1. Introduction
European integration is the last stage of European history and it is relatively recent. So far we have seen the long road that led to the creation of the European States. The discovery of Human Law in Greece, the structure of a unified empire with a solid legal system during the Roman Era, the appearance of the pleiad of small Germanic kingdoms that started carving the territory of the future European States. The return of medieval universalism in the frame of Western Christianity and the progressive separation of the national monarchies, that after Machiavelli would become the bulk of European States. The troubles of the religious wars and the surging of a Europe of States after the Peace of Westphalia. The French Revolution and the development of the powerful narrative of the “nation-state” model. The rising of nationalisms and the rising tensions that led to the Armed Peace and World War I. And how after 1918 European nation-states would progressively lose ground and become irrelevant at the World level.
2. The appearance of the idea of integration
Up to 1918 European
nation-states acted on their own, confronting each other. They did not consider
the possibility of getting together as they controlled the World. The major
European nation-states did not consider uniting when their power was at its
peak. But as their hegemonic
stage came to an abrupt halt in 1918, and Europe laid in ruins, forced
by the necessity of surviving in a World dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, some European leaders began to consider the
possibility of a united Europe in which different states would act together
instead of against each other. It was the beginning of the European
integration process.
Before 1918 they were some tepid periods in
which European States acted together. After the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815)
through the Metternich System until 1848, and specifically axed in economical
integration in German Europe with the Customs Union called Zollverein between
1834-1871.
Real European integration really started
during the Interwar period (1918-1939) as the
defeat of Germany, Austria and its allies was, to some extent, a Pyrrhic
victory for the Allies, as all Europe, both the winners and the losers, had
been laid waste. In 1914 their trade balance had been clearly in favor of
the nations of the Continent, with the United States owing the various European
states some 3 billion dollars. By 1918 the tables had turned, with the European
states owing the U.S. federal government no less than 14 billion dollars.
Almost five times more.
Europe emerged not only surpassed by the
United States, but also eclipsed by the power of Soviet Russia. Lenin, aware
from the very outset that the new Soviet state would not be strong
internationally if it could not incorporate its various neighboring states,
appointed Comrade Stalin as People’s Commissar of Nationalities, thereby
creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922, the only
European force that could rival American power in the 20th century.
3. The
exacerbation of European Nationalisms
The decline of Europe’s
nation-states could have been averted had their governments undertaken a policy
of convergence. Instead, nationalism grew stronger than ever before and the
tension between states was only exacerbated, in great part due to the
initiative of the American President Woodrow Wilson, the primary architect of
the Peace of Versailles (1919) and the author of the agreement’s famous
Fourteen Points, as he believed that the new international order ought to be
based on a strict respect for nationalities, which meant that, in his opinion,
states should coincide with “nations” – in the sense of peoples or ethnic
groups.
To this end, at Versailles
Wilson advanced the principle of “national” self-determination in order to
ensure that minorities were able to gain statehood - as in the cases of
Ireland, Poland and Czechoslovakia - or achieve internal autonomy within the
framework of a multinational state - as happened with Flanders in Belgium and
the reunification of Yugoslavia. The Allies expressed, therefore, their
sympathies with the fate of historically oppressed ethnic groups and acted to
guarantee the resurgence of the nation-state at a time when this structure was
inoperative at the global level, and a union of European states was
indispensable for Europe to maintain its clout in the new world yielded by
World War I.
The fight for consolidating new nation-states
in the frame of the Treaty of Versailles reignited European tensions to the
point that Hitler opened up again the road to war.
4.
First integration proposals during the Interwar period
However some Europeans were
well aware that this exacerbation of nationalism was dangerous and the only way
to get Europe back in the World scene was cooperation between European States. There
were a few proposals.
a) Pan-Europa
As Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, who in his book Pan-Europe
(1923) defended a union of European states in order to prevent the nations of
the Continent from succumbing to either Russian Bolshevism or American economic
domination, and the only way for Europe to maintain its influence around the
world.
Coudenhove-Kalergi
was supported by eminent European intellectuals as Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel,
Rainer María Rilke, Thomas Mann, Salvador de Madariaga and Miguel de Unamuno,
among others. Thanks to them, until the mid-1930s there was an intense
intellectual movement in favor of a united Europe which resulted in the
publication of influential books calling for European integration.
b)
Attempts for an economic integration
Also the Pan-European idea was backed by some of Europe's most dynamic employers, very impressed by the United
States’ enormous economic power by the beginning of the 1920s, however, began
to back the creation of a massive European-wide market as a means of favoring
the growth of industrial production and lowering the prices of manufactured
goods. On their initiative was created European Customs Union, established in 1926, and the the signing
of international agreements between producers. It was during this period when
the first major intra-European economic accords were signed, including the
industrial agreements which the French and German governments sought to sign
between the century’s world wars in order to solve the problem of war
reparations agreed on the Versailles Treaty.
c) The first
political proposal: Aristides Briand and Gustav Streseman (1929)
On the
political field has to be mentioned the case of Aristides Briand, France's
Minister of Foreign Affairs as of 1925, and Honorary President of the
Pan-European Union as of 1927. In 1929 he rose to head the French Government;
at which time he seized the opportunity to present his proposal for European
integration.
Briand
soon realized that the League of Nations was an instrument incapable of
ensuring the peace and considered it more pragmatic to back Franco-German
political rapprochement within the framework of a united Europe. To this end as
he enjoyed the assistance of his German counterpart Gustav Streseman, he made
public his plans for a united Europe in a speech delivered on 5 September 1929,
on the occasion of the League of Nations' fall meeting. In it he defended the
advisability of establishing a link between Europe's states which would enable
them to deal with serious circumstances together given the need to do so.
Aristides
Briand's initiative was however a failure, partly because the governments of
the various European states were unwilling to cede one bit of their
sovereignty, and most of their leaders were either indifferent or opposed to
the idea of European union – in large measure because for each of them European
unification meant something different. For the victorious states, integration
was to be a means of consolidating the European order arising from the Treaty
of Versailles. The defeated countries, on the other hand, were willing to
participate in a European unification project only if said treaty was revised.
However, the decisive development was the radical political change that
occurred in Germany after the death of Gustav Stresemann in October 1929 and
the electoral victory of the Nazi Party in 1930.
In any case, the Depression dissolved the European euphoria of 1926 and 1927 and shifted the priorities of most European states, which abandoned any support for a united Europe. In fact, the prevailing trend was just the opposite: over the course of the 1930s Europe's economic fragmentation tended to accentuate, as a consequence of increased customs duties, the establishment of exchange controls, and the consolidation of autarchic economies in general.
To make matters worse, the League of Nations
failed to keep new hostile blocs from arising in Europe. It was the reedition
of the Armed Peace previous to World War I. In
5. European integration during World War II
The
outbreak of World War II did not put an end to attempts at integration, though,
as a result of the conflict, these took other forms, on both sides of the
conflict. On the Allied side we have to mention the ephemeral
Franco-British Union of June 1940, the Ventotene Manifesto (1941) in favor of a
European federation, the formation of the Benelux on 4 September 1944.
On the Hitlerian side it was only as
German domination spread throughout Europe, and especially after the start of
the war against Russia (June, 1941), that the Führer began to conceive the idea of placing the entire Continent
under the Third Reich. In total Hitler aimed to occupy some 6 million square
kilometers, home to 450 million people, in order to constitute an
anti-Bolshevik Europe under what came to be called the “New Order.” For Nazi
leaders the integration of European was to be forged not through the creation
of federal institutions, but by way of ensuring that the Continent's different
political regimes embraced their peculiar political philosophy. In order to
bring about this Great Germany Hitler acted to install satellite and puppet
regimes in neighboring nations, with governments willing to do Germany's
bidding.
6. European integration during the post-war period
(1945-1949)
By 1945 Europe was the great
loser, left bankrupt and buried in the devastation of the conflict - literally,
as much of Europe's cities had been reduced to rubble. For the formerly
all-powerful Europeans the problem was now survival. Roosevelt’s notion of a world split between two areas of influence
would eventually prevail, as Europe was, unfortunately, torn in two, with
Western Europe under American influence and Eastern Europe under Soviet
power.
a) A destroyed Europe
Italy, which had become a republic, was
completely impoverished, and the maps of Germany and Austria were
mangled. France had been laid waste, and the United Kingdom, no longer a
great power, began to dismantle its empire with the foundation of the
“Commonwealth,” a community by virtue of which its former colonies became
independent states while maintaining a symbolic allegiance to the British Crown
- a fact which may explain why Churchill supported the creation of a United
States of Europe in his aforementioned speech at the University of Zurich (19
September 1946).
b) America’s help for
reconstruction_ from the dollar gap to the Marshall Plan
The top priority however was reconstruction. The United States was the only intact economy, bolstered by the war effort. So President Truman agreed to provide Europe with material and financial aid. However, the funds provided, however, quickly evaporated given the dire needs of the devastated Continent. It was the era of the “dollar gap.”
President Truman's advisors
soon came to the conclusion that a change in strategy was needed. The United
States was willing to facilitate Europe's overall reconstruction, but not that
of each state individually.
To channel this aid two
organizations were created: the European Recovery Program (ERP) and the
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), the former an American
agency, and the latter European. Marshall’s efforts did not
constitute full integration, and by no means did they endorse “supranational”
institutions. However, thanks to the OEEC (today’s OECD) ministers from
different countries ceased to deal with their national problems as something
confidential that did not impact their neighboring nations, and progressed in
the establishment of priorities through negotiations, as the intention was for
aid to be used by the European countries in a coordinated way rather than be
allocated individually to specific countries for particular purposes.
c) Eastern Europe dominated by Stalin splits
off
The Allies originally thought
that military cooperation had softened Stalin’s communism. Soviet Russia took
advantage of the West’s naiveté in this regard to extend its tentacles across
Eastern Europe, which Stalin was determined to seize for Russia.
In response Stalin imposed an
“Eastern Deutschmark” throughout Berlin and a blockade of the areas of
the capital controlled by western forces. The Allies responded, beginning on
June 26, 1948, by organizing the famous “Berlin Airlift” to provision western
Berlin. The Soviet blockade would not cease until 21 May 1949. The border
between the two areas would be relatively permeable until the construction of
the Berlin Wall which, beginning on August 13, 1961, became the ultimate symbol
of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain,” one
that would stand for nearly 30 years.
7. The
Congress of The Hague (1948) or the failure to form a federal Europe
As a preliminary step it was
necessary to decide the path to be followed to achieve integration. Opinions
diverged. One camp, the statists, preferred a model based on
intergovernmental cooperation. Another portion of the European public opinion, the
federalists, wished to move directly towards a federal political union,
similar to that of the United States of America.
A European “Congress” met on
May 8, 1948, in the Hague (Netherlands). The European federalists, in order to
ensure reconciliation and reconstruction, called for the creation of an
economic and political union. The problem was that none of the 800
participants, however, had the power to actually commit their states to any
agreements. It was, essentially, a gathering of representatives from different
political parties and other European democratic groups interested in the
reemergence of the Old Continent on the international scene.
The attendees sought to reach
a compromise. The federalists got their Representative Assembly, while the
statists got a Council of Ministers, the embryo of a European executive power.
Together the institutions formed the Council of Europe, a body
established on May 5,
By early 1950 the federal
formula had failed to achieve the objective of European integration. The
Council of Europe, however, did not disappear, and ended up establishing itself
as a Human Rights Tribunal after the signing of the European Convention for the Protection of Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms in Rome on November 4, 1950. This agreement would come
into force in 1953, since which time states may be legally reported to the
Tribunal of the Council of Europe based in Strasbourg for human rights
violations.
8. How to study Teaching Guide 9:
a) Read the corresponding text to T.G. 9 in the “Aula Virtual”.
b) Familiarize yourself with the following basic Chronology of the
period:
CHRONOLOGY OF TG 9
1648 Peace of Westphalia
1804-1814 Napoleonic empire
1814-1815 Congress of Vienna
1815-1830 Holy Alliance (Metternich system)
1834 Zollverein (Until 1871)
1862 Bismarck head of Prussian Government (Until 1890)
1864 War between Prussia and Denmark (Schleswig Holstein)
1866, 3 july War between Prussian and Austria: battle of Sadowa (Königgrätz)
1870
19 July Beginning of the Franco Prussian War (Until 28 January 1871)
1-2 September Battle of Sedan: French defeat.
1871
18 January Proclamation
of IInd Reich at the Versailles Palace.
1907 Triple Entente (France, UK and Russia)
First World War
1914 28 June Sarajevo’s killing of Franz Ferdinand of Austria
1916 Verdun’s Battle
1917 October Soviet Revolution
1918
Interbellum period
1919 Peace of Versailles (Woodrow Wilson)
1920 First meeting of the League
of Nations
1923 Appearance of R. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe
1929 Briand’s Proposal for
a European Union (Gustav Streseman)
Second
World War
1940 Franco-British Union
1944 Creation of the Benelux
Postwar Period
1946 , 19 September Speech of Churchill in favor of European integration
1947 European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan)
1948 Congress of the Hague (Project of European Federal Integration)
1949 Treaty
of London. Creation of the Council of Europe.
c) Complete in your Class notebook the following exercises:
CONCEPTS:
Metternich System/ Zollverein / Armed Peace / Woodrow Wilson’s Principle of Nationalities / Irish Republic vs Irish Free State vs New State of Ireland vs Republic of Ireland/ The Troubles / Irish Backstop/ Pan-Europ (R. Coudenhove-Kalwergi) / Aristides Briand and Gustav Streseman/ Franco-British Union / Benelux / Dollar Gap/ European Recovery Program / Iron Curtain / Kominform/ British Commonwealth / Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift/ Berlinermauer / Congress of the Hague/ Council of Europe/ College of Europe.
QUESTIONS:
Concrete questions
1. What was the Zollverein and where was it implemented.
2. Explain the relationship between the Dual and Triple Alliance and the
Entente cordiale and the Triple Entente.
3. Why the Allies triumph in World War I was essentially a Pyrrhic victory?
4. Why Woodrow Wilson’s Principle of Nationalities was a mistake?
5. What was the idea of R. Coudenhove Karlegi for uniting European
nation-states? What model did he use as reference? Why did he reject the idea
of a federal Europe?
6. What did Aristides Briand and Gustav Streseman wanted for Europe? Why
their idea did fail?
7. Explain what was the Program for Europe that Joseph Goebbels proposed
to Hitler in 1943.
8. What was the essence of the Benelux created in 1944?
9. Why did Stalin initiated the Cold War in 1948?
10. Why did The Congress of The Hague failed?
11. Which were the two institutions created as a result of the Congress
of The Hague?
General questions
1. Give the
outline of Irish process of independence from the UK between 1919 and 1949.
2. Explain
what was in Irish history the time of The Troubles and why the EU contributed
to ease tensions in Northern Ireland.
3. Why the
European Recovery Program created a favorable ground for European integration?
4. Explain
which were the two opposed camps in the Hague Congress in order to decide the path to be
followed to achieve integration. Which one prevailed?
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario