Finally, during a period of relative institutional standstill, in 1978 Giscard and Schmidt together created the European Monetary System to counteract the destabilizing effects of the collapse of the Bretton Woods order, when fixed exchange rates disintegrated amid the first deep post-war recession. Created outside the framework of the Community, the EMS was imposed by France and Germany against resistance even within the Commission, as the first attempt to control the volatility of financial markets, and prepare the ground for a single currency within the space of the Six.
For the first three decades after the war, then, the pattern was quite consistent. The two strongest continental powers, adjacent former enemies, led European institutional development, in pursuit of distinct but convergent interests. France, which retained military and diplomatic superiority throughout, was determined to attach Germany to a common economic order, capable of ensuring its own prosperity and security, and allowing Western Europe to escape from subservience to the United States. Germany, which enjoyed economic superiority already by the mid-fifties, needed not only Community-wide markets for its industries, but French support for its full reintegration into the Atlantic bloc and eventual reunification with the zone—still officially Mitteldeutschland—under the control of the Soviet Union. The dominant partner in this period was always France, whose functionaries conceived the original Coal and Steel Community and designed most of the institutional machinery of the Common Market. It was not until the deutschmark became the anchor of the European monetary zone for the first time that the balance between Paris and Bonn started to change.
The high politics of the Franco-German axis tell a story older than that of voters in pursuit of consumer durables and welfare payments. But if it suggests neither a new primacy of domestic concerns nor, inevitably, symmetry of national publics—the other member-states scarcely match the significance of these two—it does appear to confirm the overwhelming importance Milward gives to purely inter-governmental relations in the history of European integration. Yet if we look at the institutions of the Community that emerged from it, there is a shortfall. A customs union, even equipped with an agrarian fund, did not require a supranational commission armed with powers of executive direction, a high court capable of striking down national legislation, a parliament with nominal rights of amendment or revocation. The limited domestic goals Milward sees as the driving-force behind integration could have been realized inside a much plainer framework—the kind that would have been more agreeable to De Gaulle, had he come to power a year earlier, and that can be found today in the Americas, North and South. The actual machinery of the Community is inexplicable without another force.
That, of course, was the federalist vision of a supranational Europe developed above all by Monnet and his circle, the small group of technocrats who conceived the original ECSC, and drafted much of the detail of the EEC. Few modern political figures have remained more elusive than Monnet, as Milward observes in the couple of wary pages he accords him. Since he wrote, however, there has appeared François Duchêne’s excellent biography, which brings him into much clearer focus. In an acute and graceful work that does not minimize the anomalies of Monnet’s career, Duchêne draws an arresting portrait of the ‘Father of Europe’.
The provincial reserve and propriety that surrounded his person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Malraux than of Georges Duhamel. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for continental unity and dreams of a global directorate. From cornering Canadian brandy markets to organizing Allied wheat supplies; floating bond issues in Warsaw and Bucharest to fighting proxy battles with Giannini in San Francisco; liquidating Kreuger’s empire in Sweden to arranging railroad loans for T.V. Soong in Shanghai; working with Dulles to set up American Motors in Detroit and dealing with Flick to sell off chemical concerns in Nazi Germany—such were the staging-posts to the post-war Commissariat au Plan and the presidency of the High Authority, to the Companion of Honour and the first Citizen of Europe.
Monnet’s marriage gives perhaps the best glimpse of his life, still only visible in part, between the wars. In 1929 he was floating a municipal bond in Milan, at the behest of John McCloy, when he fell in love with the newly wed wife of one of his Italian employees. There was no divorce under Mussolini, and a child was born to the married couple two years later. Attempts to get the union annulled were resisted by the husband and father, and refused by the Vatican. By 1934 Monnet’s headquarters were in Shanghai. There one day he headed for the Trans-Siberian to meet his lover in Moscow, where she arrived from Switzerland, acquired Soviet citizenship overnight, dissolved her marriage, and wed him under the banns of the USSR. His bride, a devout Catholic, preferred these unusual arrangements—Monnet explained—to the demeaning offices of Reno. Why Stalin’s government allowed them, he could never understand. It was a tense time for a wedding: Kirov was assassinated a fortnight later. Subsequently, when her repudiated Italian spouse attempted to recover his four-year-old daughter in Shanghai, Madame Monnet found refuge from the kidnapper in the Soviet consulate—an establishment of some fame in the history of the Comintern. By the end of 1935, still holding a Soviet passport, she obtained residence in the US, when Monnet relocated to New York, on a Turkish quota. We are in the corridors of Stamboul Train or Shanghai Express.
Cosmopolitan as only an international financier could be, Monnet remained a French patriot, and from the eve to the end of the Second World War worked with untiring distinction for the victory of his country and the Allies, in Paris, London, Washington, Algiers. In 1945, appointed by De Gaulle to head France’s new planning commission, Monnet was a logical choice. The organizer of the Plan for Modernization and Equipment is with reason described by Milward as ‘a most effective begetter of the French nation-state’s post-war resurgence’.8 Here, however, he was in a substantial company. What made Monnet different was the speed and boldness with which he slipped this leash when the occasion arose. His opportunity came when in late 1949 Acheson demanded of Schuman a coherent French policy towards Germany, for which the Quai d’Orsay had no answer. It was Monnet’s solution—the offer of a supranational pooling of steel and coal resources—that set the ball of European integration rolling. The larger part of the institutional model of the EEC eight years later descended directly from the ECSC Monnet’s circle designed in 1950.
There is no doubt that, as Milward suggests, Monnet’s initiatives in these years owed much to American encouragement. His decisive advantage, as a political operator across national boundaries in Europe, was the closeness of his association with the US political elite—not only the Dulles brothers, but Acheson, Harriman, McCloy, Ball, Bruce and others—formed during his years in New York and Washington, abundantly documented by Duchêne. Monnet’s intimacy with the highest levels of power in the hegemonic state of the hour was unique. He was to become widely distrusted in his own country because of it. How much of his European zeal, both compatriots at the time and historians since have asked, was prompted by his American patrons, within the strategic framework of the Marshall Plan?
The structural interconnexion was indeed very close. It is possible that Monnet was first set thinking about post-war integration by discussions in the US, and certain that his subsequent achievements depended critically on US support. But his political inspiration was nevertheless quite different. American policy was driven by the relentless pursuit of Cold War objectives. A strong Western Europe was needed as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, on the central front of a world-wide battle against Communist subversion, whose outlying zones were to be found in Asia, from Korea in the north to Indochina and Malaya in the south, where the line was being held by France and Britain.
Monnet was strangely unmoved by all this. In France itself he got on well with CGT leaders after the l
iberation. He considered the colonial war in Indochina, financed by Washington, ‘absurd and dangerous’; feared the Korean War would escalate American pressure for German rearmament to a point where French public opinion would reject the sharing of sovereignty envisaged in the Schuman Plan; thought Western fixation with the Soviet menace a distraction. As late as June 1950 he told the editor of the Economist that the underlying purpose of the ECSC was ‘the setting up of a neutralized group in Europe—if France need not fear Germany, she need have no other fears, i.e. Russia’.9 The important task was to build a modern and united Europe, capable in the long run of an independent partnership with the United States. ‘We would transform our archaic social conditions’, he wrote in 1952, ‘and come to laugh at our present fear of Russia’.10 American power set the limits of all political action in Europe, and Monnet knew better than anyone how to work within them. But he had an original agenda of his own, which was diagonal to US intentions.
Where did it come from? Monnet had lived through two devastating European conflicts, and his over-riding goal was to bar the road to another one. But this was a common preoccupation of his generation, without inspiring any general vision of federalism. Part of the reason was that the passions of the Cold War so quickly succeeded the lessons of the World War, displacing or surcharging it in another set of priorities for the political elites of Western Europe. Monnet was detached from these. His career as a deracinated financial projector, adrift from any stable social forces or national frontiers, left him at a psychological angle to the conventional outlook of his class. As Duchêne points out, people thought Monnet ‘lacked political values’, because he did not care very much about the ‘struggles over economic equality springing from the French and Russian Revolutions’.11 It was this relative indifference—not exactly the same as insensibility—that freed him to act so inventively beyond the assumptions of the inter-state system in which these struggles were fought out.
Although he was proud of his country, Monnet was not committed to the framework of the nation-state. He opposed the French nuclear deterrent and tried to dissuade Adenauer from signing the Franco-German Treaty. From the conception of the ECSC onwards, he worked consistently for supranational goals in Europe. He was initially cool towards the idea of the EEC, which he did not originate, thinking the Common Market to be a ‘rather vague’ scheme—he was anyway not particularly impressed with doctrines of free trade. Milward makes much of his paradoxical underestimation of the potential of a customs union for integration, but the question Monnet put as early as 1955—‘Is it possible to have a Common Market without federal social, monetary and macro-economic policies?’12—is still the central issue before the European Union forty years later. The order of the phrasing is significant. A banker by profession, Monnet was not economically conservative. He always sought trade-union support for his schemes, and late in life even expressed sympathy with the student movement of 1968, whose warning of social injustice stood for ‘the cause of humanity’.13
On the other hand, Monnet was a stranger to the democratic process, as conventionally understood. He never faced a crowd or ran for office. Shunning any direct contact with electorates, he worked among elites only. From Milward’s standpoint, in which European integration flowed from the popular consensus inside each nation-state, as expressed at the polls, this was in itself enough to condemn him to the irrelevance that affected federalism more largely. It is more plausible, however, to draw the opposite lesson. Monnet’s career was emblematic, in a particularly pure way, of the predominant character of the process that has led to the Union we have today. At no point until—ostensibly—the British referendum of 1976 was there any real popular participation in the movement towards European unity.
Parliamentary majorities, of course, had to be stitched together, and corporate interests squared: there was room for alert lobbies or cross-grained deputies to put in their word. But the electorates themselves were never consulted. Europe was scarcely mentioned at the polls that in January 1956 brought the Republican Front to office in France—they were fought over the Algerian conflict and the appeal of Poujade. But the critical point on which the fate of the EEC finally turned was the switch of a few dozen SFIO votes in the National Assembly that had blocked the EDC, in response to the climate after Suez. The weakest performer in Milward’s theoretical quartet is here. The democratic foundations he ascribes to the whole process of integration were quite notional. There was an absence of popular opposition to plans designed and debated on high, which received mere negative assent below. In his most recent writing, Milward himself comes close to conceding as much. The reality is the one Duchêne describes: ‘The situation was not revolutionary, and voters were neither a motor nor a brake’.14
But if this is so, what enabled Monnet and his associates to play the role they did in the bargaining between chancelleries? If we ask why the outcome of European integration was not as lopsidedly inter-governmental as a neo-realist logic would appear to imply—was not, in other words, something closer to the kind of framework that, let us say, Mendès-France or De Gaulle (or later Thatcher or Major) would have approved—the answer is twofold. Firstly, among the Six the smaller nations were predisposed to federalist solutions. The Benelux countries, whose own customs union was adumbrated in exile as early as 1943, were states whose only prospect of significant influence in Europe lay in some kind of supranational framework. It was two foreign ministers from the Low Countries—Beyen in the Netherlands and Spaak in Belgium—who originated the key moves that led to the eventual brokerage of the Treaty of Rome. Beyen, who first actually proposed the Common Market, was not an elected politician, but a former executive for Philips and director of Unilever parachuted straight from the IMF into the Dutch cabinet. Milward, forgetting his strictures on Monnet, rightly salutes him.
There was, however, a second and much heavier weight that descended on the federalist side of the scales. That was, of course, the United States. Monnet’s strength as an architect of integration did not lie in any particular leverage with European cabinets—even if he eventually came to enjoy the confidence of Adenauer—but in his direct line to Washington. American pressure, in the epoch of Acheson and Dulles, was crucial in putting real—not merely ideal—force behind the conception of ‘ever greater union’ that came to be enshrined in the Treaty of Rome. In so far as it tends to underplay this role, Milward’s account can be taxed not with excess but insufficiency of realism.
At the same time US policy throws into sharp relief the last of Milward’s postulates. For consistent American patronage, at critical moments pressure, for far-reaching European integration did not correspond to the interests or demands of any important domestic constituency. In the decisions reached, US voters counted for nothing. More significantly, when the potential for economic competition from a more unified Western Europe, equipped with a common external tariff, was registered by the Treasury, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve, they were firmly overridden by the White House and the State Department. American politico-military imperatives, in the global conflict with Communism, trumped commercial calculation without the slightest difficulty. Eisenhower informed Pineau that the realization of the Treaty of Rome would be ‘one of the finest days in the history of the free world, perhaps even more so than winning the war’.15 Pregnant words, from the Supreme Allied Commander.
Milward is entirely clear about US priorities, which he describes with his customary trenchancy. But he does not pursue the theoretical issue they pose for his interpretive scheme. In America, at least, continuity between domestic agendas and foreign objectives did not obtain. There was a clear-cut conflict between them. Was this just an American exception, without echo in Europe? Milward himself provides the evidence that it was not. For there was, after all, one major country of Western Europe which did not take the path of integration.
Why did the United Kingdom, under both Labour and Conservative rule, reject the logic of the Six? Surely the dome
stic consensus behind rising popular standards, based on the maintenance of full employment and the welfare state, was even more complete in Britain than in France or Italy, with their still intransigent mass Communist parties, or Germany with its doughty champions of economic liberalism? On the chequerboard of major political forces, there were no English counterparts of Marty or Erhard; and in the vocabulary of continental Europe no equivalents to Butskellism. If the predominant impetus to integration was a popular quest for socio-economic security codified in a strong national consensus, should Britain in the age of Attlee or Macmillan not have been foremost in it?
Although he points out the elements of an economic configuration that set the UK somewhat apart from the Six—the structure of agricultural subventions, the role of sterling, the salience of Commonwealth markets—Milward does not argue that it therefore made sense for Britain to stay out of Europe. On the contrary, he judges that ‘failure to sign the Treaties of Rome was a serious mistake’.16 His explanation for the error is that the British political establishment, arrogant and provincial, clung to the belief that the UK was ‘still in some sense a great power whose foreign policy should reflect that position’. Its ignorance of the nearby world was richly distilled by Harold Macmillan’s remark to his intimates that it was ‘the Jews, the Planners and the old cosmopolitan element’ who were to blame for the supranational tendencies of the European Commission.17
What the detail of Milward’s account suggests is that for fifteen years after the war British policy towards European integration was essentially settled by rulers who put calculations—or miscalculations—of political power and prestige before estimates of economic performance. The misfit between this pattern and the overall framework of The European Rescue of the Nation-State is too plain to escape his notice. On a more tentative note than usual, he offers the ingenious suggestion that because the crisis of the British state in the inter-war and war-time years was less acute than on the continent, ‘so the search for a new consensus after 1945 was more limited’, and—despite appearances—the result ‘perhaps weaker’. He goes on to remark: ‘The prosperity it brought was also more limited and the United Kingdom was eventually to lead the attack on the post-war consensus of which it had only been one of the lesser beneficiaries’.18
The New Old World Page 3
