Two Tries That Failed: 1945–1949
‘More than ever we are convinced that we are right in proclaiming the necessity for complete European Union. But…it is a disgrace that Europe had to wait for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty and interest lay.’
Dr Henri Brugmans, Chairman of the European Union of Federalists, August 1947
The official history of the European Union, as can be seen from the European Commission’s Europa website and any number of other publications, invariably begins with the period immediately after the Second World War. The Commission’s version opens with the historic speech made by Winston Churchill in the Great Hall of Zurich University on 19 September 1946. After painting a typically robust picture of the ‘plight to which Europe has been reduced’ by the ‘frightful nationalistic quarrels originated by the Teutonic nations’, Britain’s revered wartime leader held out his vision of how the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of this unhappy and ruined continent might ‘regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living’. To achieve peace, freedom and an end to ‘all the crimes and follies of the past’, he said, ‘we must build a kind of United States of Europe’.1
Churchill was to renew his message in three more major speeches in the years that followed, in London in 1947, at The Hague in 1948, and in Strasbourg in 1949. These rallying calls by Europe’s only statesman at that time of world stature would later be claimed as having been the inspiration for the steps which eventually led to the European Union: a project in which it would also be claimed that Churchill wished Britain to play a central part. In every respect this is based on a misreading of the facts.
For a start there was a crucial distinction between the type of united Europe envisioned by Churchill and that which would begin to take shape in the 1950s. He made this clear by his references at Zurich to the ‘pan-European union’ which had been worked for by that ‘famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand’, and to that ‘immense body which was brought into being amidst high hopes after the First World War – the League of Nations’. At all times, Churchill was essentially looking back to that internationalist idealism of the 1920s, associated with Briand, Stresemann and Coudenhove: a ‘United States of Europe’ based on an alliance of sovereign states.
As we shall see, however, it was precisely this type of ‘intergovernmentalism’ which the founders of what was to be the European Union regarded as their greatest obstacle. Indeed, when their project was finally launched, the man chiefly responsible for it was openly dismissive of Churchill’s type of ‘United Europe’. Monnet was convinced that the goal could only be reached in a wholly different way.
Secondly, as Churchill consistently made clear both at Zurich and later, he saw any ‘united Europe’ rooted in ‘a partnership between France and Germany’. Here was no question of Britain’s direct participation. ‘In all this urgent work’, as he put it,
‘France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and, I trust, Soviet Russia…must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe, and must champion its right to live.’
In 1947, at the Albert Hall in London, he conjured up his vision of a ‘Temple of World Peace’, which would have ‘four pillars’: the USA; the Soviet Union; a ‘United States of Europe’; and, quite separately, ‘the British Empire and Commonwealth’. Ironically, this was almost the only point on which Churchill and Monnet were agreed. If a ‘United States of Europe’ was to be brought about, it would be without Britain.
However, the most fundamental misconception about how the European Union came into being stems from the myth that its intellectual genesis emerged after the Second World War. All the essential ideas which lay behind the moves to unite Europe at that time had in fact been conceived in the 1920s, before the rise of Hitler, as a way to prevent a recurrence of the First World War. In that sense they had already failed in their original purpose, in that they had been unable to prevent the Second World War.
More significantly, by the time these ideas were disinterred after 1945, the political balance of Europe and the world had changed out of all recognition. The chief problem they were designed to solve, the national rivalry between France and Germany, paled into insignificance beside a new, much greater threat, identified by Churchill in his other famous speech of 1946, given at Fulton, Missouri. Then he spoke of how, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.2 In that respect, the efforts to dissolve Europe’s ancient national enmities in a new union were specifically addressed to solving a problem which no longer existed.
The golden age of inter-governmentalism
As the world emerged into an uncertain peace, following the dropping of the first nuclear weapons on Japan in August 1945, there was a general mood of cautious optimism, expressed above all in a renaissance of internationalist idealism. The defeat of the Axis powers had required international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. Reflected in the famous picture taken in February that year at Yalta, showing Stalin seated alongside the dying President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the world political scene was dominated by what were known as the ‘Big Three’, the three powers which had played the leading role in the allied victory: the USSR, the US and Britain with her Commonwealth.3
The end of World War Two was to act as even more a spur to schemes of international co-operation than the end of the Great War 25 years earlier. Many of the international institutions which were to provide a framework for the post-war world were called into being at this time. Foremost among them was the United Nations, set up in 1945 to replace the League of Nations (which was only formally dissolved in 1946).
The first UN General Assembly was held in London in January 1946 under the presidency of Belgium’s foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak. From the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as instruments of post-war financial and economic reconstruction, came the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In October 1947, indirectly through the UN, came the signing of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) designed to work for the progressive liberalisation of world trade.
All these were intergovernmental structures based on co-operation between sovereign governments. As with the League of Nations before them, their prime mover, closely supported by Britain, was the United States of America. But, this time, there was to be no American retreat into isolationism. The US was firmly committed to play a central role, as was symbolised by the fact that the permanent headquarters chosen for the new United Nations was not in neutral Switzerland, like that of the defunct League. It was in the heart of New York (where its General Assembly building on the East River was to be designed by that most Utopian of 1920s architects, Le Corbusier).
There was of course one reason above all why the US was to find it impossible to repeat its 1920 retreat into ‘splendid isolation’. The Second World War had produced a complete reshaping of the balance of power. At the start of that war the leading western European nations, with their imperial possessions scattered across every continent, were still powers which, politically and militarily, were of world rank. But by the war’s end, the world was bestridden by the two new super-powers, the US and the USSR: one already armed with nuclear weapons, the other soon to possess them, representing two political ideologies in potentially deadly conflict. Nowhere was this more obvious than on the continent of Europe which, far from being the centre of world politics, was to become merely the central cockpit in which that greater rivalry was acted out.
However, it was not yet evident just how deep this division of Europe was to become. Initially, it had been agreed at the Moscow conference of October 1944 that most of central and eastern Europe, then being liberated from Nazi occupation by the Red Army, would fall after the war into ‘the Soviet sphere of influence’.
But when hostilities ended several of Europe’s pre-war democracies, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, re-established democratic, multiparty forms of government. Although they were under the shadow of Soviet occupation, the full political ambitions of the Communists were not yet obvious. Yugoslavia came under one-party Communist rule by Tito, then still Stalin’s ally. Albania followed suit, and played an active part in promoting an attempted Communist take-over of Greece only narrowly averted by Britain’s armed intervention in the Greek civil war of 1944–1945.
The immediate task confronting the western half of the continent, including all those occupied countries which had been liberated by the Western allies, was to re-establish self-governing institutions and to rebuild their economies. Here too, there initially seemed grounds for optimism, despite the presence in Italy and France of large Communist parties, which were to provide a constant reminder of how fragile the re-born democracies of western Europe might prove if economic recovery was not successful.
An early reflection of that optimism was contained in a confidential paper presented by a British Cabinet minister to his colleagues in the summer of 1945: none other than Arthur Salter, now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Churchill’s short-lived ‘caretaker government’. His chief task had been to report on the state of the economies of ‘liberated Europe’.
Salter’s conclusions were surprising. After touring western Europe, he reported that ‘the material destruction is much less, and the resources available for restoration are much greater, than could have been anticipated’. Except in ‘the limited areas of actual conflict’, he had found the industrial infrastructures of France, Holland, Belgium and even Germany itself still surprisingly intact. In general, western Europe had enough food, coal, port facilities and other raw materials to meet its essential needs. The most serious obstacle to recovery was the breakdown of the distribution system, in particular the extensive damage to railways. This, he suggested, could be overcome by use of surplus army trucks. ‘All that liberated Europe needs’, he concluded, ‘represents an effort, in terms of manpower and materials, which is small by comparison with what was required by actual combat.’ 4
Scarcely had Salter presented his report, however, than the government to which he belonged was replaced in the electoral landslide which, in July 1945, dismissed Churchill from office.5 The Labour victory, on the most radical Socialist programme ever presented to the British electorate, was itself a vivid expression of the post-war mood of idealism. The vision held out to the British people was that a new and better world could now be created, based on international co-operation and, at home, a massive expansion of state ownership and state controls. Its aim was to build a ‘better, fairer and more efficient society’. The peace was to be ‘planned’ just as had been the victory.
Britain’s new government, under Clement Attlee, launched a radical restructuring of Britain’s economy, based on the belief in centralised planning and nationalisation. The Bank of England and a wide range of basic industries, including coal, iron and steel, the railways and public transport, were taken into public ownership.
An equally ambitious and in some ways very similar programme was being launched in France. The man in charge was Salter’s old friend, Monnet. As a member of de Gaulle’s National Liberation Committee, in 1943 he had been appointed as ‘Commissioner for Armament, Supplies and Reconstruction’.6 On 30 August 1944, when General de Gaulle set up a provisional French government in newly liberated Paris, Monnet was full of ideas on how to restructure the French economy.
After VE Day in May 1945, he realised that a key would be American financial help. He therefore returned to Washington for some months, where, by effective lobbying, he talked the US government into providing a loan of $550 million. A useful ally in this was a young Washington lawyer, George W. Ball, who in the years that lay ahead was to become one of his closest and most invaluable collaborators.7
Armed with this aid, Monnet was able to return to France in November 1945, in charge of the new Commissariat du Plan, set to implement a four-year programme of reconstruction and modernisation. As in Britain, the ‘Monnet Plan’, as he himself called it, was based on state planning, controls and wholesale nationalisation, starting with the Bank of France and the railways. After de Gaulle stepped down as France’s President in January 1946, Monnet had become arguably the most powerful man in France.8
However, fully engaged in reconstruction as they were, in the first two years after the end of the war, there was little talk of bringing about ‘European unity’ from the governments of western Europe. The exception was a plan agreed by the governments-in-exile of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, to set up a common customs area between their three countries, Benelux. The idea had been inspired by Monnet’s attempt at Anglo-French union in 1940,9 and was finally ratified on 29 October 1947.
During these two years, however, the vision of creating a ‘United States of Europe’ did break into the headlines, from two unexpected directions. One was the speech made in Zurich in September 1946 by Churchill himself, now out of power and not averse to creating a stir on the international stage. He came up with a startlingly unconventional proposal: the setting up of a ‘Council of Europe’. The other, not dissimilar proposal came from the country which over the next few years was to play a key part in promoting Europe’s political integration: the United States of America. That it should have come from America itself was partly the result of the inter-war idealism when a group of internationally minded Americans had set up the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1920.
The CFR prospered during the years of America’s isolationism, perversely, as a consequence of the State Department’s withdrawal from world affairs. This had led to serious under-staffing and the CFR had begun to fill the gap with a series of position-papers addressing major foreign policy issues of the day. Generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and other industrial corporations, it had carried out detailed examinations of ‘mechanisms for the economic integration of Europe’. Over 120 influential figures, including academics, business leaders, politicians and civil servants drawn from across the Roosevelt administration, were involved in this programme, holding 362 meetings and producing no fewer than 682 documents. In 1939, it set up a series of ‘War and Peace Study Groups’, and when Coudenhove Kalergi had arrived in New York as a refugee from Hitler, the CFR arranged for him to spend the war years teaching ‘European integration’ at New York University.
The cause of European unity was also actively promoted in Washington in the early war years by Monnet. Not only did he win sympathy from such key US establishment figures as Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Justice Felix Frankfurter, but several times met President Roosevelt himself.
As peace approached, and Washington began to think about how Europe might be rebuilt, politically and economically, the ‘Europeanists’ had succeeded in convincing established liberal opinion that the solution to Europe’s post-war problems would lie in some form of political unification. There was, however, an important proviso: the US would not be prepared to support continued European colonialism.10 Europe had to learn to live within her own boundaries.
All this was reflected when, in 1946, one of the CFR’s study teams, headed by David Rockefeller and Charles M. Spofford, a senior lawyer, produced a paper entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Europe’, which was widely circulated in US government circles. In March 1947, after active lobbying by Coudenhove, two Senators, William Fullbright and Elbert D. Thomas, piloted a resolution through both houses of the US legislature that ‘Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe’.
To attract public support for the resolution, CFR members orchestrated an intensive media campaign. On 17 March, Life magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce, was a leading CFR member, proclaimed: ‘our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787’. Sumner Wells (CFR) of the Washington Post, owned by another CFR member, Eurgen Meyer, wrote: ‘Europe desperately needs some effective form of political and economic federation.’ Boston’s Christian Science Monitor, another strong CFR supporter, advised: ‘the US could hardly impose federation on Europe, but it could counsel… It could mould its lending and occupational policies towards upbuilding a single continental economy.’ The New York Times, the most influential CFR mouthpiece of all, produced on 18 April a magisterial editorial proclaiming: ‘Europe must federate or perish’.11
However, what gave the real impetus to American support for European integration was the darkening international climate, and it was this which was to bring the United States fully into the European arena.
The Marshall Plan: The first try that failed
The trigger for US interest was primarily its fear of Communist take-overs in Italy and France, where the Communists briefly became the largest single party in the Assembly. At its root was the economic dislocation caused by the unusually severe winter of 1946–1947, which undermined that initial post-war optimism about the potential for recovery of western Europe’s economies. Washington began to sense serious concern over Communist ambitions in Europe.
Ironically, however, the first country to run into real economic crisis was Britain: over-stretched by her still enormous military commitments and by the efforts her people had made through six years of war, much of it financed by huge American loans under the wartime ‘Lend-Lease’ programme which had cost the US $48.5 billion.
No sooner had the Japanese war come to an end in August 1945 than the US government abruptly terminated Lend-Lease. The impact on Britain’s economy was compared by John Maynard Keynes to that of ‘a financial Dunkirk’. Keynes himself, then the most respected economist in the western world, was dispatched to America to negotiate a replacement. In December 1945, he managed to secure loans of $3.75 billion from the US and a further $1.25 billion from Canada. But the terms were harsh, demanding that sterling be made freely convertible with the dollar, thus seriously undermining Britain’s special trading relationships with her colonies and Commonwealth.
In the first year after the war, Britain’s adverse trade balance soared to a then enormous £298 million (the following year it was to rise still further, to £443 million). So grave did the situation become that, over that freezing winter of 1946–1947, the Labour government was forced to export coal to reduce the balance of payment crisis. Yet fuel stocks in England were so low that power stations had to cut back drastically on generating hours or shut down altogether. Factories producing goods for export had to stop work or curtail production. For the ordinary citizen, the austerities of everyday life were now even more exacting than they had been during the war, the drastic rationing of clothing and food now being extended even to bread.
Already, as this financial crisis mounted, a government committee had reported in July 1946 that the cost of supporting the British zone of Germany in the year 1946–1947 would be over £80 million,12 a sum Britain could not afford. The only remedy was economic integration of the occupation zones. The British and US authorities had already begun the rebuilding of German self-government centred on the Länder, the regional divisions of Germany dating back to the Weimar Republic. They now agreed that the British and American zones should be fused, creating the so-called ‘bi-zone’ from 1 January 1947, with the US paying for three quarters of its financing.13
Further burdened by the costs of her military and political responsibilities in the Eastern Mediterranean, Britain then informed Washington on 21 February 1947 that she could no longer continue providing financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey (in addition to her substantial military commitment to Palestine, where the British mandate was now coming under severe strain from the campaign by Jewish nationalists and terrorist groups to set up a state of Israel).
This precipitated crisis meetings between members of Congress and State Department officials. Their outcome was a statement by Truman’s Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson propounding what would later become known as the ‘domino theory’. Facing the possibility of a Communist take-over in both Greece and Turkey, he declared that more was at stake than just those countries. If they fell, Communism might spread south to Iran and even perhaps to India.
A support package was hastily devised and, addressing a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, Truman asked for approval for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. ‘It must be the policy of the United States’, he declared, ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ He thus established what became known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, which was to guide US diplomacy for the next 40 years.
This also marked the beginning of America’s cold war foreign policy, at a time when the fragile détente between the Western allies and the Soviet Union was visibly crumbling. The events of 1947 were to mark a decisive turning point in the relations between Communist ‘East’ and non-Communist ‘West’. As local Communist parties registered significant gains in elections in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it had become clear that Stalin had every intention of turning the countries of central Europe into a Soviet empire. In October a Warsaw conference was to set up the ‘Cominform’ (Communist Information Bureau), to co-ordinate the activities of all Europe’s Communist parties. The so-called ‘Big Three’ negotiations between America, the Soviet Union and Britain on the future of Germany were getting nowhere, and in December 1947 the talks were to collapse irrevocably, over Soviet demands that Germany should pay massive reparations.
It was against this background of a Europe rapidly polarising between Communist and Western camps that the US Secretary of State George Marshall early in 1947 organised a team of officials, led by one of his most senior advisers, George Kennan. His task was to map out an ambitious new strategy for Europe’s economic support. Three of the key figures in putting together this study were members of the Council of Foreign Relations, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton and George Kennan.14 In particular Kennan and Clayton had extensive consultations with the man now in charge of France’s economy, their wartime Washington friend Jean Monnet.15 From their combined efforts came the European Recovery Programme, better known as the ‘Marshall Plan’. This was announced by Marshall on 5 June 1947, in a speech at Harvard University. Crucially, to avoid any appearance of the US dictating European policy, Marshall couched the offer of help in these terms:
‘It is already evident that, before the United States government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on the way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government. It would be neither fitting nor proper for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a programme designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European programme and the later support of such a programme so far as it may be practical for us to do so.’16
In response to Marshall’s declaration, 16 European nations agreed to attend a conference in Paris on 12 July 1947, to form a group known as the Committee for European Economic Co-operation (CEEC). The CEEC’s chairman was a British civil servant, Oliver Franks. But its key figure was his vice-chairman Jean Monnet, aided by his deputy Robert Marjolin and his former Washington lawyer George Ball, who had come to Paris in August to work for Monnet, advising how the CEEC case for economic aid could most effectively be presented to Washington.17 The result of their work was a report on 12 December that, to cover the period 1948–1951, the 16 nations would need $19.1 billion. Seven days later, on 19 December, after making provision for emergency aid to France, Italy and Austria, President Truman submitted to Congress his ‘European Recovery Bill’, requesting $17 billion over four years.
The Marshall Plan has generally been viewed as an altruistic gesture by the USA to help its impoverished Western allies in their hour of need. Also underlying it, however, were strong commercial interests. Europe represented for America ‘an enormous market, of several hundred million persons’ which she could not afford to lose.18 Economic support for Europe thus represented an opportunity for US manufacturers and suppliers desperate to find outlets for their production after orders for war materiel had dried up. As with the earlier Truman package for Greece and Turkey, the proffered aid was by no means solely financial. It included grain, machinery and vehicles produced in America. Additionally, US corporations had recognised that there was an opportunity to buy up valuable European assets at knock-down prices: a form of intervention at which de Gaulle expressed particular alarm. Europe’s economic weakness might also enable the US government to exert pressure on European governments to adopt more ‘liberal’ trading rules, thus easing the path for American exports.
An even more significant element in the Marshall Plan was that, from the outset, it included a major political component. Despite its apparent ‘hands off’ approach, the conditions imposed on recipient countries were deliberately designed to promote a federal Europe, the creation of which had for the State Department now become a Holy Grail. At one bound, thanks not least to effective lobbying by the CEEC’s vice-chairman Monnet, the most enthusiastic integrationist power in post-war Europe had become the United States.19
No sooner had the Marshall Plan been announced than it was greeted with particular excitement by many groups which, since Churchill’s Zurich speech in September 1946, had been evangelising for the cause of European political and economic unity. In Britain itself, on 14 May 1947, Churchill had launched at the Albert Hall his all-party United Europe Movement, with his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys MP, as its president, and a committee which included two members of the Labour Cabinet and several future Conservative Cabinet ministers, among them Macmillan. Churchill repeated his call for a ‘United States of Europe’, of which the USA, the USSR and Britain could be sponsors, and advocated the reintegration of Germany into the Western world.
Similar associations had been formed in France and Germany. Partly inspired by the Geneva manifesto drafted in 1944 by Spinelli, a European Union of Federalists had been set up, under the chairmanship of a leading Dutch Socialist and pacifist, Dr Henri Brugmans. Its objective was to bring together groups in Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, under the aegis of a new committee, the International Co-ordination of Movements for the Unification of Europe Committee.
When Marshall announced his Plan in June, support for it was quickly orchestrated across western Europe. Among those most active in this operation were several figures who had been enthusiasts for the integrationist cause since they were wartime exiles in London. These included Paul van Zeeland, more than once Belgium’s prime minister, and Joseph Retinger, a Polish émigré, who early in 1947 had formed an Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ELEC). In March 1947, ELEC’s leaders, headed by Van Zeeland, had already met in New York to discuss closer links with the United States, and they were now recruited to promote the Marshall Plan. A memorandum supporting the Plan was approved by ELEC on 30 June 1947 in Paris and sent to all European governments.
Another prominent advocate for the Plan was Brugmans. Addressing a congress of his European Union of Federalists at Montreux in August 1947, attended by Retinger and Sandys, he said, after referring to the Marshall Plan:
‘More than ever we are convinced that we are right in proclaiming the necessity for complete European Union. But…it is a disgrace that Europe had to wait for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty and interest lay.’20
Within months Brugmans’ speech was being widely circulated among ‘European federalists’, updated with a reference to the three events of 1947 which had ‘determined international life: the Marshall Plan, the breakdown of the Conference of the Big Three and the setting up of “Cominform”’.
Citing Proudhon’s plea of 1866 that ‘to end the irreparable abuse of sovereignty’ what was needed above all was ‘the dismemberment of sovereignty’, Brugmans called for the setting up of ‘supranational’ authorities. They would administer hydro-electric power from the Alps, the European railway system and ‘the first nucleus of autonomous European administration of coal and heavy industry’. This call was echoed in a foreword to the British edition of Brugmans’ speech by Arthur Salter’s friend Lord Layton, who wrote that ‘the whole of Western Europe can in fact be regarded as a single, highly interdependent industrial unit’ crying out for supranational control.
Despite this orchestrated support from Europe and intense lobbying in Washington, the US Congress remained hostile to Marshall’s proposal. Again it was pressure from events elsewhere which turned the tide. In February 1948, the ‘Prague coup’ established complete Communist control over Czechoslovakia. This event had profound repercussions throughout the Western world, lending substance to Acheson’s ‘domino theory’. Congressional resistance to the Marshall Plan collapsed. On 13 March, it was supported by the Senate and on 2 April it was approved by the House of Representatives with a massive 329:74 majority. Nevertheless, Congress refused to write a blank cheque. Aid was limited to $5.3 billion for one year, at the end of which approval had to be sought for continued funding.
For pro-integrationist lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic, an important lesson had been learned: rhetoric on protecting western Europe from the threat of Communism was likely to be the most effective shaping American opinion. John McCloy, soon to become US High Commissioner for Germany (and later chairman of the CFR, from 1953 to 1970), admitted: ‘one way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism’.21 The French also found the Communist threat highly advantageous. Mendès-France commented: ‘The Communists are rendering us a great service. Because we have a “Communist danger”, the Americans are making a tremendous effort to help us. We must keep up this indispensable Communist scare’.22
The chief instrument chosen by Washington to promote its new policy of European integration was a new organisation, formed on 16 April 1948, to administer the distribution of Marshall Plan funding. This was the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). The French government, heavily influenced by Monnet, pushed for the new body to be given an executive council with supranational powers and a permanent secretariat. The committed integrationist Paul-Henri Spaak, now once again Belgium’s prime minister, was appointed its director general. This was vociferously opposed by the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, supported by Sweden and Switzerland, who also had serious reservations about the ‘political’ components of the plan.
Through their efforts, the OEEC remained strictly intergovernmental, controlled by a ‘Council of Ministers’ making decisions on the basis of unanimity. Monnet’s verdict could not have been more withering: ‘the OEEC’s nothing: it’s only a watered-down British approach to Europe – talk, consultation, action only by unanimity. That’s no way to make Europe.’23 The first serious attempt to set up a large-scale supranational European organisation had failed.
The Council of Europe: the second try that failed
In 1948, following the breakdown of the ‘Big Three’ talks on the future of Germany, relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Europe seemed to be worsening by the month. Less than a month after the Prague Coup, on 17 March, Britain, France and the three ‘Benelux’ countries signed a mutual defence treaty in Brussels. Three months later, in June, the great powers were to be plunged, over Berlin, into their most serious crisis since the end of the war.
Before the eruption of this crisis, however, came another significant landmark in the campaign for European political unity. In May 1948, arising out of the Montreux meeting of the European Union of Federalists the previous August, Brugmans, Retinger and Sandys organised in The Hague a vast ‘European Congress’, which to their delight was chaired by Sandys’s father-in-law Winston Churchill, clad in an imposing frock coat of the type rarely seen since before the First World War. The 13th century Ridderzaal or ‘Hall of the Knights’ was packed with 713 delegates, nearly half from Britain and France. They included more than 20 former and future prime ministers, such as Paul Reynaud who had supported the Anglo-French union proposal in June 1940, Alcide de Gasperi of Italy, Paul van Zeeland of Belgium, Robert Schuman of France and Harold Macmillan of Britain; 29 former foreign ministers; and even a 51-strong delegation from west Germany, led by the man soon to become its first Chancellor, Dr Konrad Adenauer.24 Others present included Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish historian, and Denis de Rougemont, the eminent Swiss intellectual and fervent ‘federalist’.25
The Congress was sharply divided into two camps: the ‘federalists’, who wanted a ‘European assembly’ with governmental power, and the ‘confed-eralists’, like Churchill himself, who only wished to see the nations of Europe co-operating more closely on an intergovernmental basis. Easily the more numerous and vocal were the ‘federalists’, who cheered Brugmans’ declaration that ‘we are not at all, not in the slightest interested in diplomatic structures like the old League of Nations or a European UNO’; and that this would involve setting up ‘a European government and a European parliament’. Delegates were presented with a report calling for ‘common citizenship, without loss of original nationality’; the creation of a ‘Single European Defence Force’; a ‘unified economic system’ and ‘the conclusion of a complete federation with an elected European Parliament’.26 Echoing Spinelli, they voted for a ‘constituent assembly’ to draft a constitution for a European ‘union or federation’. But the more cautious intergovernmentalists, co-ordinated by Sandys, managed to water down these more extreme ‘federalist’ demands, so that the most obvious outcome of the Congress, taking up Churchill’s proposal in Zurich, was a call for the creation of a ‘Council of Europe’. It was further agreed that a ‘European Movement’ should be launched, to coordinate all the different groups now promoting European integration. Its aim would be to ‘break down national sovereignty by concrete practical action in the political and economic spheres’.27
This decision was indirectly to trigger one of the more curious episodes in the history of the European integration movement. Shortly after the Hague Congress, Retinger and Sandys went to America to lobby for support for their campaign for European unity. Here they met two key figures, William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, one of the founders in 1947 of the CIA, and his colleague Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA under President Eisenhower (and whose brother John Foster Dulles was to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of State). These two very senior members of the US intelligence community had recently joined in support of Coudenhove to form a Committee for a Free and United Europe. But, as a result of the meetings with Sandys and Retinger, Coudenhove, who considered that he alone should lead any unity movement, was now dropped, amid some acrimony. A new organisation was set up, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). From this time on, as recent academic research has established,28 the ACUE was used as a conduit to provide covert CIA funds, augmented by contributions from private foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, to promote the State Department’s obsession with a united Europe, in what one historian has called a ‘liberal conspiracy’.29
Over the next few years, ACUE funding was secretly channelled to a range of individuals and organisations working for European integration, from politicians such as Paul-Henri Spaak and trade unions to such influential British magazines as Lord Layton’s The Economist and the intellectual monthly Encounter. However, the major beneficiary of ACUE funding was the European Movement. Between 1949 and 1960, it was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income.30
Even while these negotiations were secretly afoot in Washington, however, the eyes of the world were suddenly focused in June 1948 on the most serious international crisis since the Cold War began. In January 1948, the British and US authorities in Germany had proposed that western Germany must move towards full self-government, based initially on the German-run economic council they had set up in their ‘bi-zone’, with a second chamber consisting of representatives of the Länder.
To meet French objections to this move, a six-nation conference was called in London, attended by representatives of the three occupying powers and the Benelux countries. On 7 June, it agreed to proposals for west Germany’s political development on a federal system, based on the Länder, along with a new single currency, the Deutschmark. On French insistence, it also agreed to an International Ruhr Authority, to control the coal and steel industries of the Ruhr.
What provoked the crisis was the decision of the three allied powers to introduce the Deutschmark into West Berlin. In those pre-Wall days, access to the different zones was not restricted. The Soviet authorities, fearful that the new currency would soon come to be used throughout the city, and aware that control of a currency brought economic control,31 imposed a blockade, cutting off road and rail access to the three western zones. Disaster for millions of West Berliners was only averted by the Allies, who for nearly a year would manage to keep the city’s population alive by flying in immense quantities of food, fuel and other vital supplies in what became known as the Berlin airlift.
This first ‘Berlin crisis’ confirmed how serious the Soviet threat at the heart of Europe had become and triggered negotiations on a comprehensive solution to the whole question of Western Europe’s security. Even the French government recognised that the Soviets presented a greater threat than a resurgent Germany, and pressed for greater US involvement in the defence of Europe. This was to lead to the signing in Washington on 4 April 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty, committing the US, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, the Benelux countries and four other western European nations (Norway, Denmark, Portugal and Iceland) to set up an integrated military organisation for the defence of non-Communist Europe.
It was the resultant organisation, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with its headquarters in Fontainebleau (later moved to Brussels), which was to guarantee the peace of Europe for the next 40 years. And its successful establishment was above all a triumph of inter-governmentalism: independent nations co-operating in a way which did not detract from their sovereignty.
While the NATO negotiations had been proceeding, active steps had also been taken to set up the Council of Europe called for by the Hague Congress. This was the first time since the 1920s that a proposal put forward by Europe’s various federalist groups had been taken up at government level. In January 1949, the governments of France, Great Britain and the Benelux countries, together with Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Switzerland, began talks on the form such a Council might take.
Ernest Bevin and the British government were extremely sceptical of its overall aim, and the discussions were led by the French, aided by the European Movement, with discreet off-stage encouragement from Monnet’s old friend Dean Acheson. Himself a fervent integrationist, he had succeeded Marshall as US Secretary of State on 7 January. Britain sought to dilute the proposals, arguing instead for a permanent conference of foreign ministers. In order to encourage British participation, which was regarded as essential, not least by Washington, a compromise was reached. The Council would divide its role: one part would be a Committee of Ministers, meeting behind closed doors, the other a Consultative Assembly, drawn largely from members of existing national parliaments, meeting in public.
On 5 May 1949, the Statute of the Council was signed in London by the 10 governments of the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In the same month the European Movement formally came into being, under four ‘Presidents of Honour’: Churchill, Spaak, de Gasperi and Leon Blum of France. Sandys and Leon Jouhaux of France were made co-presidents; Retinger its secretary-general.32
The first session of the Council began in Strasbourg on 10 August 1949. It was attended by senior politicians from each of the participating countries, including leading members of the British and other governments. The star was indisputably Churchill, who was given the freedom of the city and made a memorable speech to a rapturous crowd of 50,000 in Strasbourg’s main square (telling his fellow delegate Harold Macmillan ‘this is the best fun I’ve had for years and years’).33
The first president of the Assembly was Spaak, who had resigned as Belgian prime minister after a defeat in the general election only a week before the first session. He took his seat to preside over a series of discussions on how the Council could further the cause of integration,34 keen on the one hand to promote integration but, on the other hand, anxious not to lose touch with the British. With the exception of Richard Mackay, an Australian-born Labour MP, none of the British delegation advocated British entry into a Federal Europe.35
In the second session, the ‘federalists’ launched a ‘major offensive’, seeking to establish supranational authorities in the ‘key sectors’ of defence, human rights, coal, steel and power. But it was from the debates that clear divisions began to emerge, with sustained opposition to integration from British and Scandinavian delegates. Macmillan, then one of the Conservative delegates, explained that the British opposition was, above all else, ‘a matter of temperament’, a preference to work empirically when dealing with practical problems, rather than setting out ‘general principles’ which were then applied to practical issues. The British took the view that those who wished to take the federal path should do so, but they had no intention of following. At that stage, Spaak was later to recall, the idea of a ‘little Europe’ of ‘the Six’ first took shape, comprising France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries.36
By the third session, in the autumn of 1951, when the Conservatives had succeeded Labour and Churchill had replaced Attlee, there were some hopes that his party might be more ‘Europe-minded’. But, in power, the Conservatives proved no more enthusiastic for integration than their predecessors. Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (later to become Lord Kilmuir) broke the news. The Churchill government was ready to give its friendly support to the movement for European integration, but there was no question of the British taking an active part. Spaak finally concluded that the Council would never be anything more than a talking shop and came to realise that ‘we must do without Britain’s support if we were to make any headway’. He resigned as president on December 11 1951, by then sharing Monnet’s view that Britain would not consider joining until a united Europe was created.37
But, by this time, a third bid to give Europe a supranational government was already under way. This one would succeed.
1 The Times, 20 September 1946.
2 Although it was Churchill’s Fulton speech on 5 March 1946 which made this phrase famous, the term ‘iron curtain’ had been used many times before, not least in a widely reported article by Josef Goebbels in Das Reich on 25 February 1945, in which he warned that German surrender would lead to Soviet occupation of most of the Reich and eastern Europe, dividing the continent by ‘an iron curtain’ of ‘enormous dimensions’. Churchill himself, in a cable to President Truman on 4 June 1945, wrote ‘I view with profound misgivings…the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward’. Another phrase was given general currency through the Fulton speech when Churchill urged the continuation of ‘a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’.
3 The scale of the contribution made by Britain and the Commonwealth was reflected in the fact that by 1944 the Commonwealth armed forces totalled 8.7 million, of which Britain contributed 4.5 million. This compared with US armed forces of 7.2 million. (Williams, Neville (1967), Chronology of the Modern World 1763–1965 (New York, David McKay Co.).)
4 Salter, The Slave Of The Lamp, pp. 207–211.
5 At this point Salter drops out of the story. In 1951, at Churchill’s behest, he re-entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Ormskirk, for which he sat as MP for two years, serving briefly as a minister in Churchill’s government, before being elevated to the peerage as Lord Salter in 1953. In the 1960s he published two volumes of memoirs, but made no reference to his earlier writings on ‘Europe’, or the part played by the ideas he shared with Monnet in shaping the institutions and principles on which the EEC had by now been founded.
6 Taken from Monnet’s own entries to Who’s Who (London, A. & C. Black).
7 Ball, George (1982), The Past Has Another Pattern (New York, Norton and Co.), p. 77.
8 Milward, A. S. (2002), The Rise And Fall Of A National Strategy (London, Frank Cass), p. 37.
9 Brombergers, op. cit., p. 31.
10 An exception to this was the loan negotiated by Monnet for French reconstruction in 1946 (Ball, op. cit., p. 77).
11 Jasper, William F. (1989) ‘United States of Europe’ in New American, 5 (8), 10 April.
12 Approximately £2 billion at 2003 values.
13 Woodhouse, C. M. (1961), British Foreign Policy Since The Second World War (London, Hutchinson & Co.), pp. 16–18 and 110–112.
14 Bundy, William P., www.foreignaffairs.org/generalInfo/history.html.
15 Brombergers, op. cit., p. 62.
16 www.marshallfoundation.org/about_gcm/marshall_plan.htm
17 Ball, op. cit., pp. 77–78.
18 Brugmans, Dr Henri (1948), Fundamentals Of European Federalism, foreword by Lord Layton (London, The Federal Union), p. 4.
19 Aldrich, Richard L. (2001), The Hidden Hand – Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd), pp. 342 and 344. Aldrich also cites Thorne’s American Political Culture, pp. 316–320 and Hogan’s Marshall Plan, pp. 213–214 and 332–333.
20 Brugmans, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
21 Cited in Jasper, op. cit.
22 Galtier-Bossiérer, J. (1950), Mon journal dans la grande pagaie (Paris), p. 187. Cited in: Werth, op. cit., p. 351.
23 Ball, op. cit., p. 81.
24 Horne, Macmillan 1894–1956, op. cit., pp. 313–314.
25 Vaughan, Twentieth Century Europe, op.cit., pp. 84–86
26 Eyewitness report on the Congress by Harold S. Bidmead, Petts Wood and District Advertiser, June 1948.
27 Boothby, Lord (1978), Boothby – Recollections Of A Rebel (London, Hutchinson), p. 264.
28 Cf. Joshua Paul of Georgetown University, Washington, reported in Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000, and Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, op. cit.
29 See Coleman, Peter (1989), The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress For Cultural Freedom And The Struggle For The Mind Of Europe (New York, The Free Press).
30 ACUE funds were also used for a range of other purposes in Europe, including the financing of anti-Communist parties. In 1948, for instance, the CIA paid $10 million to support the Italian electoral campaign of Alcide de Gasperi a staunch supporter of European integration. This substantial contribution was intended to help avert an Italian civil war in which the Communists might prevail.
31 This was a lesson the advocates of a European ‘single currency’ were quickly to learn.
32 Retinger was also given CIA funding to set up an organisation known, from the Dutch hotel in which it first met in May 1954, as the Bilderberg Group. The purpose of this organisation, which continues to this day, was to stage regular meetings, deliberately shrouded in secrecy, between top politicians, businessmen and lawyers, to strengthen links between the US and western Europe. Among those who attended the first meeting, as guests of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, were senior European politicians and, from the US, David Rockefeller of the CFR and George Ball. Many of its members played an active role in the history of European integration and decades later the supposed influence of the Group was to become the focus of a popular conspiracy theory. But, as such, the Group played no direct part whatever in the integration process which began with Monnet’s ‘Schuman Plan’ in 1950, four years before the first Bilderberg meeting took place.
33 Horne, Alistair (1988), Macmillan 1894–1956 (London, Macmillan), p. 315.
34 Urwin, Derek W. (1995), The Community Of Europe – A History Of European Integration Since 1945 (second edition) (London, Longman), p. 35.
35 Spaak, op. cit., p. 209. See also, Aldrich, op. cit., pp. 355–356. Mackay’s activities were funded generously by the ACUE, with CIA approval.
36 Spaak, op. cit., pp. 211–212.
37 Spaak, op. cit., pp. 219–220 and 225.