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The story of European integration, as it is understood today, essentially begins and is conventionally dated as beginning in 1945. The titanic struggle of World War II was over, and amidst the widespread feelings of relief and exhaustion there was also the sense that a significant watershed in the history of the continent had been reached, that the ending of the war heralded the beginning of a new reality. Central to this changed atmosphere was the belief that the war had been a cleansing agent. The European economies were in ruins or at the least had been severely disrupted, and the old political systems had either been discredited for their inadequacies in coping with the economic conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, or destroyed by Hitler and his allies. Many people therefore thought and argued that Europe could start afresh, with a different political and economic order that rejected the tired doctrines of nationalism, political sovereignty and economic autarky upon which the old state system of the continent had been built. In its place they wanted some kind of political union or federation that would effectively put into practice the old symbolic concept of the harmony of European nations.
Yet while this ferment of the months surrounding the final cessation of hostilities may have provided the seed bed for the developments in European integration in the years since 1945, the idea of and the desire for unity had had a much more prolonged prologue. Across the centuries intellectuals and political leaders alike had dreamed of overcoming the unique historical characteristic of Europe: its extreme political fragmentation. (Murray, 102) Most obviously, the historical record is replete with attempts at conquest: political leaders from Charlemagne through the Habsburgs to Napoleon, and even perhaps Hitler, had sought to realise the dream through imperial domination of the continent. Yet in the end all aspirations came to nought, defeated in part by the complex fragmented mosaic of the continent as well as by the inadequate technical resources of the would-be conquerors to establish and maintain effective control by force over large areas of territory against the wishes of the local populations.
But the dream of unity was not confined to would-be military conquest. Intellectuals and thinkers had also persistently returned to the theme; some of their ideas and views on the necessity of union proved to have some lasting effect on the history of European integration. The role model adopted by many writers was perhaps the old Roman Empire, which was perceived as having integrated the whole of civilised Europe. It was this civilising aspect which appealed too many, a united Christian Europe at peace with itself and better able to defend itself against depredations and invasions from outside. The greatest value of unity, in other words, was the maintenance of peace and the avoidance of war. (Schenk, p.i)
All of these ideas and views fed into the even greater intellectual agitation of the nineteenth century, much of which acknowledged in particular its debt to the work of Henri Saint-Simon. In 1814 Saint-Simon advanced a stronger and more detailed scheme for institutional unity, embracing a European monarch, government and parliament. The links with thinkers of the past were preserved through what was the dominant motif for Saint-Simon and his followers: peace through a United States of Europe. The latter was a phrase well understood by nineteenth century intellectuals. It was the theme or catchphrase of the several peace movements that in the event were to be principal torch bearers of integration throughout the century. The French novelist and publicist, Victor Hugo, used it, for example, at the Paris Peace Congress of 1849, while eighteen years later a similar congress established a journal with that very title.
Yet these were but schemes advanced by people who were, at the most, only at the fringes of politics. They held little appeal or relevance for political leaders. The same, however, was not so true of the parallel development of ideas on some form of economic integration. Many political leaders could see potential political advantages in either a customs union or some form of free trade area. The distinction between these two forms of economic structure is important for it proved to be the fundamental dividing line in all debates on European integration and organisation through to the present. For that reason it may be useful to spell out the basic distinction at this point. Briefly, in a customs union the member states would belong to a single tariff area where, ideally, there would be no customs duties on goods circulating within the union, though the members would construct a common external boundary where a common tariff would be levied on all imports entering the union from outside. By contrast, a free trade area is a looser concept, with much more limited political implications. There would be no common external tariff, with each member state free to impose its own tariff levels on goods coming from non-members: the goal was merely to eliminate or reduce internal tariffs, but usually without any compulsion to do so.
Attempts to launch such economic schemes on a continental basis were not successful. Essays into free trade arrangements proved to be short-lived, while customs unions like the prototypic Zollverein of 1843 were region-specific, not European: as such they were protectionist and disliked by other states. In a sense, economic ideas on unity suffered the same fate as political ideas on the same theme (Keohane, 167-79). The nineteenth century witnessed an ever-increasing imperialist competition among states, an assertion of the supremacy of national autarky and intensification of competition that eventually culminated in World War I.
The war and its aftermath, in radically redrawing the political map of Europe and launching several new states on to the scene, should ideally have made political and economic cooperation, if not integration, even more pressing. On the other hand, the war that was supposed to impose a durable peace upon Europe, the ‘war to end war’, had, in accepting the idea of national self-determination as the basic building block of the new Europe, actually increased the obstacles to cooperation and integration (Ludlow, 347) .With the disintegration of the old empires of Central and Eastern Europe, the continent had become even more fragmented, with an almost inevitable reinforcement of nationalism (Harrop, 25-27) .In addition, the defeat of Germany imposed a further instability over and above fragmentation. The hope that in 1918 had been placed in the newly-established League of Nations also quickly evaporated. New states, jealous of their independence and giving governmental expression to historic national and ethnic rivalries, were not in a mood to accept any diminution of their political and economic freedom (Sbragia, 45-50). Moreover, the economic problem had been made worse by a reduction of Europe’s economic role in the world: the continent’s foreign trade, as a share of the gross national product of the industrialised states of the world, had slumped dramatically (Nugent, 171-83).
Despite the rhetoric, there was little indication of how economic cooperation would transform itself into political union. The overarching concept of political union remained undefined, sufficiently vague to be acceptable to all the member states without presenting a threat to any. As we have seen, the 1970s proved to be difficult years for the EC. In particular, the EMU structure quickly unravelled; its replacement by the EMS in 1979 did not by itself necessarily advance the political cause. Nevertheless, the EC persisted with the notion of political unity. On the international stage the EC steadily grew in stature as an important actor both in terms of its formal relationships with other states and through EPC, both activities benefiting greatly from the involvement in this aspect of EC affairs of the national government leaders through the European Council. Progress in terms of the political unification of the EC was to be more hesitant, if not almost non-existent. Yet the EC states had committed themselves to an ultimate union where the several threads of the past and the members’ hopes for the future were to be interwoven into a seamless garment.
Works Cited
- Harrop, J. The Political Economy of Integration in the European Community ( Aldershot 1999) 25-27
- Keohane, R. O. and S. Hoffman (eds), The New European Community: Decision-making and Institutional Change ( Boulder 2002) 167-79
- Ludlow, N. Piers, ‘The making of CAP: towards a historical analysis of the EU’s first major policy (Common Agricultural Policy)’, Contemporary European History 14:3 (2005), p.347 (25)
- Murray, Philomena, ‘Factors for integration? Transnational party cooperation in the European Parliament, 1952-79’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, 50:1 (2004), p.102 (14)
- Nugent, N. The Government and Politics of the European Community ( London 2001). 171-83
- Sbragia, A. M. (ed.), Europolitics: Institutions and Policymaking in the ‘New’ European Community (Washington DC 2003). 45-50
- Schenk, Catherine, ‘Sterling, international monetary reform and Britain’s applications to join the European Economic Community in the 1960s’, Contemporary European History 11.3 (2002), p.i (26)
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