An Historical Introduction to the European Union

Philip Thody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134696390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An Historical Introduction to the European Union is a chronological political history of European integration from the 1950s to the present. It also includes a contextualising survey of wider European history since the 1600s, and places unification against a background of world politics.
This clearly written introduction to the essential history, economics and politics of the European Union assumes no prior knowledge. It offers a detailed account of the Union with sections on:
* how the Union works
* basic principles of the Union
* arguments over contested practices, including agriculture
* issues of the cold war, enlargement, and the role of the United States
* language
* single European currency
With an annotated bibliography, chronology and guide to the institutions of the European Union, An Historical Introduction to the European Union incorporates the most recent research and detailed treatment of the policies of the European Union.

1 History

COAL, STEEL AND SOVEREIGNTY

The European Union has its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established on 18 April 1951 by the Treaty of Paris. The immediate political aim of the ECSC was to avoid the risk of future conflict between France and Germany by linking the two basic elements in their economies, the production of coal and the manufacture of steel, more closely together. In 1870, the hostility between France and Germany had led to the only major European war to take place between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the beginning of the first world war ninety-nine years later. Between 1914 and 1918, this hostility had been a major factor in the first world war, and a contributory cause of the second. The best way to avoid a fourth conflict, it was argued, was to tie the economies of the two countries so closely together that it would become physically impossible for them ever to fight each other again. In so far as it is now inconceivable that a war should break out between France and Germany— or, indeed, between any of the fifteen countries making up what is now known as the European Union¹—its first political aim has been totally achieved.

The initial proposal to establish the ECSC had been made on 9 May 1950 by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, and enthusiastically accepted by the Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer. The French and Germans then invited other Western European countries to join them, and their invitation was taken up by Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These were all countries which saw in the creation of the ECSC the possibility of linking their own economies to those of Western Europe's two largest nations, while at the same time helping to avoid yet another war. Schuman himself had been born in Luxembourg in 1886 of a French-speaking family from Lorraine, one of the two provinces taken from France by Germany after the French defeat in the war of 1870, and had been forced to serve in the German army during the 1914–1918 war. After 1918, when France recovered Lorraine and its sister province of Alsace, he officially became a French citizen again, but remained acutely and understandably aware of the need for Franco-German reconciliation.

The two countries had been in conflict since the sixteenth century, when the rivalry between Francis I of France and Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, led to fighting in the south of France and in Italy, as well as to an alliance, in 1536, between Catholic France and the then militantly Islamic Turkey. In the seventeenth century, France deliberately prolonged the Thirty Years War of 1618–1648 in order to weaken the House of Austria, which then had authority over much of what is now Germany, and the armies of Louis XIV laid waste the Palatinate. In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon I had defeated and humiliated Austria and Prussia, before being defeated himself by an army containing Austrian and Prussian soldiers as well as British and Russian ones. Later on, once Prussia had defeated Austria in the war of 1867, it was obvious to Bismarck that the best way to unify Germany behind Prussian leadership was to provoke a war against France. This he did, on 18 July 1870, and in January 1871, after the defeat of France, the Prussians signed the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles which marked the beginning of the Second Reich, the régime which governed Germany until the defeat of 1918 led to its being replaced by the Weimar Republic of 1919–1933.

The Germans had economic as well as political reasons for insisting in 1870 on taking away the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and making them an integral part of their newly unified country. Lorraine was rich in deposits of iron ore, which the Germans could combine with the coal of the Ruhr basin to make their steel industry the largest in continental Europe, and this industry was soon to overtake that of the United Kingdom. One of the principal aims of France during the first world war, from 1914–1918, had been to recover what she had never ceased to think of as her national territory. The Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, had done this, but the defeat of 1940 saw Alsace and Lorraine, together with parts of northern France, incorporated into Hitler's Third Reich in the same way as they had been into the Second Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm II between 1870 and 1919. Germany's defeat in 1945 led to the two provinces going back to France again, but Robert Schuman was not the only European statesman to feel that the enmity between France and Germany, the root cause of the first world war, ought to come to an end.

It was the businessman, economist and political thinker, Jean Monnet, who dedicated his life after the second world war to the creation of what he, like Churchill, called ‘the United States of Europe’, who had originally suggested to Robert Schuman the idea of beginning with the two basic industries of coal and steel. In the 1950s, 70 per cent of the energy needs of Western Europe were met by coal, and no country could have an effective army without steel. If the coal mines and steel mills of France and Germany were brought under international control, Monnet argued, it would become physically impossible for the two countries to go to war with each other again, and Robert Schuman agreed. The British, however, for reasons discussed below, did not accept the invitation to become one of the founder members of the organisation which was eventually, in 1991, to give birth to the European Union.

The ECSC proved as successful in its immediate economic objectives as it was to be in its long-term political aims. It gave the French access to the rich coal deposits of the Ruhr, and ended the dual pricing system whereby German coal bought for the steel mills of Lorraine cost 46 per cent more than the same coal burnt in West Germany.² It removed all customs barriers to the sale of coal and steel among the six participating countries so much so that by 1958, and the end of the transitional period allowed for in the Treaty of Paris of April 1951, interstate trading in steel between the six member countries had increased by 151 per cent, that of coal by 21 per cent and that of iron ore by 25 per cent. Since the 1970s, the problem has been more that of managing the decline in these two traditional industries, and the Chronology has a note on how this problem was dealt with in 1980. What was more immediately important, in the context of the general movement towards European unification which has been such a marked feature of the last fifty years, was the model offered by the ECSC, and the way it enabled other problems to be, if not solved, at least circumvented.

Politically, it was to provide the starting point for the European Economic Community (EEC) of 1958, with the individual states agreeing to hand over the management of important sections of what had previously been seen as their national economy in accordance with Directives issued by a supranational body, the High Authority. This consisted of nine members, holding office for six years. Eight of them were designated by the governments of the Six, with one extra member being chosen by the eight who had already been appointed. This Authority had the right to decide on prices and levels of production, and offered favourable conditions which enabled, for example, the Belgian coal industry to be subsidised by Germany and Holland, and Italy to have access to coal mined in French North Africa.

The establishment of the ECSC also removed another source of international friction by enabling the Saarland to be integrated into what was increasingly a combined European operation for the production of coal and steel. After 1919, the Treaty of Versailles had declared Germany guilty of having started the first world war and placed one of its major industrial areas, the Saarland, under the control of the newly-established League of Nations, entrusting the management of its coal industry to the French. This caused considerable resentment among the Germans, and the decision by plebiscite of the Saarlanders, in 1935, to go back to Germany was felt in France as a serious political defeat. A similar decision to place the Saarland under international control was taken at the end of the second world war, in 1945, but the Saarlanders were again to decide by plebiscite, in January 1957, to become part of Germany again. This time, however, because the production of coal and steel was becoming a European affair in which decisions were no longer taken by nation states for obviously nationalist reasons, the French reaction was much more muted.

POLITICS, NATIONALISM AND DEFENCE

A series of events which took place elsewhere in Europe immediately after the signature of the Treaty of Paris in April 1951 suggested that the British might have made a sensible decision to keep out when they declined the invitation to join the ECSC as founder members with Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. They did so for a number of reasons, the first of which was summarised by Clement Attlee, Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, when he said that we were ‘not going to join a group of nations in which we have just saved four of them from the other two’, and at the time, his remark was fully understandable.

In 1940, only eleven years before the establishment of the ECSC, the Germans had been bombing Great Britain and preparing to invade. The French Third Republic (1871–1940) had collapsed, and signed an armistice which involved, in the words of Marshal Pétain, the official Head of State of the Vichy régime which replaced it, a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Dutch had tried, unsuccessfully, to stay neutral; the Belgians had not proved reliable allies; while the Italians, under the leadership of Mussolini, had waited until the French and British armies had been defeated before declaring war on them on 10 June 1940. The Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders, in contrast, had been in the war against Germany from the beginning to the end. Once the Japanese had attacked them at Pearl Harbour on Sunday 7 December 1941, and Hitler fulfilled his obligations as an Axis power by declaring war on the United States, the Americans had pursued the war against Germany with vigour, and given priority to the liberation of Western Europe over their more obvious interests in the Pacific.

Attlee's remark also echoed a more long-standing vision which the British have had of their relationship to Western Europe and the rest of the world. Since the sixteenth century, they have seen themselves as a maritime power whose occasional involvement in the politics of continental Europe had always been more trouble than it was worth. In one of the Yes, Minister programmes broadcast on BBC television in the early 1980s, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, the career civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, explains to his Minister, Jim Hacker, that the British government has

had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years—to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and the Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Italians and the Germans

and his remark, although apparently flippant, was based on a series of real historical events. In 1585, England had intervened to support the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands against Philip II of Spain, and in the War of The Spanish Succession (1702–1773) had led an alliance against France which included Austria and the Netherlands. Between 1793 and 1814, in the wars against the French Republic and the Empire of Napoleon I, Great Britain had allied herself with Austria and Prussia, as well as with Russia, to prevent Western Europe being dominated by France. Between 1914 and 1918, Great Britain was in alliance with France and Russia against Germany, with Italy being on the allied side in the first world war and that of the Axis in the second. During the Cold War (1946–1989), Britain was in alliance with France, Germany and Italy against the Soviet Union, the Russian power which then threatened to dominate Europe.

The English also coupled what was basically a policy of Realpolitik, in which the balance of power in Europe was maintained by enabling their potential enemies to cancel one another out, with a moral vision of their relationship with Europe which was perhaps less securely based. In their view, each of the régimes against which British armed forces had intervened on the Continent was characterised by a peculiarly unpleasant way of treating its own subjects and of behaving towards its neighbours. For the English, the Spain of Philip II was a proselytising, Catholic power which had expelled its own Jewish population in 1492 and seemed bent on persecuting heretics wherever they could be found. In what English historians themselves call the Whig theory of history, Louis XIV had shown a similar indifference to the rights of minorities and to the idea of religious freedom when he had decided, in 1685, to expel a million or so Protestants from France. Like Philip II, he had also looked to the English like a man bent on dominating Western Europe from a military as well as an ideological point of view, and the dictatorship which Napoleon I established in 1799 seemed to the English—and, perhaps, to others—to be pursuing precisely the same objective. The principal aim of German policy during the first world war was to reduce France to satellite status; in the second, to murder as many Jews as possible while imposing a permanent dictatorship over everyone else.³

There was, it is true, more than a touch of self-righteousness about the way in which the English looked at their history. It also showed a marked tendency to neglect the way in which they too had persecuted heretics, conquered Wales, massacred the Irish and the Scots, and imposed legal penalties on Roman Catholics which did not even begin to disappear until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. But the behaviour of nation states is very frequently governed by a vision of themselves which lacks a firm basis in objective reality, and the British governments in the 1940s and 1950s were also influenced in their attitude to the ECSC by a number of other, more tangible political and economic factors.

On 1 January 1948 all the coal mines in Great Britain had passed into public ownership, and in 1949 the Labour Party, which since 1945 had had a majority of over a hundred in the House of Commons, had nationalised the steel industry as well. The ECSC was based on a mixture of private and public ownership. The coal mines had been nationalised in France, but not in Germany. In neither country had the steel industry been nationalised, and the speed with which the German free enterprise economy was recovering from the destruction of the second world war suggested that there would be little chance of the Federal Republic embarking on the socialism which the then majority party in the United Kingdom considered essential for a healthy economy.

The High Authority for the ECSC consisted of representatives of the six member states. Their decisions were subject to inspection and discussion by a Parliamentary Assembly consisting of members chosen from among deputies elected to the national parliaments in Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany, and an independent court was established to be responsible for interpreting the treaty whose signature in Paris on 18 April 1951 had brought the six countries together. But neither the High Authority itself, nor the embryo of what was to become the European Parliament, directed the utilisation of resources in the way that a national government did at the time when dealing with its own nationalised industries. The Authority fixed quotas, offered guaranteed prices and set out rules for free and equal competition. It then let the market do the rest, an idea which was anathema to the philosophy of the party which then held power in Great Britain.

The British reluctance to involve themselves in the process of European unification was also reinforced by a series of events which began outside Europe and echoed tensions already developing between the Soviet Union and its Western allies in their struggle against Nazi Germany. Even before 1945, the Soviet Union had shown that it had no intention of allowing Western-style, parliamentary governments to be established in the countries which, like Poland, had been liberated from the Germans only to be occupied by the Red Army. The USSR established satellite governments in Albania, Bulgaria and Hungary, and on 25 February 1948, destroyed the semi-independent government of Czechoslovakia by inspiring a coup d’état whose brutality can be judged by the fact that the Prime Minister, Jan Mazaryk, was thrown out of a window and killed.

On its defeat in 1945, Germany had been divided into four zones, each to be occupied by one of the victorious powers of Great Britain, France, the United States and the USSR. The Soviet government treated its zone, officially transformed in October 1949 into the German Democratic Republic, in the same way as it treated the other countries it had occupied in 1944 and 1945, imposing a one-party system on the same model as the one which had existed in Russia itself since the revolution of 1917. Seen from the West, the object of what Winston Churchill was to call at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946 the ‘Iron Curtain’ which had ‘descended across the continent from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’ seemed to be to shelter a collection of régimes which were preparing an attack on Western Europe under the leadership of the Soviet Union.

The sudden invasion, on Saturday, 24 June 1950, of South Korea by well-armed forces from the Communist north consequently looked at the time very like one of the probes by which Hitler had successfully proved in the 1930s that the capacity of parliamentary democracies to resist military aggression was strictly limited. Hitler also liked to carry out his surprise moves at the weekend, when normal people's minds were on more enjoyable matters, and the fact that Saturday, 24 June 1950 was only two days before the beginning of the Wimbledon tennis tournament added insult to injury. It was on Saturday, 7 March 1936, that Hitler had invaded the demilitarised zone of the Rineland, and on Sunday, 13 March 1938 that he had succeeded in breaking another article of the Versailles Treaty by reuniting Germany and Austria by what was known as the Anschluss, or merging.⁴ In September 1938, he had bullied the British and French into breaking their alliance with Czechoslovakia and agreeing to the transfer to Germany of the Sudetenland. He had then broken the Munich agreements by taking over what remained of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939—for once, a Wednesday.

The United Kingdom, the United States and France had already received a comparable warning shot across the bows from Stalin's USSR in June 1948, when the Soviet authorities blocked all the land and canal routes to West Berlin. Like Germany itself, Berlin had been partitioned in 1945 into four occupied zones, but it had the disadvantage, for the Western allies, of lying ninety miles inside the Russian occupied zone. The attempt to use this land blockade to force France, Great Britain and the United States to withdraw their forces from West Berlin did not succeed. Between 24 June 1948 and 12 May 1949, American, British and French aircraft flew a total of 200,000 flights to furnish Berlin with the supplies which the 2,500,000 inhabitants of West Berlin needed to keep alive.

Although this included a substantial amount of coal to enable the Berliners to survive a particularly harsh winter, it also meant that more supplies of coke and coal were available for the rapidly growing industry of West Germany, an incidental example of the way in which the Cold War contributed to the revived prosperity of Western Europe after 1945. But the Berlin blockade also pointed to the existence of an Eastern bloc whose foreign policy was sufficiently aggressive to create what was felt as an urgent need for the West to rearm. The invasion of South Korea on 24 June 1950 consequently seemed like another of the incidents which meant that the course of European unification, begun with the signature of the Treaty of Paris in April 1951, could be successful only if it coincided with a general programme of European rearmament, accompanied by a movement towards military as well as economic and political unification.

This vision of a common European defence policy inspired and organised by the Europeans themselves nevertheless failed to translate itself into reality. The military measures taken to protect Western Europe against any incursion from the East may have been fully justified and certainly provided a shield behind which the process of European unification was able to take place. However, they have remained largely separate from the moves towards a united Europe which had begun in 1951 with the establishment of the ECSC. Already, on 2 April 1949, over two years before the signature of the Treaty of Paris establishing the ECSC, the United States had made a fundamental change in its foreign policy by committing itself to a peacetime alliance which guaranteed its immediate intervention to defend another state outside North America. The twelve countries which signed the North Atlantic Treaty establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Paris on 2 April 1949, were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. They were joined in 1952 by Greece and Turkey, in 1955 by the German Federal Republic, and in 1982 by Spain.

The remark frequently made at the time was that NATO had been created to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, the Germans down and the French calm was a fairly accurate summary of its basic aims, as well as what proved to be a useful guide to its long-term achievement. For what NATO did was provide a p...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• CHRONOLOGY
• 1: HISTORY
• 2: ORGANISATION AND POWERS
• 3: BASIC PRINCIPLES
• 4: CONTESTED PRACTICES
• 5: CURRENCIES AND POWER
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING