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The History of the EU-4October 20, 2005 Jean Monnet & Robert Schuman, architects of the ECSC
[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ]
[Some Important EU Institutions]
FORMATION
The War changed everything in Europe. Formerly, the Western powers were tied mainly to their empires; now they were tied mainly to each other. Even during the Great Depression, the French state regarded itself as the seat of West Africa and Indochine; Italy's fascists had inherited Crispi's dreams of Italian territorial expansion anywhere possible. The United Kingdom, constrained by protectionism in the dominions and abroad, effectively annexed Argentina; it also began to dabble in Keynesian stimulus, as did pre-1932 Japan. However, after 1945 it was immutably clear to all that the whole of Europe was, to all intents and purposes, a multi-cultural nation. Regardless of whatever resentment the France and the Danes might have harbored towards Germany, all depended on the rapid recovery of all.
There were three formative institutions that later became the EU: the European Coal & Steel Community (ECSC), founded in 1951 from the Benelux countries, Germany, France, and Italy; the European Economic Community (EEC, or "Common Market"), founded in 1958, with the same charter members; and "Euratom," also founded 1958. The EEC and Euratom were founded by the Treaty of Rome. Readers will notice that the ECSC came first, and was followed by an atomic energy development agency for the member states. The EEC, in contrast, was ineffectual until 1962, when the French government was able to get its mind off Algeria. During the period of the Fourth Republic, a tension persisted between the "revolutionary imperialists" who were determined to continue the project of "gallicizing" Algeria; and those who prioritized France's role in Europe.1 With French withdrawal, the latter priority won out, and the Fifth Republic set about dismantling any interferring ties to the USA.2
With France out of Algeria, all the energy and priorities favored integration with Paris taking the lead. Even before '62, the ECSC was so important because it concerned nearly all energy (this was when coal was practically synonymous with electric power AND domestic heating AND transportation). Petroleum's role in transport was confined to a small share of short-haul shipping and a tiny aviation sector; natural gas was almost unutilized, and nuclear power was in its infancy. Mechanical work of any sort meant coal, heat meant coal, and industrial production meant steel refined with coal. For such an important commodity as coal and its siamese twin, steel, the integration of planning provides a great boost to welfare.3
The EEC, in turn, was largely a research group (like OPEC pre-1970 or the OECD today) until 1962, with the launching of the common agricultural policy (CAP). While trade in farm commodities was of far smaller significance economically, most European nations (as well as the USA) were obsessed with the rehabilitation of their farming sectors; subsidizing the export of products into each other's markets was driving up the cost of government in western Europe, and exposing the region to ecological disaster. In 1962, the object of the ECSC and the EEC was to increase output of everything, of course; but later, both were as much preoccupied with "rationalization," as with overall economic expansion. "Rationalization" is sometimes used to mean, "subordinating to market forces"; here; however, the object was to prevent a massive overinvestment in capacity by competing national champions. As such, this would allow the national governments of the ECSC to agree to expansion on the basis of comparative advantage.
Euratom is a relatively obscure part of the unification process; it was evidentally modelled on the US Atomic Energy Commission (later, Nuclear Regulatory Commission), but also on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Both the USA and the states of Europe were committed to a massive adoption of atomic energy as an alternative to fossil fuels; in the 1950's, it was widely expected that nuclear energy would be so cheap it would entirely supercede fossil fuel everywhere. Unlike the USA, however, Euratom initially was obligated to ensure that atomic fuel was not diverted to weaponization.
The creation of these three organizations was the visible face of European integration, and a very meaningful cross-section of it, too. Energy was fundamental, and managing capital spending in energy or inergy-intensive industry, was priority one. Capital-intensive energy development was priority two (hence, Euratom). Integrating the monetary policy of the European states was still conducted through the BIS and summits of central banks, under the auspices of the Bretton Woods System, but by the late 1960's competing national views about inflation and money "hardness" were diminishing in favor of a united action on currency (leading to the 1969 Hague Summit). The one big achievement of the old EEC was an initial jab at harmonizing the farm policies of the six member states (CAP, '62), establishing a common external tariff ('67), and conducting research on strategies for industrial union.
In the debate over the creation of the EEC, the two main protagonists were the former adversaries Germany and France. Both the 4th and 5th Republics were dominated by etatist views on the appropriate role of the state; this did not interefere with the country's general conservative social character. The Christian Democratic government of Germany had a vision of a European federation analogous to the German federation itself; ideally, the EEC would virtually replace the national governments with a three-tiered federation. Although it is a sort of counterfactual speculation, and therefore inherently silly, I am rather interested in how such a federation would actually have worked had it been put into place. [West] Germany, Italy, and the Benelux states would each have been federations of a dozen states each, while France would have fused two levels of government into Paris. (Since this is a cartoon of how the EU actually does function, it contributes to an understanding of why France's unitary state acts as a "force multiplier" within the European system).
In the USA, the federation includes a chronic power struggle beween the states and the federal government. The federal government normally has won ground over the last 80 years on prudential matters and civil liberties, but mainly tends to expand by vesting new powers in institutions not directly under federal control, such as Social Security and GNMA (which are self-governing) or the Federal Reserve (which is institutionally detached from the three branches of the federal government). The US government has "created" states like Oklahoma, Arizona, Hawai'i, and others, but having done so, loses control over them. Likewise, the SSA, which manages almost half of all federal non-interest expenditures. Traditionally, the US "right" favors a weaker central government; the "left" (or political radicals) favor a stronger one. While the "left" has historically been very weak in the USA, the federal government has expanded by compromise with the right on control over new federal functions.
Suppose NAFTA were replaced by the North American Union (NAU), complete with parliament and NAU executive. After many years, the federal government in Washington might devolve power to the NAU commission in, say, Monterrey, Nuevo León. Now there are two historic trends at work: the decline of state power (moving to the national capitals of Washington, Ottawa, and Ciudad de Mexicó); and the decline of national power (moving to Monterrey). The latter is an inevitable outcome of the mere creation of NAU; before, there was no NAU, now there is. As Monterrey takes on more harmonizing functions between the member states, it partly supplants them.
A possible outcome is that the states/provinces might win increased control relative to their national capitals; for example, the decline in the relative importance of US defense spending and the "rationalization" of PEMEX would sharply diminish the federal governments of Mexico and the USA; conceivably, as the Canadian model of provincial-administered healthcare mandated by the federal government spreads to the USA and Mexico, those national governments would become facillitators of states administering social policies, rather than administer the policies themselves. In short, the middle tier might wither away as NAU and the states/provinces expand into the administrative space occupied by the national governments. In 2100, NAU might have entirely replaced the member states. Or, conversely, the Canadians and Mexicans—determined to preserve their distinct society—might drastically expand the capacities and responsibilities of the central government, with Canada perhaps becoming a unitary state to offset its small population. Then, Ottawa would apply pressure on Washington by colluding (?) with, say, twelve of the smaller US states (and possibly the future EU).
In this case the evolution of the supranational federation would be driven, as it always has been, by local expedience (the need to integrate hurricane response, for example), monetary crisis (as, for example, the 1969 Hague Summit's response to the anticipated Bretton Woods collapse), and security concerns (either with respect to cross-border terrorism or, in the case of the eventual EU, asserting European preferences with respect to the common defense of Western democracies). Which brings me to my final point.
So far I've confined this post to the matter of economic and energy-based union. However, strategic anxieties also played an important role in the creation of the EU.
OPERATION "STAY BEHIND"
Allied victory in the War left a severe political problem. The non-fascist nationalist parties of the West had been decimated by the fascist states that occupied those countries. Many of the conventional "bourgeois" parties spent the war in concentration camps. Moderate socialists had likewise been liquidated, and in many cases had political agenda applicable to a recovering economy like that of 1939, not a devastated and occupied one like that of 1945. The fascist parties had probably lost the sincere support of most European voters, which was obviously a good thing. That left the Communist Party, which is unusual among parties in that it usually flourishes when it is violently suppressed. In countries like France, Greece, and Italy, the Communist Party was almost coextensive with the resistance under Occupation/Fascism. In Austria, the Communists had long been the main opposition to the fascist parties, and in fact had had a paramilitary group to counter that of the fascists. Finally, Turkey's Kemalist leaders were preparing for multiparty elections; they were worried about both Islamicist parties in the south and east, and leftist parties in the northwest. In many cases, therefore, the post-war Allied Administrations of occupied Europe created secret armies to defend against a potential Communist invasion... or revolution.
For Turkey, under authoritarian rule, the objective for the US liaisons was to professionalize the elites so they could continue to win the confidence of the electorate (and hence win elections, something they had not tried). In Greece, the objective was to liquidate the Communist partisans who were principally responsible for liberating the country from Nazi rule, and who had been pushed into the countryside by the British [*]. In Italy, well— During the 1990s, research into stay-behind armies progressed only very slowly, due to very limited access to primary documents. It was revealed, however, that stay-behind armies covered all of Western Europe and operated under different code names, such as Gladio in Italy, Absalon in Denmark, P26 in Switzerland, ROC in Norway, I&O in the Netherlands, and SDRA8 in Belgium. The so-called Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), coordinated the stay-behind networks on an international level. The last confirmed ACC meeting took place on 24 October 1990 in Brussels, chaired by the Belgian military secret service, the SGR. Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former head of the CIA, refused in a television interview to answer questions about Gladio. At the end of the interview, the questioner asked him about Licio Gelli, who headed the secret masonic lodge P2 whose members included military officers, politicians, industrialists and secret service chiefs. Admiral Turner ripped off his microphone and shouted: "I said, no questions about Gladio." A forced admission about the link between Gladio and P2, held responsible for right-wing terrorism? Or the confused reaction of a man no longer in command of the facts? For several years the story of Stay Behind forces has simmered in the background. Again, Mr. Ganser: This is not really a conspiracy theory as I define it. "Stay Behind," for example, was evidently designed to merely ensure a resistance movement survived and succeeded were Western Europe invaded by the USSR (regarded as a plausible idea in the late 1940's). Suppose it transpired the French maquis was also a scheme of pre-WW2 British and American intelligence? In fact, the problem with "Stay Behind" was that it was shoddy and unreliable; the men it armed were prone to getting embroiled in the indigenous far-right politics of Italy. Another problem was that the US & UK administrators were immutably convinced, perhaps out of ideological vanity, that no truly indigenous—and therefore legitimate—Communist movement could ever arise on Western soil.
And even if it had, the intelligence analysts reasoned, it would have done so only because of the political vacuum left by Nazi/Fascist rule. If US citizens were left with a choice between Maoists and Klansmen, in what sense could the elctions that followed represent the will of the people? The administrators of Europe faced a similar dilemma.
AND?
The EU was actually the culmination of an imminently logical and benign US program [*]. There's nothing secret about that, since the project of a United States of Europe was, and remains, a very stic scheme. Unifying the continent under a liberal market economy and free multiparty elections was easily the first best option; no one wanted another world war. And few actually wanted a seething zoo of autarkic "people's republics,"either. The creation of NATO (1948) united the two goals politically: prevent vindictive nationalisms from stopping the reconstruction of Europe; and prevent Nazi's rival totalitarian movement, Communism, from exploiting its monopoly on political organization.4 Since the mid-1960's, Western European Communist parties won legitimacy and acceptance through participation in bourgeois governments, plus a high-octane hypernationalist ideological narrative. Obviously, US nationals and policymakers have not benefitted from this, and at the beginning of the Cold War, tolerance of Communist coups in Western Europe would have been frankly suicidal.
Moreover, the union of pre-existing nations (as opposed to colonial extrusions of a single country, as was the USA itself) was almost guaranteed to mean economic liberalism. A centrally-planned economy involving nations of different cultures and languages, would need to operate on the principle of market economics. Without the principle of comparative advantage enshrined as an operating principle, for example, an enterprise as urgent for the public welfare as the ECSC would never have appeared.
In the event, the interesting paradox of European unification was that the one country whose input was likely to be rejected (out of resentment for the past), the one whose economic philosophy was the most at odds with the general tenor of the times, and the one without any pretensions to global pre-imminence, was Germany; and that one country's vision of a unified Europe has tended to favor federalism rather than a cooperative model (favored by France). While the federal model is usually imagined to give the most influence to that bette-noire of the neoliberal, the "eurocrat," it has been advocated by the one major advocate of free markets in Europe, viz., the Bundesrepublik. And finally, this is the model that has despite the foregoing, tended to prevail over time. When the other partners drag their feet on the federalization scheme, then it grinds to a halt. When necessity imposes giving national powers to Brussels, then the unification project is resumed.
I would submit this is no conspiracy, but reflects the fact that federalism is the one venue under which the union can respond to the shocks implicit in a market economy.
(Part 5)
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