European Integration. Mark Gilbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

WORLD WAR II

      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 СКАЧАТЬ