The History of European Integration

A new perspective

Ivan T. Berend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317224402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The foundation of the European Union was one of the most important historical events in the second half of the 20th century. In order to fully appreciate the modern state of the EU, it is crucial to understand the history of European integration. This accessible overview differs from other studies in its focus on the major roles played by both the United States and European multinational corporations in the development of the European Union. Chronologically written and drawing on new findings from two major archives (the archives of the US State Department and Archive of European Integration), this book sheds crucial new light on the integration process.

The History of European Integration offers a major contribution to our understanding of Europe's postwar history, and will be essential reading for any student of postwar European History, Contemporary History, European Politics and European Studies.

1
Made in the US?

The origins of European integration from the 1940s

Who built Europe? As the cessation of fighting in May 1945 brought the bloodiest and most devastating of Europe’s modern wars to a close, the general idea of integrating the European nations was being considered by a number of different influential individuals and groups. Thus the answer to the question of who should be credited with building Europe is anything but simple. Visionary federalist politicians and the political elite of some extremely vulnerable countries argued for a secure, integrated political structure of Western Europe, based on the bitter lessons of World War II. A vast literature credits the French political economist and diplomat Jean Monnet as the visionary and organizer of an integrated, federal Europe. Henry Kissinger, looking back from the vantage point of 2014 to provide a historical perspective on the current “world order,” assigned the credit elsewhere:

That Western Europe found moral strength to launch itself on the road to a new approach to order was the work of three great men: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gaspari [De Gasperi] in Italy … [They had] the vision and fortitude to overcome the causes of Europe’s tragedy.¹

The idea of a united Europe was not entirely new. Enlightenment philosophers, especially those who traveled abroad as Montesquieu did, already recognized the deep similarity of the Western countries, which—as Perry Anderson rediscovered in one of his essays—are essentially like a “single republic.”² On the other side of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, George Washington was one of the earliest statesmen to speak of a United States of Europe as the natural outcome of processes already at work in Europe. United States of Europe movements spread later, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, with the famous French writer Victor Hugo as one of the movement’s high priests. Then in the mid-1920s came pan-European movements maintaining that Europe is one great nation.³ At the end of that decade, the French Premier Aristide Briand filed an initiative for federal reorganization at the League of Nations. The list of forerunners and variants on the idea of unity in Europe could go on for pages—the idea was clearly alive long before the horrors of World War II added the impetus needed to bring it to fruition.

The long pre-history to which I have just alluded may create an impression that the integration process after World War II was a logical and genuine continuation and realization of these early ideas. In reality, that was not the case. None of these federal dreams and visions ever had the chance to be realized. The spirit of Westphalia (that is, the spirit of the twin treaties signed in 1648), which established the individual state as the legitimate embodiment of sovereignty in Europe, was yet to be really challengeable. Alan Milward went as far as stating, and proving, that even the postwar “saints and prophets,” as he sarcastically called the leading advocates of federal Europe, in reality wanted to serve the interests of their own nation-states.⁴

In short, from the passionate federalist advocacy of hundreds of federalist resistance movements, politicians, and organizations, nothing tangible came into being. Federalist ideas hit the thick concrete wall of the resistance of the victorious great powers. The latter had different plans for Europe.

The German Question: postwar ideas about security and peace

With the cessation of formal hostilities in Europe after May 8, 1945, as the full extent of the horror of the second of two twentieth-century total wars came into full view, victors and vanquished alike wondered whether a Europe of fully sovereign nation-states could ever hope to enjoy a lasting peace.⁵ Could a political institutional framework be found that would make war obsolete as a mechanism for conflict resolution? And more to the point, could a solution be found to the so-called German Question—could conditions and policies be created that would prevent a repetition of German aggression against neighbors in Europe? What was to be done? What could be done?

The answer seemed at first to lie in a solution based on a continued alliance of the victorious great powers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dreamed about a world system based on just such an alliance and, at the Tehran summit meeting at the end of November 1943, he spoke about a postwar international order supervised by “four policemen,” America, Russia, Britain, and China. Shortly before that, during the Moscow meeting of the foreign ministers of the Allied countries in October 1943, Vyacheslav M. Molotov made a clear and strong statement announcing “that any kind of federation in Europe is unacceptable for the Soviets.”⁶ Stalin, genuinely paranoid and convinced that any kind of European integration would foster anti-Soviet actions, took a hard line after the war. He instructed the European communist parties to follow and reject any kind of regional integration. Meanwhile, the postwar British Government and its foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, “did not want to do anything that would exacerbate an increasingly difficult relationship [with the Soviets].” Therefore, in the early postwar years, until the conflict between the victors became manifest, Britain tried to avoid dividing Europe into two camps by supporting the Western integration plan and instead sought to keep the wartime alliance alive.⁷

All of the victorious powers wanted Germany to pay for the devastation it had caused and to paralyze it so that it would be unable ever to start another war. Before his untimely death in April 1945, Roosevelt had sketched plans to address the German Question—that is, the Prussian German pattern of aggression against neighboring countries that had emerged with national unification in the later nineteenth century and that had spawned the two total wars of the twentieth century. Now, the victors of World War II thought to secure peace by incapacitating, permanently paralyzing, and partitioning Germany. In October 1943, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull agreed in Moscow that the German Question would be handled by the victors acting together. To this end, the Allies established the Allied Control Council in London. In September 1944, the Council suggested creating temporary occupation zones after the war. In February 1945, in Yalta, they agreed to form a new Allied Control Council to run occupied Germany. Then at Potsdam in July 1945, the Allies decided not to establish central government, but nevertheless to handle Germany as a single unit for economic purposes. They also agreed on reparations, including removal of important strategic industrial capacities.

After the fighting ended, because of the rapid emergence of tensions, disagreements, and outright conflict among the Allies, the Potsdam program was never really implemented. In the summer of 1946, Secretary Byrnes suggested the unification of the occupation zones to govern Germany better. Although the French rejected the offer, Britain accepted. By January 1947, the governmental division into four zones was disrupted by the creation of American–British Bizone, or Bizonia, and with this development, the more inclusive economic vision for occupied Germany was dead—at least for the time being. One-and-half years later, a currency reform was introduced by the Western occupation zones, thus introducing another form of division.⁸

Policy making among the Allies, under the best of circumstances, could be a notoriously convoluted business, never more so than when the German Question lay on the negotiating table. The Morgenthau Plan is a case in point. Prepared by President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr, this plan specified the partition of Germany, with either the internationalization or annexation of the German industrial heartland—the Saar, Ruhr, and Upper Silesian regions. The central goal was to dismantle or destroy the heavy industrial base of the country, thereby “converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.”⁹ On September 16, 1944, at their Quebec Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed and accepted the basic ideas contained in this document.

In reality, this plan never became official American policy. In the US, the Departments of State and Treasury were quarreling over policy, as an internal State Department memo makes clear:

State-war [departments] plan for denazification drawn up in 1944 but vetoed by FDR and the Treasury [Department] crowd … The big issue of disagreement … at that time was on the broad economic question of how much and what kind of industries to leave in Germany. The [State] Dept.’s paper of Sept. 4, 1944 entitled Suggested Recommendations on Treatment of Germany from the Cabinet Committee for the President (was discussed by the Cabinet Committee on Sept. 5 but not agreed to). Mr. Morgenthau on Sept. 15 at Quebec got the President and Mr. Churchill to initial a paper embodying his own extreme views on pastoralizing Germany … In his reply of October 20 [to the State Department memorandum on the treatment of Germany] the President backed down from the extreme position taken in the Sept. 15 Quebec paper and approved a substantial part of the [State] Department’s memorandum.¹⁰

In April 1945, before the differences could be resolved, Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman took over the presidency. Two weeks later President Truman called for a meeting to learn about, discuss, and decide how to deal with postwar Germany. Among the participants were Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew and experts such as William Clayton and John J. McCloy. Morgenthau was also present.¹¹

The Morgenthau Plan was shelved, but Morgenthau himself certainly helped to shape the new policy that was accepted just a few days after this meeting. Service Order JCS-1067, the directive that implemented the new policy, did not target the re-agrarization and pastoralization of Germany but was still quite draconian. It gave General Eisenhower explicit orders to enforce its provisions in the American occupation zone and to “urge the Control Council to accept it as a general policy.” It stated that

Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves … Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation … The principle Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world.¹²

A policy of “industrial disarmament” targeted the elimination of strategic industries such as ship building, aircraft, synthetic rubber, and oil production, and the limitation of the capacity of other sectors, such as iron, steel, and machine tools, to what was necessary to serve domestic consumption needs. Industrial production, as the directive declared, should only serve to prevent starvation of the population. The order also prohibited scientific research and ordered closure of laboratories and institutes, “except those considered necessary to the protection of public health.” The capacities of banned industries were to be dismantled and delivered for reparation, or destroyed. Accompanying these harsh industrial policies was the order for a harsh denazification purge to remove all members of the Nazi Party and military organizations who had been more than nominal participants in the Third Reich. Such individuals were to be “excluded from public office and from positions of importance in quasi-public and private enterprises.” Finally, in spite of the fact that Germany was already partitioned, the directive called for establishing a strongly decentralized structure with local responsibilities except in transportation, foreign affairs, and a few other crucial areas.

At the aforementioned Potsdam meeting of the victorious powers, the agreement made on August 4, 1945 largely followed this American directive on the “policies of military, industrial, and scientific disarmament for Germany and directed the Allied Control Council to negotiate and execute programs effectuating these policies.”¹³ In October, the US State Department finally prevailed over Treasury; Morgenthau was excluded f...