European unity: The history of an idea

Date: 03/01/04

The notion that unity and peace in Europe are two sides of the same coin is an article of faith for modern pro-Europeans. A large exhibition about the history of the idea of European unity was staged last year at the German History Museum in Berlin. Marie-Louise von Plessen, the exhibition's curator, argues that the “idea of unification and peace are completely linked.” The political sympathies of the exhibition's organisers were barely disguised.

The Berlin exhibition emphasised the intellectual origins of the idea of European unity. Miss von Plessen's plan was to show that “Behind the shifting alliances between nations, there were always people who thought and wrote about the utopia of a united Europe, even though they were never really taken seriously until after the second world war.” The thousands of people trooping through the galleries were treated to tableaux bearing quotes from philosophers and thinkers promoting the idea of European unity.

There was Pierre Dubois, a counsellor for the Duke of Burgundy, who called for a European federation in 1306; Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who made a celebrated call for “perpetual peace”; William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and an early advocate of a European parliament; and Victor Hugo, the French 19th-century novelist who proclaimed in 1849 that “A day will come when you, France, you, Russia, you, Italy, you, Germany, you, all nations of the continent, without losing your distinctive qualities and glorious individuality, will be merged within a superior unit.” Lest any utterly dim-witted visitor miss the political moral, the exhibition closed with a quotation from Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the convention that drafted the disputed constitution for the EU, urging his listeners to “Dream of Europe. Let us imagine a continent at peace, freed of its barriers and obstacles, where history and geography are finally reconciled.”

A tableau of crimes and misfortunes

It is not just museum curators and elderly politicians who hold fast to the idea that European unity is both the best way of guaranteeing peace in Europe and a natural historical progression. The idea is also cherished among serious historians in France and Germany. Hagen Schulze, a professor of history at the Free University of Berlin, ends his scholarly study of the evolution of the European nation-state, “States, Nations and Nationalism”, with the thought that the “ancient states and nations” of Europe “may gradually fade away and recede into the background to make way for one united Europe.” This, he avers, is likely to be a considerable improvement on previous efforts to “restore the former unity of this continent by elevating one of its major powers” to a position of hegemony-first Spain, then France, then Germany. The horrors of the fighting in Yugoslavia - he was writing in the mid-1990s - bring forth more lamentations about the warlike tendencies of nation-states. “The baleful principle of a nation united by bonds of blood is still capable of threatening democracy and plunging Europe into fresh...trials of strength.”

French historians tend to be a little less eager to wish away la patrie. But many of them also almost instinctively link the idea of European unity with notions of peace and progress. Jacques Boussard in “The Civilisation of Charlemagne” (1968) asserts that “Charlemagne's achievement was the realisation of a united Europe. There were no wars except at the frontiers.” (This is an important qualification, given that the great man fought some 53 military campaigns expanding the boundaries of his empire.) In Boussard's view it was only the “stable society created by Charlemagne” that allowed for an “extraordinary outpouring of cultural, artistic and intellectual activity.”

It is sometimes observed that places that once formed part of Charlemagne's empire - France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands - have been much more at ease with the modern-day drive for European unity than areas that fell outside it, notably Britain and Scandinavia. Perhaps as a consequence, British historians are less likely than their French or German counterparts to assume that European unity is necessarily synonymous with peace and cultural progress. In the “Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe”, for example, George Holmes argues that one of the lessons of the period is the “extraordinary vigour and creativity which derive from the fragmentation of power and wealth”, and that “the places where political fragmentation was most complete, such as Tuscany, the Low Countries and the Rhineland, were perhaps the most creative.”

Arguments about the connections between creativity and culture on the one hand and political unity and fragmentation on the other are reassuringly abstract - particularly when safely placed in the Middle Ages. Historical debate becomes a lot rougher when it moves into the modern era. In 1997 John Laughland published “The Tainted Source”, whose subtitle - “The undemocratic origins of the European idea ” - summarises its general thesis. Mr Laughland, who helps to run a Eurosceptical lobby group called the European Foundation, argues that it is not just the familiar figures in the pro-European pantheon - Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and the like - who preached the virtues of European unity. Similar sentiments had been expressed by Hitler and the architects of fascist Italy and Vichy France.

Hitler, for example, told the Reichstag in 1936, “It is not very intelligent to imagine that in such a cramped house like that of Europe, a community of peoples can maintain different legal systems and different concepts of law for long.” Mussolini urged in 1933 that, “Europe may once again grasp the helm of world civilisation if it can develop a modicum of political unity.” Oswald Mosley, the leading British fascist of the 1930s, was also a champion of the idea of European union.

Partly as a result of Mr Laughland's work, many British Eurosceptics are inclined to see the modern promoters of European unity not as idealistic peaceniks, but as the heirs of Hitler who have simply devised a new and subtler plan for taking over Britain. Bonkers? Perhaps. They certainly forget the speech of Winston Churchill in Zurich in 1946, in which he called for a United States of Europe. But the conquest-by-stealth view is popular in Britain. When Mr Giscard d'Estaing published his draft constitution last year, the Sun, Britain's bestselling newspaper, greeted it with a cartoon showing Hitler and Napoleon squabbling over a copy of the document, each claiming, “I thought of it first.”

A DNA test for Europe's real father?

Hitler does not feature very prominently either in Mr Giscard d'Estaing's works or in the recent Berlin exhibition on ideas of European unity. In the German exhibition, the Nazi contribution to the debate on European unity is dismissed thus: “Hitler seeks to subjugate the European continent to the Third Reich in the name of 'New Europe'.” Miss von Plessen, the exhibition's organiser, says that she used Mr Laughland's book as a source for the Berlin show. But she argues that it is unfair to link Hitler to the modern movement for European unity because “Hitler based his ideas on notions of the superiority of the Germanic race and conquest, whereas modern Europe is being built on the idea of equality between peoples.”

She is not much keener on the idea that Napoleon was a “builder of Europe”. The exhibition catalogue refers to the French emperor as “seeking to use national sentiments for his own ends” and implies that it was the monarchical alliance that defeated him, and this was the true promoter of European co-operation and peace.

Some French historians, however, are much less bashful about claiming Napoleon to the cause of European Unity. Since the French still generally regard Napoleon as a “good thing ” - he was a hero to Churchill, too - they are less likely to fear that the cause of European unity will suffer by association with the emperor.

On the contrary. In 2002 Historia, a monthly French magazine, published an article under the title “Napoleon - the real father of Europe”, with a cover illustration of the great man crossing the Alps wearing a hat decorated with the insignia of today's EU. According to the article, many of the EU's features - federal law, the common market, the dismantling of frontiers, the promotion of the idea of the rights of man - can be traced to the Napoleonic heritage. Why, even the Grand Army brought together 20 nations. And such musings are not confined to popular history magazines. Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, recently published a book on Napoleon in which he argued, “History has vindicated Napoleon's vision of a 'great European family' of the future.”

Napoleon himself had little doubt that he deserved to be counted as a great European. In his memoirs, he lamented that had he only won his war in Russia, “Europe would soon have been...but one people, and anyone who travelled anywhere would have found himself always in the common fatherland.” Moreover, “Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations.”

O, for an empire like America's

Should anyone really be disturbed by the less savoury antecedents of Europhilia? Even Mr Laughland, the Eurosceptic polemicist, notes in a fit of fairness that “drawing attention to the detail of Nazi propaganda about Europe is not to imply that modern pro-Europeans are fascists. That would be absurd.” If the modern makers of European union are constructing an empire, it is of a new and strange variety - reliant on persuasion, example and regulation, rather than force of arms.

Naturally, it has ambitions. If pressed, few of the architects of the modern Europe venture would deny that they hope that one day the EU will be a great power - a peaceable, liberal, law-based and generous great power, no doubt, but one capable of looking the United States or China in the eye. Mr Bush caught an authentic whiff of this ambition when he teased Mr Prodi about the new Roman empire. Perhaps, nursing some imperial ambitions of his own, he recognised it. Not long before their lunch, Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor, was writing of the United States, “Not since Rome has any one nation loomed so large above the others.” The Roman empire has indeed been re-created, it seems, but its capital is Washington, DC - for the time being, anyway. Maybe, after a while, the new division of the West will mirror the old division of the Roman empire, with Rome and Constantinople replaced by Washington and Brussels.

The idea of a united Europe stretches back thousands of years. The early enthusiasts were seldom as high-minded as their modern successors.