The New Old World (85 page)

In this visionary text, the three political traditions that would contest conceptions of Europe over the following century are all present in embryo.
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Saint-Simon, who had fought in the American Revolution and made a fortune in the French Revolution, based his construction on a rejection of any return to the
ancien régimes
of Europe, and an accurate prediction of the violent overthrow of the Restoration in France. Within another decade, he would produce the first industrial version of utopian socialism. From this part of his legacy descended a sequence of revolutionary interventions and slogans for a united Europe. In the 1830s, Considérant, a disciple of Fourier, argued for a European federation based on productive labour and reciprocal recognition of rights and goods, to banish war from the continent. By the time of the Commune, when he worked with Courbet, Considérant was calling for a United
States of Europe on the model of the USA. Now made possible by the progress of science and technology, it should begin with collaboration between France and Germany.
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In the revolutions of 1848–9, Mazzini and Cattaneo looked to European unity as the only safeguard against wars destructive of popular sovereignty and nationality, Mazzini envisaging a common market, Cattaneo a federal state.
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Hugo added his plangent voice for a United States of Europe, in a famous address to a peace congress in Paris.
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Proudhon and Bakunin followed in the 1860s—Proudhon arguing that Europe was too big for a federation, and should become a confederation of confederations, along Swiss lines; Bakunin, on the eve of joining the First International, attacking Mazzini's nationality principle as calculated to crush weaker or more backward communities, and denouncing any bureaucratic structure as incompatible with the insurrectionary liberty of a United States of Europe to come.
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In the Second International, views divided. In 1911 Kautsky declared that the only path to a durable peace in the world was ‘the unification of the states that belong to European civilisation into
a federation with a common trade policy, a federal parliament, government and army—the establishment of a United States of Europe', a perspective Luxemburg rejected as utopian.
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But when war broke out in 1914 the Bolsheviks themselves adopted the slogan of a republican United States of Europe in their first manifesto against it. A year later, Lenin would criticize this position, arguing that while a capitalist United States of Europe was possible as a common front of the continent's possessing classes to suppress revolution and meet the challenge of faster American rates of growth, it was wrong for Marxists to call for a socialist version. For that might imply that the revolution could not triumph in one or several countries before sweeping Europe as a whole.
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Trotsky, by contrast, viewed the prospect of a capitalist United States of Europe as potentially a step forward that could help to create a united European working class, even if—he added a decade later—in answering to the needs of European capital to compete on more equal terms with America, reaction were to solve, not for the first time, tasks the revolution had failed to acquit. It was impossible to build socialism in a single country, as Stalin was claiming to do in the USSR, whereas Europe formed a logical field of struggle towards it.
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Stalin's victory in the CPSU closed down all discussion of a United States of Europe within the Third International. But not outside it. The revolutionary tradition found a final, spectacular expression during the Second World War, in the manifesto composed on the island of Ventotene by Altiero Spinelli, a member of the PCI expelled from the party for criticizing the Moscow trials, and Ernesto Rossi, a leader of
Giustizia e Libertà
, both prisoners of Mussolini since the twenties. Italy had been the classic land of radical struggle for national unity and independence, symbolized by the career of Garibaldi. The Manifesto of Ventotene drew a line under that experience. Although such nationalism had once been progressive, it had also contained the seeds of its degeneration into the imperialism that for a second time had set loose the furies
of war in Europe. Nazism had to be defeated by the Allies. But the Soviet Union, vital to victory, had become a bureaucratic despotism, while the Anglo-American powers were bent on restoration of the old order, which had brought inter-imperialist war in the first place. Once the fighting was over, therefore, the revolutionary imperative was to abolish the division of Europe into sovereign national states. Needed was a single federal union, of continental dimensions. In the struggles to come, the critical line of division was not going to be over democracy or socialism, but internationalism. The European revolution would certainly be socialist, and it would require the temporary dictatorship of a revolutionary party, as the disciplined nucleus of the new state and the democracy it would create. But it should not involve the bureaucratic statification of all property, still less of the means of public expression and organization. A free press, free trade-unions and a free judiciary, all unknown in Russia, were essential to it.
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The manifesto, smuggled out to the mainland by Albert Hirschman's sister, is without question the most powerful vision of continental unity to emerge from the European Resistance—libertarian and jacobin motifs fused white-hot in a synthesis that is testimony to the fludity of ideas possible before the Iron Curtain fell. Forty years later, Spinelli ended his career in full respectability, a member of the European Commission and father of the European Parliament, whose principal building in Brussels bears his name.

Later to emerge than this revolutionary tradition was a second filiation, closer to the best-known legacy of Saint-Simon to the nineteenth century—his conception of desirable social change as the work of scientific and industrial elites, reforming society from the summits of expert knowledge. Incorporated in his prescriptions for a European parliament, this technocratic vision passed down not only to his followers, the Saint-Simonian politicians, bankers and engineers of the Second Empire and Third Republic, but out into wider areas of reforming opinion.
In its European applications, it was marked by a concern with detailed institutional machinery typically missing from the revolutionary line. The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune were the signals for its emergence. In 1867, the League of Peace and Freedom was founded in Geneva, run for the next twenty years by Charles Lemonnier, editor of Saint-Simon's selected works and former secretary of the Crédit Mobilier, who from 1868 onwards produced a monthly journal for the League,
Les États Unis d'Europe
.
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With Hugo as an associate and Garibaldi as its president, the League visibly descended from the republican traditions of the revolutions of 1848. But by 1872, when Lemonnier, in the wake of ‘the sad and terrible year' that had just ended, published a book calling for a federal United States of Europe, a shift of emphasis was clear. A united Europe composed of republican governments required a single army, a supreme court, and a common market, and needed the consent of its citizens, expressed by universal suffrage. But it should keep completely clear of the ‘social question', other than by imposing arbitration to prevent strikes, and promoting economic growth.
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Still more moderate, and yet more detailed, was the proposal that came five years later from the Swiss jurist Bluntschli, who after the defeat of the conservative Sonderbund in his homeland had moved to Germany, becoming a leading authority on international law. Ruling out either an American or a Swiss model, he explained that any future European union would have to respect the sovereignty of the states—carefully enumerated: eighteen in all—composing it, with major and minor powers accorded different voting
weights. The ensuing organization should have neither fiscal nor military authority over its members, but should concentrate on administrative and legal issues that could be resolved in common. With this, a fully-fledged inter-governmental, as distinct from federal, conception of European unity was for the first time set out, and a shift towards the technicalities of constitutional law begun.
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Early political science was not far behind. In 1900, the Sciences Po organized a colloquium in Paris at which rival schemes for European union were debated. The historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, scion of a leading establishment family, made it clear that the slogan of a United States of Europe was counter-productive: an American-style federation was not on the cards. The first steps towards European unity would have to be economic—a customs union—not political, and should start from the historic core of European civilization, the Latin and Germanic nations of West and Central Europe. Of the three empires surrounding these, Russia was needed as a counterweight to Germany, and Turkey should be admitted to avert the dangers of war over its fate. But Britain should be kept out: it was an overseas empire, without European solidarity, against which a confederal Europe should be made—fear of the Anglo-Saxon powers providing a better spur to its formation than mere democratic sentiments. Another rapporteur, the lawyer Gustave Isambert, included Britain but excluded Turkey on ethnic, religious and moral grounds, and warned against dividing its member-states into two categories of powers. Only a confederation was feasible, but it should be a strong one, endowed with a legislature, a high court, an executive and an army, with a capital perhaps in Strasbourg. For to entrust the prevention of war simply to the effects of technical and economic progress was delusive—waiting for water to erode a rock, rather than lifting it with the lever of political will. United, a Europe of 375 million souls could lay down the law to the earth—naturally in keeping with principles of justice and equity.
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The juridical and geo-political cast of these reflections acquired further life after the First World War, when Europe's position in the world was more visibly threatened. The technocratic tradition had always been moderate in its instincts, lying more or less in the middle of the political spectrum. But in the inter-war period, its leading sequel became much more explicitly a doctrine of the centre, in both senses of the word. In the ideas, tactically variable over the years though these were, of Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Austrian count who launched the Pan-European Movement in 1923, the unity of Europe was always based on a double opposition. Ideologically, it was to be a bulwark against communism on the left, and extreme nationalism, later Nazism, on the right. Geopolitically, it would be an effective military barrier to Russia and an economic competitor of Anglo-America—later, when he adjusted his sights to include England in Europe, of the United States.
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More self-consciously elitist than any of his predecessors, Coudenhove—whose bent was less technological than aesthetic and philosophical—sought support from the great and the good of the time: from Einstein to Rilke, Mussolini to Adenauer, Mann to Claudel, Brüning to Briand. In practice, his organization benefitted from the patronage of the clerical regimes of Seipel and Dollfuss in Austria—a country that, both stripped of its empire and denied self-determination, was the most glaring of all victims of Wilsonian diplomacy at Versailles—and from the funds of a Teutonic banking establishment—Warburg, Deutsche Bank, Melchior, Kreditanstalt—worthy of the Crédit Mobilier of old.
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Publicly, democracy was upheld by Coudenhove as a regime of the golden mean between left and right, even if too many democrats—bourgeois or social—were spineless defenders of it. Earlier, he had made no secret of his liberal disdain for it as a ‘lamentable interlude between two great aristocratic epochs: the feudal aristocracy of the sword and the social aristocracy of the spirit'.
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In due course, once Hitler had absorbed Austria, Coudenhove's outlook shifted away from an original anti-parliamentarism, and he ended close to Anglo-French professions of the connexion between liberty and collective security. But throughout, his constitutional schemes for Europe—from a treaty of arbitration through a customs union and a high court to a single currency—were to be bestowed on the peoples from above. In temperament not entirely dissimilar to Saint-Simon—another flamboyant, semi-worldly, semi-unworldly adventurer—the Austrian count proved in the end an appropriate descendant of the French one: completely unpractical, yet uncannily premonitory of what was to come.

Saint-Simon, however, also anticipated a third, no less significant current of reflections on Europe. In his description of a peaceful original unity in the Catholic faith and institutions of the Middle Ages, and dismissal of the balance of power between states that had been cherished by the Enlightenment as a ruinous substitute, supposedly mitigating war while actually fomenting it, he struck two notes that would be central to the culture of the Restoration, and the conservative traditions that issued from it. Idealized images of feudalism and religion, a world of graceful piety and chivalry, as what most truly made Europe one, had already been a leitmotif of Burke's counter-revolutionary message. But a far more powerful, because dialectical—thereby also ambiguous—version lay unpublished. Written three years after
Letters on a Regicide Peace
, Novalis's
Europa
(1799) represented mediaeval Christendom as a fabled realm of harmony, love and beauty, united by the papacy, that had been destroyed by Luther's insurrection against the Church, which in turn had set loose the revolution—‘a second Reformation'—in France. In its wake, Europe was now rent by a battle between old and new worlds, that revealed the
dreadful defects of its traditional organization of states. But what if the ‘primary historical goal' of the unprecedented conflict now engulfing the continent was actually to bring Europe together again? Might not war be reawakening it into a higher ‘state of states', in which tradition and emancipation would be reconciled in a post-revolutionary faith to come?
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