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Since the Fall of the Roman Empire the idea of unity has been
present in European culture. Since the early modern period,
proposals have been made for unions of European states in some
form, from the 19th century as unions of nation-states. The creation
of the predecessors to the present European Union was however
specific to the years immediately after the Second World War.
Pre-1945 Influences
The Frankish empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire united
large areas under a loose administration for hundreds of years. Once
Arabs had conquered ancient centers of Christianity in Syria and Egypt
during the 8th century, the concept of "Christendom" became essentially a
concept of a unified Europe, but always more of an ideal than an actuality.
The Great Schism of 1054 between Orthodoxy and Catholicism rendered the
idea of "Christendom" moot. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, the first proposal for peaceful methods of unifying Europe against a
common enemy emerged. George of Pod Brady, a Hussite king of Bohemia
proposed the creation of a union of Christian nations against the Turks in
1464. In 1569, the Union of Lublin transformed the Polish-Lithuanian
personal union into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multi-national
federation and elective monarchy, which lasted until the partitions of
Poland in 1795. In 1693, William Penn looked at the devastation of war in
Europe and wrote of a 'European dyet, or parliament', to prevent further
war.
Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre 1658 – 1743. Proposed the creation of a
European league of 18 sovereign states in 1728In 1728, Abbot Charles de SaintPierre proposed the creation of a European league of 18 sovereign states, with
common treasury, no borders and an economic union. After the American
Revolution of 1776 the vision of a United States of Europe similar to the United
States of America was shared by some prominent Europeans, notably the
Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Kościuszko.Some suggestion of a European
union can be found in Immanuel Kant's 1795 proposal for an "eternal peace
congress”. In the 1800s, customs union under Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental
system was promulgated in November 1806 as an embargo of British goods in
the interests of French hegemony. It demonstrated the flaws of a supranational
economic system for Europe.The French socialist Saint-Simon and Augustin
Theirry would in 1814 write the essay De la reorganization de la société
européenne, already concurring up some form of parliamentary European
federation. In the conservative reaction after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the
German Confederation was established as a loose association of thirty-eight
nominally sovereign German states formed by the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon
had swept away the Holy Roman Empire and simplified the map of Germany. In
1834, the Zollverein (German, "customs union") was formed among the states of
the Confederation, in order to create better trade flow and reduce internal
competition.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 1872, helped define the modern European movement
Italian writer and politician Giuseppe Mazzini called for the creation of a
federation of European republics in 1843. This set the stage for perhaps, the best
known early proposal for peaceful unification, through cooperation and equality
of membership, made by the pacifist Victor Hugo in 1847. Hugo spoke in favor of
the idea at a peace congress organized by Mazzini, but was laughed out of the
hall. However, he returned to his idea again in 1851.
After the First World War
Following the catastrophe of the First World War, some thinkers and visionaries
again began to float the idea of a politically unified Europe. In 1923, the Austrian
Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europe movement and
hosted the First Pan European Congress, held in Vienna in 1926. In 1929, Aristide
Briand, French prime minister, gave a speech in the presence of the League of
Nations Assembly in which he proposed the idea of a federation of European
nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and
political and social co-operation. Many eminent economists, among them John
Maynard Keynes, supported this view. At the League's request Briand presented
a Memorandum on the organization of a system of European Federal Union in
1930.In 1931 the French politician Edouard Herriot published the book
The United States of Europe.The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and
subsequently World War II prevented this inter war movement gaining further
support.
Impact of the Second World war
In 1940, following Germany's military successes in World War II and planning for
the creation of a thousand year Empire, a European confederation was
proposed by German economists and industrialists. They argued for a
"European economic community", with a customs union and fixed internal
exchange rates. In 1943, the German ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Cecil
von Renthe-Fink eventually proposed the creation of a European confederacy,
which would have had a single currency, a central bank in Berlin, a regional
principle, a labor policy and economic and trading agreements. The proposed
countries to be included were Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Norway, Finland,
Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Greece and Spain.
Such a German-led Europe, it was hoped, would serve as a strong alternative to
the Communist Soviet Union. The later Foreign Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart
said: "The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will
find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are
removed", while the Vichy French Minister Jacques Benoist-Mechin said that
France had to "abandon nationalism and take place in the European community
with honor." These pan-European illusions from the early 1940s were never
realized because of Germany's defeat. Neither Hitler, nor many of his leading
hierarchs such as Gobbles, had the slightest intention of compromising absolute
German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation. Although
this fact has been used to insinuate the charge of fascism in the EU, the idea is
much older than the Nazis, foreseen by John Maynard Keynes, and later Winston
Churchill and various anti-Nazi resistance movements. Indeed, the founders of
the post-war movements for European unity were firmly anti-fascist and
emphasized that unity must be based on democracy and partnership, not
domination and conquest.
In Britain the group known as Federal Union was launched in November 1938,
and began advocating a Federal Union of Europe as a post-war aim. Its papers
and arguments became well known among resistant to fascism across Europe
and contributed to their thinking of how to rebuild Europe after the war.
Jean Monnet, (1888 – 1979),
regarded by many as the architect of European Unity. One of the most influential
figures in this process was Altiero Spinelli, co-author with Ernesto Rossi of the
"Ventotene Manifesto" entitled "Towards a Free and United Europe" and
smuggled out of their internment camp - the island of Ventotene - as early as
1941, well before the outcome of the war was safely predictable, and widely
circulated in the resistance movements. Spinelli, Rossi and some 20 others
established, as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp, the
Movimento Federalista Europeo.
The founding meeting, held in clandestinely in Milan on the 27/28 August 1943,
adopted a "political thesis" which, inter alia, stated: "if a post war order is
established in which each State retains its complete national sovereignty, the
basis for a Third World War would still exist even after the Nazi attempt to
establish the domination of the German race in Europe has been frustrated". In
1943, Jean Monnet a member of the National Liberation Committee of the Free
French government in exile in Algiers, and regarded by many as the future
architect of European unity, is recorded as declaring to the committee: "There
will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national
sovereignty... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples
the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must
constitute themselves into a federation..."
Post 1945 impetus
The disastrous course of World War II and the high death toll, gave a strong impetus
to plans for some form of union of states in Europe, to prevent future wars and
facilitate post-war reconstruction. At the same time, the division of Europe between
two rival blocs limited these proposals in effect to western Europe. Public support for
some form of European federation or government did emerge, but came to be
associated with western Europe. Although he was careful to exclude the United
Kingdom from his expostulation, in September 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech
at the University of Zurich, calling for a "United States of Europe", employing the term
French writer Victor Hugo had used nearly a century earlier to invoke an image of a
federalized Europe that would be similar to the United States of America. The
principal result of this speech was the formation of the Council of Europe in 1949. The
Council of Europe however was a rather restricted organization, like a regional
equivalent of the United Nations.