Why is the European project facing an existential threat this week? In the recent words of European Union president Donald Tusk: “The spectre of a breakup is haunting Europe.” In perhaps the frankest admission ever to come out of Brussels, he said: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro enthusiasm.” Thus did he dismiss the utopian dreams of the forerunners of the EU and the subsequent “naive Euro-enthusiastic visions of total integration”.
The origins of the EU lie in the second world war, but not in the way many people on both sides of the debate assume. Brexiters try to imply that European unification descends from Napoleon and Hitler, even though membership has hardly been imposed at the point of a bayonet. At the same time, defenders of the EU like to believe that it somehow prevented a third world war, when in fact peace depends rather more on good governance. Proper democracies do not fight each other.
Because Britain was not involved at the start we do not have a clear idea of the EU’s development. Few in this country have even heard of Jean Monnet. He was an extraordinarily important Frenchman who neither went to university nor was ever elected to public office. Born into a family of cognac merchants, Monnet became the greatest behind-the-scenes fixer in modern history.Antony Beevor
It was Monnet who, while based in London in the dark days of June 1940, working on the integration of the British and French arms industries, came up with the suggestion of an Anglo-French union to continue resistance to Hitler. The idea excited both Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, but was crushed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who described the plan as a “marriage to a corpse”, since France was about to surrender. It was Monnet, now in the US at the behest of the British government and acting as an adviser to Franklin D Roosevelt, who persuaded the president to turn the US into the “arsenal of democracy” and to introduce the “victory plan” for the mass production of armaments to defeat Nazi Germany. And it was Monnet who, in 1943, ensured De Gaulle’s ascent to power as head of the French government in exile in Algiers, despite Roosevelt’s opposition.
That August of 1943, Monnet also decided that European states would be so enfeebled after the war that they must unite into a federation. And yet the Monnet plan, which he expounded in 1945, proposed the French takeover of Ruhr coal production to rebuild France at the expense of Germany. De Gaulle supported the idea fervently, but then resigned because the infighting of French politics failed to live up to his own impossible dream that the country’s conflicting views would become unified under his leadership.
On 2 January 1946, just before his departure, De Gaulle appointed Monnet to head the Commissariat Général du Plan. This was to provide centralised planning writ large. Monnet brought in almost the whole team from the Délégation Générale à l’Equipement National, even though it had been created by the collaborationist Vichy regime. These bright young “technocrates” from the top schools of the French administration had worked on projects to modernise France within the “new European order” of the Third Reich. After the war they were the very same people who were to run the European Coal and Steel Community, headed of course by Monnet, and then in 1958, the European Economic Community. Thus the top cadres of the European bureaucracy were not merely elitist from the start, they had little patience for democratic consultation. They knew best what was needed.
Brexit would make Britain the world’s most hated nation | Antony Beevor | Opinion | The Guardian
The origins of the EU lie in the second world war, but not in the way many people on both sides of the debate assume. Brexiters try to imply that European unification descends from Napoleon and Hitler, even though membership has hardly been imposed at the point of a bayonet. At the same time, defenders of the EU like to believe that it somehow prevented a third world war, when in fact peace depends rather more on good governance. Proper democracies do not fight each other.
Because Britain was not involved at the start we do not have a clear idea of the EU’s development. Few in this country have even heard of Jean Monnet. He was an extraordinarily important Frenchman who neither went to university nor was ever elected to public office. Born into a family of cognac merchants, Monnet became the greatest behind-the-scenes fixer in modern history.Antony Beevor
It was Monnet who, while based in London in the dark days of June 1940, working on the integration of the British and French arms industries, came up with the suggestion of an Anglo-French union to continue resistance to Hitler. The idea excited both Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, but was crushed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who described the plan as a “marriage to a corpse”, since France was about to surrender. It was Monnet, now in the US at the behest of the British government and acting as an adviser to Franklin D Roosevelt, who persuaded the president to turn the US into the “arsenal of democracy” and to introduce the “victory plan” for the mass production of armaments to defeat Nazi Germany. And it was Monnet who, in 1943, ensured De Gaulle’s ascent to power as head of the French government in exile in Algiers, despite Roosevelt’s opposition.
That August of 1943, Monnet also decided that European states would be so enfeebled after the war that they must unite into a federation. And yet the Monnet plan, which he expounded in 1945, proposed the French takeover of Ruhr coal production to rebuild France at the expense of Germany. De Gaulle supported the idea fervently, but then resigned because the infighting of French politics failed to live up to his own impossible dream that the country’s conflicting views would become unified under his leadership.
On 2 January 1946, just before his departure, De Gaulle appointed Monnet to head the Commissariat Général du Plan. This was to provide centralised planning writ large. Monnet brought in almost the whole team from the Délégation Générale à l’Equipement National, even though it had been created by the collaborationist Vichy regime. These bright young “technocrates” from the top schools of the French administration had worked on projects to modernise France within the “new European order” of the Third Reich. After the war they were the very same people who were to run the European Coal and Steel Community, headed of course by Monnet, and then in 1958, the European Economic Community. Thus the top cadres of the European bureaucracy were not merely elitist from the start, they had little patience for democratic consultation. They knew best what was needed.
Brexit would make Britain the world’s most hated nation | Antony Beevor | Opinion | The Guardian
