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DOCUMENTS EUROPEAN UNIFICATION

EUROPEAN UNIFICATION INTO THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

                          FADING, FAILING, FRAGILE?              

Second Revised Edition of European Unification in the Twentieth Century.

Europe is old, the idea of Europe is quite recent and the project of European unity is still in its infancy.  Sixty two years at the end of three millennia from Hellas to the present, represent just 2% of Europe`s years in history covered by Norman Davies in his masterful book Europe. A history;  that must be read before this volume. Sixty two years are not enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the future of European unification. They are more than enough to need a history for those born after 1990, who never heard about Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer or Jean Monnet. What happened to the plan Schuman of 1950 will be discussed extensively in Part II of this volume.

         NEW: DOCUMENTS ON THIS  WEBSITE, NO LONGER IN THE BOOK

Before the second part of this book, we must reflect on what brought Europe to the moment in her history when such a radical new departure was called for. Emperors, kings and philosophers in the past did have plans for extending their dominion over the peoples of Europe. From Charlemagne to Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, none of them really worked. The shock of two disastrous World Wars in the 20^th. century aroused the conscience of some of Europe`s post war leaders, as we shall see in our first chapter. As a civilization, Europe is characterized by a fundamental ethical dualism between Christian virtues and pagan traditions. In our second chapter we highlight two – far apart – examples, where Christian virtues prevailed, the humanization of law by the canonists in the 12^th. and 13^th. century , and the victory of Solidarnosc over communist repression in the 20^th. The values of Europe our current political leaders proclaim as age old ones, are quite new in fact and the source of much confusion as we can read in chapter 3. They have much to do with the philosophies of the 19^th. century. The ideologies they produced in the 20^th. century are not from another country and may not be forgotten. Chapter 4 should remind us that the worship of collective human power and its abuse are not aberrations of the past. They are still with us in the guise of the attachment to full national sovereignty and the ideologies of nationalism.

The history-proper of European Unification began in Western Europe in 1948, when the European Congress convened at the Hague in the presence of most post-war  political leaders from Western Europe. The governments of Western Europe had responded to the American Marshall plan of 1947  by the creation of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) as the framework for developing a joint program of economic recovery and liberalisation of trade and payments. The Soviet Union had rejected Marshall-aid as a capitalist plot and had forced its satellites to do likewi­se. Soviet domination over Eastern Europe had been completed by the coup d`état in Prague in February 1948. Negotiations on a peace treaty with Germany had broken down. France, Britain and the Benelux states had signed the Western Union Treaty, as a framework for self-defence, cooperation and mutual assistance.   

     The spectacle of ruins left by the Second World War,  the onset of the Cold War, together with visio­nary American leadership convinced West European leaders of the urgent necessity to organise Europe on the basis of reconciliation between France and Germany.  A joint European commitment to respect fundamental human rights and the rule of law was required to prevent individual states from again violating these rights on the scale practised by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi-Germany,  the Soviet Union and fascist Italy. Economic recovery was needed to rebuild West European states from widespread devastation and chaos, and to regain sufficient strength to resist further Soviet expansion.

     So it began, after the OEEC, with the Council of Europe, the Plan Schuman and the European Convention on Human Rights, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4 in the second part called "The Peaceful Organisation of Common Action." Chapter 1 follows the process from the Schuman Plan through the European Communities, the crises of the sixties, the stagnation of the seventies, the Single European Act of 1986 and the long drawn out efforts to transform the communities to a European Union. Two efforts – in 1953 and 2003 – to agree on a Constitution for Europe both failed, the first one due to a negative vote on an EDC in the French National Assembly, the second due to the negative outcome of referenda in France and the Netherlands. The six original members of the European Communities had to wait for the resignation of French President Charles de Gaulle before embarking on the first enlargement of the European Communities with Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark in 1973 as will be discussed in chapter 2. Together with agreement on political cooperation, discussed further in chapter 5, the five also accepted a French proposal to work towards Economic and Monetary Union before the end of the decade of the seventies, as shall be dealt with in chapter 3. It did not happen, but supported by the plans of the European Commission in 1985 for completing the internal market before 1992, the issue remained on top of the agenda. During the same decade Greece, Spain and Portugal entered the Communities following their return to democracy in the seventies.

SPECIAL FEATURE: CONCLUSIONS FROM ALL SUMMITS AND EUROPEAN COUNCIL MEETINGS FROM 1961-2011 CAN BE FOUND ON THIS WEBSITE.

 The end of the Cold War in 1989 - 1991 offered Europeans another spectacle of ruins, left by Soviet domination and the Cold War. The peaceful revolutions in East and Central Europe were events of world historic importance. I already touched upon them in Part I, Chapters 2 and 3. They caught the European Community Members by surprise and it took them long years before they finally agreed to the enlargement of the European Union to the East, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, the leading chapter on Enlargement. After the enlargement to the West in 1973, to the South in the 1980`s, with the neutral European countries in 1995, and to the East in 2004 and 2007, Malta and half of Cyprus were also added. There is no lack of further candidates for membership, but there certainly is lack of enthusiasm on the part of the present membership.

     The end of the Order of Yalta also brought the re-unification of Germany and the inclusion of the former GDR into member state Germany, an enlargement not much applauded by the French, the British and some others. It made the French insist on accelerating the Monetary Union, a decision taken by the European Council of Maastricht in December 1991. Germany re-united clearly is in the centre of Europe again. Despite the enlargement to the East and due to Britain`s role as the odd man in with lots of treaty opt-outs,  political leadership still lies between Berlin and Paris. Their leadership is less than forceful and imaginative.     

     Chapter 5, finally, tells the sad story how the European Community according to Schuman went astray to be transformed into a European Union. When the original purpose of federal unity was replaced by the illusion of world prominence, the six, later the nine, the twelve, fifteen and twenty seven,  joined the Echternach procession from political cooperation to external action. The chapter reflects an unending history of pretence and impotence, of confusion and failure, wrapped in the kind of Eurospeak one finds in article 21 of the Lisbon Treaty. The heritage of Gaullism lives on in the steady rise of the number of  European Council meetings as can be read throughout all five chapters in Part II of this second edition.