Lamy admits that there is a democratic deficit in the European experiment: “We are witnessing a growing distance between European public opinions and the European project. . . . In spite of constantly striking institutional flints over the past 50 years, there has been no resulting democratic spark.”27
That is what global governance comes down to: the usurpation of democratic self-government by a democratically unaccountable group of globalist elites. In the next section we will step back and examine how this postdemocratic, postliberal project began. An overview of the history of postwar European integration will reinforce how the noble illusion of supranational governance runs like a red thread through the story of the EU.
INTENDED AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Five years and a day after World War II had ended in Europe with Germany’s unconditional surrender, the Schuman Declaration was presented, on May 9, 1950. The French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was proposing the establishment of what would become the European Coal and Steel Community. The Schuman Declaration was a powerful symbol of a new Europe emerging from the ashes of the most destructive war the world had ever known.
The immediate purpose of the ECSC was to eliminate the perpetual rivalry between France and Germany, which had led to repeated conflicts and untold suffering for so many generations. By placing French and German coal and steel production under a common High Authority, which would administer both countries’ coal and steel industries independently of their respective governments, the ECSC would bind together the economic interests of the two nations. Thereby, war between France and Germany was to be relegated to the past. According to the Schuman Declaration, “The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.”1
AN END TO WAR
The idea of making war between France and Germany impossible was a powerful and noble idea indeed. In World War II, approximately 5 million German soldiers, 1 million German civilians, 400,000 French soldiers and 400,000 French civilians had died, to say nothing of the millions of wounded and the war’s estimated economic costs of 4 trillion dollars. And this is to say nothing of World War I, which had ended only twenty-one years before the beginning of World War II.
But of course, World War II and Nazism did not affect only France and Germany. On the continent of Europe, it claimed the lives of approximately 15 million people, including the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Outside of Europe, the war dead numbered 6 million people. The United States mourned 290,000 American soldiers who died in Europe and Asia.
The war’s end finally came in August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing approximately 120,000 people. But the specter of another war, one that could destroy civilization, soon loomed on the horizon. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Now there were two rival world powers armed with nuclear weapons that could cause devastation on a scale unimaginable even in the wake of the recent war.
In the midst of all this, the Schuman Declaration and the ECSC were not just about preventing war between France and Germany. That was only the starting point for building a new Europe – and via this new Europe, for achieving world peace. The very name of the “European Coal and Steel Community” made clear that this new supranational entity was not to be limited to Germany and France. Jean Monnet, who would serve as the ECSC’s first chairman, invited the core Western European nations to the negotiations to establish the ECSC. Great Britain, protective of its national sovereignty, declined. Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg accepted and, with the entry into force of the Treaty of Paris in July 1952, joined France and Germany as the six founding members. They formed the nucleus of what was eventually to become the European Union.
The Schuman Declaration attributes the recent war, at least in part, to the failure to achieve “a united Europe,” and takes as a presupposition that Franco-German reconciliation is only a first step to the greater goal of uniting Europe: “The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany.”2 Likewise, the preamble to the Treaty of Paris establishing the ECSC speaks of building Europe, saying it can be done “only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity, and through the establishment of common bases for economic development . . . .”3
From the beginning, the primary movers behind the ECSC were aiming toward a united, post-nation-state Europe. “The indispensable first principle,” according to Jean Monnet, was “the abnegation of sovereignty in a limited but decisive field.” Cooperation alone was not enough; there must be “a fusion of the interests of the European peoples and not merely another effort to maintain an equilibrium of those interests . . . .”4 The signatories to the Treaty of Paris, in founding the ECSC, declared themselves resolved “to create, by establishing an economic community, the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the foundation for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared. . . .”5
The ECSC High Authority was perhaps the first example of a supranational institution that was endowed with real authority over its member states. The six member states of the ECSC had truly ceded a significant aspect of their sovereign powers – control of the production of coal and steel. This was something not only central to their economies in general, but also necessary for building the weapons and machinery to wage war successfully. Clearly, the ECSC was meant to usher in a radically new, united Europe.
FROM EUROPEAN DREAMS TO INSTITUTIONAL REALITY
The idea of European unity did not appear out of nowhere with the ECSC. It has a long history. Perhaps the most significant intellectual antecedent of the European idea came from the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, with his proposal for achieving perpetual peace through “a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of peace (fœdus pacificum), and which . . . seeks to make an end of all wars forever.” Kant suggested that this concept of federation “should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace . . . .”6
Before and after Kant published his idea for a league of peace, many people had thought about or proposed a unification of some kind among European nations, or some sort of “United States of Europe.” After World War I and until the ECSC’s founding, the idea of European unification picked up steam. The Austrian count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the International Paneuropean Union in the 1920s, with the goal of uniting Europe. The French prime minister Aristide Briand advocated a federation of European nations at the League of Nations in 1929. Several books were written in several countries promoting a United States of Europe. Seeking a way to achieve lasting peace, Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in 1946, said, “We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” In 1948, Churchill was honorary president of a Congress of Europe, which preceded the founding of the Council of Europe the next year. Today the Council of Europe has forty-seven member states, including all of the member states of the EU.
The idea of union among nations for the purpose of achieving world peace was not solely a European one. It was President Woodrow Wilson who proposed the first aspirationally global organization, the League of Nations, with the aim of securing a lasting international
