The New Old World (4 page)

This is one legitimate and productive way of looking at the Second World War, which does set the stage for the story of post-war reconstruction leading to integration that Milward tells. Yet, of course, the war was not just a common ordeal in which all continental states were tested and found wanting. It was also a life-or-death battle between Great Powers, with an asymmetric outcome. Germany, which set off the struggle, never actually collapsed as a nation-state—and least of all because of any narrowness of popular support. Its soldiers and civilians resisted the Allies unflinchingly, to the end.

It was the memory of this incommensurable experience during the war—of the scale of German military supremacy, and its consequences—that shaped European integration quite as much as the commensurate tasks of rebuilding nation-states on a more prosperous and democratic basis after the war, on which Milward concentrates. The country centrally concerned was inevitably France. It is no accident that the French contribution to the construction of common European institutions has been out of all proportion to the weight of France within the overall economy
of Western Europe. The political and military containment of Germany was a strategic priority for France from the outset, well before there was any consensus in Paris on the commercial benefits of integration among the Six. Once Anglo-American opposition ruled out any re-run of Clemenceau's attempt to hold Germany down by main force, the only coherent alternative was to bind it into the closest of alliances, with a construction more enduring than the temporary shelters of traditional diplomacy.

At the centre of the process of European integration, therefore, has always lain a specifically bi-national compact between the two leading states of the continent, France and Germany. The rationale for the successive arrangements between them, principally economic in form, was consistently strategic in background. Decisive for the evolution of common European institutions were four major bargains between Paris and Bonn. The first of these was, of course, the Schuman Plan of 1950, which created the original Coal and Steel Community in 1951. If the local problems of French siderurgy, dependent on Rhenish coal for its supply of coke, were one element in the inception of the Plan, its intention was far broader. Of the two countries, Germany possessed much the larger heavy industrial base. France feared its potential for rearmament. On the other hand, Germany feared continued international military control of the Ruhr. The pooling of sovereignty over their joint resources gave France safeguards against the risk of renascent German militarism, and freed Germany from Allied economic tutelage.

A second milestone was the understanding between Adenauer and Mollet that made possible the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Overriding reservations from the Finance Ministry in Bonn and the Foreign Ministry in Paris, the two governments reached an accord that secured German and French goods industries free entry into each other's markets, on which each was already highly dependent for its prosperity, while holding out the prospect of increased imports by the Federal Republic of French farm produce. Adenauer's
placet
for this deal, in the face of fierce liberal opposition from Erhard—who feared higher French social costs might spread to Germany—was unambiguously political in inspiration. He wanted West European unity as a bulwark against Communism, and a guarantee that eventual German reunification would be respected by France. In Paris, on the other hand, economic counsels remained divided over the project of a Common Market until rival proposals from London for a free
trade area looked as if they might be more attractive to Bonn, threatening the primacy of Franco-German commercial ties. But it was not the technical opinion of
hauts fonctionnaires
that decided the issue,
⁶
nor the personal preference of Mollet himself—who had always favoured European integration but been quite unable to carry his party two years earlier, when the EDC was killed off by SFIO votes. What swung the balance was the political shock of the Suez crisis.

Mollet headed a government far more preoccupied with prosecution of the Algerian War, and preparations for a strike against Egypt, than with trade negotiations of any sort. Anglophile by background, he was committed to an understanding with Britain for joint operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. On 1 November 1956 the Suez expedition was launched. Five days later, as French paras were pawing the ground outside Ismailia, Adenauer arrived in Paris for confidential talks on the Common Market. He was in the middle of discussions with Mollet and Pineau, when Eden suddenly rang from London to announce that Britain had unilaterally called off the expedition, under pressure from the US Treasury. In the stunned silence, Adenauer tactfully implied the moral to his hosts.
⁷
The French cabinet drew the lesson. America had reversed its stance since Indochina. Britain was a broken reed. For the last governments of the Fourth Republic, still committed to the French empire in Africa and planning for a French bomb, European unity alone could furnish the necessary counterweight to Washington. Six months later, the Treaty of Rome was signed by Pineau; and in the National Assembly it was the strategic argument—the need for a Europe independent of both America and Russia—that secured ratification.

The third critical episode came with the advent of De Gaulle. The first really strong regime in France since the war inevitably altered the terms of the bargain. After clinching a Common Agricultural Policy to the advantage of French farmers in early 1962, but failing to create an inter-governmental directorate among the Six, De Gaulle initiated talks for a formal diplomatic axis with Bonn in
the autumn. France was by now a nuclear power. In January 1963 he vetoed British entry into the Community. In February Adenauer signed the Franco-German Treaty. Once this diplomatic alliance was in place, De Gaulle—notoriously hostile to the Commission headed by Hallstein in Brussels—could check further integration of the EC so long as he was in power. The institutional expression of the new balance became the Luxembourg compromise of 1966, blocking majority voting in the Council of Ministers, which set the legislative parameters for the Community for the next two decades.

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.