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Tony Judt writes: “The very scale of the collective misery that Europeans had brought upon themselves in the first half of the twentieth century had a profoundly de-politicizing effect; far from turning to extreme solutions, in the manner of the years following World War One, the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned away from politics. The implications of this could be discerned only vaguely at the time – in the failure of Fascist or Communist parties to cash in upon the difficulties of daily existence; in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action; in the emergence of domestic recreations and domestic consumption in place of participation in public affairs…
“In more ways than most contemporaries could possibly have foreseen, a new Europe was being born.”234
In Western Europe, the post-war poverty and depression had been much greater than in the Anglo-Saxon countries (especially North America), and the consequent contrast as prosperity returned in the 1950s was therefore more striking. Thus while in the period 1913-50 the average growth rate in Britain, France and Germany was 1.3 percent, in the period 1950-73 “French growth rate per annum had averaged 5 percent, West Germany had grown at nearly 6 percent and even Britain had maintained an average rate above 3 percent.235 This extraordinary growth in prosperity, unparalleled in European history, could not fail to have an important and deleterious effect on the European psyche, accelerating its already pronounced turning away from religion and the spiritual life to Mammon and the pleasures of the flesh. The American gospel of self-fulfilment played its part in this change, as preached by the wave of Hollywood films that poured into Europe. But there were other, still more significant factors.
One was the increased size and influence of the state, not in the totalitarian form of the contemporary Soviet Union, but in the more subtle and beguiling form of the West European welfare state… West European welfarism, otherwise known as Social Democracy, was for the time being a great success. As Judt writes: “In the peak years of the modern European welfare state, when the administrative apparatus still exercised broad-ranging authority and its credibility remained unassailed, a remarkable consensus was achieved. The state, it was widely believed, would always do a better job than the unrestricted market: not just in dispensing justice and securing the realm, or distributing goods and services, but in designing and applying strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality. The notion that such matters might better be left to enlightened self-interest and the workings of the free market in commodities and ideas was regarded in mainstream European political and academic circles as a quaint relic of pre-Keynesian times: at best a failure to learn the lessons of the Depression, at worst an invitation to conflict and a veiled appeal to the basest human instincts.
“The state, then, was a good thing; and there was a lot of it. Between 1950 and 1973, government spending rose from 27.6 percent to 38.8 of the gross domestic product in France, from 30.4 percent to 42 percent in West Germany, from 34.2 percent to 41.5 percent in the UK and from 26.8 percent to 45.5 percent in the Netherlands – at a time when that domestic product was itself growing faster than every before or since. The overwhelming bulk of the increase in spending went on insurance, pensions, health, education and housing. In Scandinavia the share of national income devoted to social security alone rose 250 percent in Denmark and Sweden between 1950 and 1973. In Norway it tripled. Only in Switzerland was the share of post-war GNP spent by the state kept comparatively low (it did not reach 30 percent until 1980), but even there it stood in dramatic contrast to the 1938 figure of just 6.8 percent.
“The success story of post-war European capitalism was everywhere accompanied by an enhanced role for the public sector. But the nature of state engagement varied considerably. In most of continental Europe the state eschewed direct ownership of industry (though not public transport or communications), preferring to exercise indirect control, often through autonomous agencies, of which Italy’s tentacular IRI was the biggest and best known…
“Doctrinal differences over the ostensible goals of the state might noisily oppose Left and Right, Christian Democrats and Communists, Socialists and Conservatives, but almost everyone had something to gain from the opportunities the state afforded them for income and influence. Faith in the state – as planner, coordinator, facilitator, arbiter, provider, caretaker and guardian – was widespread and crossed almost all political divides. The welfare state was avowedly social but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological.
“Nevertheless, within the general post-war European consensus there was a distinctive vision, that of the Social Democrats. Social Democracy had always been a hybrid; indeed, this was just what was held against it by enemies to the Right and Left alike. A practice in lifelong search of its theory, Social Democracy was the outcome of an insight vouchsafed to a generation of European socialists early in the twentieth century: that radical social revolution in the heartlands of modern Europe – as prophesied and planned by the socialist visionaries of the nineteenth century – lay in the past, not the future. As a solution to the injustice and inefficiency of industrial capitalism, the nineteenth-century paradigm of violent urban upheaval was not only undesirable and unlikely to meet its goals; it was also redundant. Genuine improvements in the condition of all classes could be obtained in incremental and peaceful ways.
“It did not follow from this that the fundamental nineteenth-century socialist tenets were discarded. The overwhelming majority of mid-twentieth century European Social Democrats, even if they kept their distance from Marx and his avowed heirs, maintained as an article of faith that capitalism was inherently dysfunctional and that socialism was both morally and economically superior. Where they differed from Communists was in their unwillingness to commit to the inevitability of capitalism’s imminent demise or to the wisdom of hastening that demise by their own political actions. Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.”236
The most sophisticated and complex organization of Social Democracy, creating a vast increase in state power, turned out to be supranational: the European Union, composed in the beginning of the six Benelux countries, but now (in 2016) encompassing twenty-seven states (excluding Britain, which voted to leave in 2016).
Ironically, it was probably an Englishman, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who sketched the first plan for a united Europe as far back as 1693. His proposal was that the Sovereign Princes of Europe should “agree to meet by their stated deputies in a General Dyet, Estates or Parliament, and there Establish Rules of Justice for Soveraign Princes to observe one to another; and… before which Soveraign Assembly, should be brought all Differences depending between one Soveraign and another… Europe would quietly obtain the so much desired and needed Peace.”237
Peace was certainly one of the many motivations for the creation of the European Union; as David Reynolds puts it, the formation of the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community in 1957 was “effectively a peace settlement for Western Europe”.238
Many intellectuals in the early post-war generations believed that yet another war among the nations of Europe could be prevented only by uniting them in a new supra-nation. This, according to Michael McManus, was the motivation of Sir Edward Heath, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who took his country into the Union in 1973.
Heath “had first-hand experience of a Nuremburg rally in 1937, of the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and of combat in the Second World war itself. His greatest fear was of a resurgence of nationalism in Europe and of another ruinous war. European unity was, for him, first and foremost, the necessary key to peace.
“This was the predominant view within the Conservative Party from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s including most of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, however, she recognised a new reality and was fearful of a united Germany. But Sir Edward’s needle had got stuck…”239
But was it really the European Union or its embryonic predecessors that kept the peace in Europe? Hardly… Certainly, the process was helped forward by the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (it was proposed by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman on May 9, 1950) with its embryonic supranational organization, commission and court of justice. However, the real causes of the preservation of peace between the West European countries were mutual exhaustion, the common threat of the Red Army just over the Elbe – and the consequent felt need for the formation of NATO. In fact, the real cause of peace was the American army, the core army of NATO, together with other American institutions in Europe, which both defended the West against the Soviets and constantly cajoled the Europeans, especially the French, into working together for the common good.
In fact, the man usually credited with creating the EU, Jean Monnet, worked for much of his life in America and has been considered by many as almost an American spy. “It was Monnet,” write Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, “who had secured the Allies’ backing for General de Gaulle against Roosevelt’s opposition, and in return, de Gaulle gave him responsibility for rebuilding the French economy and industry – a position he used to achieve his great dream, laying the foundations for the EEC.
“The ‘Schuman Declaration’ was the result of intrigue, trickery and subterfuge by Monnet, his most audacious trick being to get French and West German governments to set up a supranational organisation to co-ordinate their industries without realising exactly what they had signed up to. This radical new concept, of an organisation with control over individual nations’ industries but with its own, outside autonomy, laid the foundation for all that came after. Unsurprisingly, Monnet became president of the new body, called – with a chillingly Orwellian tone – the High Authority. Schuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958.”240
Whether Monnet’s and Schuman’s motivation was a sinister as this is open to question. What cannot be denied is that, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes, “The European Union was always an American project.
“It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.
“While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO.
“There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy…
“The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. ‘It all began in Washington,’ said Robert Schuman's chief of staff.
“It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a modus vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even threatening to cut off US Marshall aid at a furious meeting with recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.
“Truman's motive was obvious. The Yalta settlement with the Soviet Union was breaking down. He wanted a united front to deter the Kremlin from further aggrandizement after Stalin gobbled up Czechoslovakia, doubly so after Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the South.
“For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist pantheon, the eminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware that he spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes and ears of Franklin Roosevelt.
“General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent, as indeed he was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he worked hand in glove with successive administrations.
“General Charles de Gaulle was always deeply suspicious of American motives…
“Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project.
“As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became available, one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J. Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement’s funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA.
“Bill Donovan, legendary head of the war-time OSS, was later in charge of orchestrating the EU project…
“There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.
“There were horrible misjudgments along the way, of course. A memo dated June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community to pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the ‘adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable’. This was too clever by half, as we can see today from debt-deflation traps and mass unemployment across southern Europe…”241
However, the pursuit of political union by economic stealth was always the aim of the EU’s founders. As Jean Monnet said in 1952, “The nations of Europe must be guided towards a Superstate without their peoples understanding what is happening. This can be carried out in successive stages, each camouflaged as having an economic goal, but which will end up by leading them irreversibly into a federation.”
Monnet’s words were prophetic: during the course of the twentieth century the European superstate’s powers increased inexorably, being sanctified through a series of treaties signed by the heads of the Union’s national governments, including the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the Single European Act of 1985, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the introduction of the single currency in 1999 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. But these acquisitions of power by the supranational Union were not democratically debated or ratified in any real sense; and the lack of democratic consensus and of sustained economic growth in later decades has caused serious problems, leading to Britain’s decision to withdraw from the Union in 2016. While a detailed study of this problem remains beyond the scope of this book, the potential of the atheist and unelected European Commission going down a similar path to that of the atheist and unelected Politburo of the Soviet Union (albeit less violently) should always be borne in mind…
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