before Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson called for a “general association of nations . . . formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”7 Because of opposition in the Congress, though, the United States itself never joined. For this and other reasons, the League was weak and ineffectual from the beginning. By the time World War II broke out, the League was all but defunct. It was formally dissolved in 1945 when the United Nations officially took over its functions.
The United States was also central to the establishment of the United Nations. In fact, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who first coined the term “United Nations,” referring to the twenty-six countries allied against the Axis powers during World War II. Over the course of the war, the idea of the UN was developed under American leadership, and the UN Charter was agreed upon at a conference in San Francisco, in June 1945, entering into force on October 24.
The United States also played a large part in getting Europe on a practical path to unity. Tired of war and wary of Soviet designs on Western Europe, the U.S. promoted European economic integration with the Marshall Plan. U.S. officials also supported the idea of political and military integration. The ECSC enjoyed U.S. support and the U.S. even backed the idea of a supranational European army. As we will see, the war-weary Americans did not fully realize what kind of project they were helping to set in motion.
The key to translating the aspirations for European unity into institutional reality was Jean Monnet and his brilliant modus operandi, dubbed the “Monnet method.”8 Monnet embedded the utopian objective in a gradualist strategy that slowly moved forward toward the supranationalist goal but never clearly defined it. The strategy was to begin in the economic realm, avoiding openly political proposals, and with care never to take a step that would be unacceptable to people at any given stage of integration. A British Conservative author, Adrian Hilton, characterized the Monnet method so well that for years his words were wrongly attributed to Monnet himself: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”9
So a secret to the EU’s success has been its eschewal of any Great Leap Forward. Instead, the EU is moving toward its utopian goal in small, achievable steps, occasionally taking an unavoidable step backward. Charitably, one might say that a kind of benign deception is at the heart of this strategy. The purpose of proceeding incrementally is to avoid alerting average citizens to the fact that the objective is slowly to hollow out the power of their country and its government, the power that they best understand and that is accountable to them. Only the insiders – who see themselves as long-range thinkers and believe they understand best the complexities of international relations – can be allowed to know what is really happening. The EU would not be the EU without this culture of government by insiders and elites.
But the elites are deceiving themselves too. Neither Monnet nor most of his followers have seemed to know exactly what they are striving for. And even if they think they do, can anything based on deception – including self-deception – be good?
THE UTOPIAN IDEA OF WORLD PEACE
While the goal of the European project eludes precise definition, one thing is certain: it has never been only about Europe. It began with no lesser aim than ending warfare globally; it was a child of Kant’s ideal of perpetual peace. Thus the opening words of the Schuman Declaration: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.”10 This statement, in almost exactly its original wording, became the first clause of the preamble to the Treaty of Paris, thereby establishing the safeguarding of world peace as the ECSC’s fundamental reason for being.
A radically restructured, supranational Europe heralding the advent of world peace: this dream was a mirror image of the other political ideologies that had made the fate of twentieth-century Europe. In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s genocidal pan-European dystopia of evil, and in the midst of Soviet communism’s ongoing global campaign to subjugate whole nations and peoples to its vision of a brave new world, the European idea was another political utopia brewing in the world. It is a utopianism of good, a soft utopianism, but it is utopian nonetheless.
And despite all the ways the do-gooder utopianism of the European Union is different from the “hard” utopianism of Nazism and communism, it has another thing in common with its totalitarian cousins: its ultimate goals are unachievable. But the pursuit of these impossible goals, like the pursuit of any utopian idea, cannot but cause real damage to real people. Seventy years after the end of World War II, the European idea is shaping up to be a tragedy of unintended consequences – the antidemocratic consequences of good people’s determination to prevent the reoccurrence of the tremendous evil they have witnessed. If the supranationalist vision of the European project prevails, democracy and self-government will steadily be eroded in the vain pursuit of an unachievable world peace.
The European Coal and Steel Community was unprecedented. But from the very beginning it was meant to be only the first step to an integrated, united Europe. Thus it was bound to be supplemented by organizations, institutions and agreements that would bring Europe closer to the integrated continent that the founders and their successors envisioned.
From 1952 to 1957, the ECSC was the only established institution advancing the supranational integration of Europe. During this period, though, there was an attempt to create another integrative organization, the European Defense Community (EDC). This was a truly audacious initiative by the six member states of the ECSC to launch a common European army. It proved to be a step too far, breaking Monnet’s rule of taking incremental steps that would not arouse opposition. The project was dropped in August 1954 when the French National Assembly rejected the EDC treaty.
FROM COMMUNITY TO UNION
Soon, in June 1955, negotiations began toward the next phase of European integration, the European Common Market. The result was treaties in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the latter intended to develop a common market for the peaceful use of atomic energy. The Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (TEEC), commonly known as the Treaty of Rome, is celebrated today as the most significant step toward the European Union until its formal establishment in 1992. Article 2 of the TEEC states:
It shall be the aim of the Community, by establishing a Common Market and progressively approximating the economic policies of Member States, to promote throughout the Community a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increased stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living and closer relations between its Member States.1
At that time, the participants were still only the six founding members of the ECSC: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Another milestone in European integration came in July 1967, when the European Economic Community merged with the European Atomic Energy Community and the European Coal and Steel Community to form the European Communities, also referred to unofficially in the singular, as the European Community (EC).2 The change from “European Economic Community” to “European Community” is an example of how the integrationists use language in artful ways to advance their agenda under the radar. Steeped in their own technocratic universe, they have developed a body of jargon understandable only to insiders. Using this EU-speak, European elites
