and better. Many of the troubles of the European Union now can be attributed to the fact that the political elites decried by today’s populists have given their peoples the impression that reinforcing the EU’s powers has become an end in itself, not a means.

Europeans are unsurprisingly suspicious of political projects that sacrifice their immediate personal welfare for shadowy future goals. Nationalism, fascism, and communism—the three dominating ideologies of twentieth-century Europe—all imposed huge sacrifices. To use Arthur Koestler’s metaphor, all three ideologies conducted great “vivisectionist” experiments on the people of Europe (and beyond), but they left behind them only catastrophic destruction, millions of dead, and a moral desert. The optimism of the nineteenth century ended abruptly in the despair of the twentieth: Verdun, the Great Depression, racial hatred, and the abyss of genocide and total war. European integration was a moral response to these evils: it was an attempt to show the rest of the world (and to prove to Europeans themselves) that Europe could construct political institutions worthy of its civilization’s greatest achievements and of its peoples’ genius, to employ a word that statesmen used quite naturally in the 1940s.

THE AGE OF NATIONS

      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 СКАЧАТЬ