This forum explores continuities and transformations in the way Europeans thought about integrating their continent politically, economically and ideologically across the twentieth century. It questions the idea of a Stunde Null, which sees European integration primarily as a response to the destruction of the Second World War. Instead, the forum shows how mentalities, ideologies, challenges and constraints that arose before 1945 shaped the way European elites conceptualised and pursued unification in the post-war decades. The European leaders who orchestrated integration after 1945 were looking both backward and forward, trying to revive older visions for a unified continent and overcome long-standing problems while simultaneously aspiring to a new, supranational regional order that would preserve Europe's position as a global power. In exploring such continuities, this forum adds a regionalist dimension to the burgeoning literature – by Patricia Clavin, Daniel Gorman, Mark Mazower and others – on the connections between interwar internationalism and the post-1945 global order, and on the continuity of intellectuals, experts and politicians through the middle half of the twentieth century.Footnote 1
More specifically, the forum asks whether the space for European integration expanded, contracted or transformed after 1945 by looking at four different spheres: geopolitics, politics, ideology and economics. Harold James introduces the forum by tracing the long history of how European intellectuals and leaders have thought about integrating their continent, in the context of three critical turning points: 1848, 1945 and 1989. In each of these moments ‘European saints’ such as Victor Hugo, Winston Churchill, Jean Monnet and Vaclav Havel crafted grand visions for continental unity.
These visions inspired Europeans and shaped the meaning of Europe as well as the geographical contours of the continent in the mental maps of contemporaries. Nevertheless, James underscores how the actual course of European integration after 1945 evolved on a very different level from that of the visionary: through the exploitation of crisis, through hard negotiation, through the management of technical challenges that range from currency alignment to agricultural policy and, ultimately, through the politics of interest.
Joseph Bohling begins the first of four case studies about integration thought and practice. His essay on France as a colonial and a continental power illustrates how the potential routes to European unity were wide open from the standpoint of French intellectuals, industrialists and politicians. In exploring the debates surrounding Aristide Briand's memorandum for a federated Europe in the 1920s, Bohling charts the sheer diversity of strategies to preserve French power in a changing global order: where some elites envisioned Europe and empire as separate economic units, others hoped to combine the two into a Eurafrican bloc. The common geopolitical challenges motivating these contrasting visions were the anxiety that the nation state would not be viable in an increasingly interdependent world and the fear of the United States's growing economic influence. The solution was some form of peaceful integration to allow French business to remain globally competitive. After 1945 these concerns resurfaced, yet so too did the vision of overcoming them through a synthesis of imperial consolidation and European integration.
Christian Bailey's essay on European unity and Ostpolitik likewise shows how, among the European left, the geography of integration was expansive during the middle of the twentieth century. He traces the emergence in the 1920s of a desire to carve out a ‘Third Way’ for Europe, independent of US capitalism and Soviet communism and centred on Central, not Western, Europe. During the 1950s an influential wing of Germany's Social Democratic Party revived these ideas for an open, Eastward looking integration as a solution to the question of national minorities, and this strategy remained an important option in political debates and in the public sphere until the hardening of the Cold War. Even after 1956 the ‘Centrality of Central Europe’ continued to shape German diplomacy and helped give birth to and bestow legitimacy on the Social Democrats new strategy of Ostpolitik.
By contrast, in his essay on das Abendland Rosario Forlenza demonstrates how, in the minds of Catholic elites from Robert Schuman to Jacques Maritain, the geography of integration contracted after 1945. Christian Democrats in France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries revived the idea of the Christian West to overcome the problems of modern nationalism, to construct a new political identity for Europe and to rehabilitate Germany. These Catholic thinkers aimed to create more than just a society of states, they aspired to forge a supranational community of people with shared values and faith, one that would grow out of a kernel of states centred on the Rhineland, the old core of the Carolingian Empire. In tracing the evolution of these ideas Forlenza underscores how many of the politicians driving European integration after 1945 hailed from the periphery of their respective nations and were deeply committed to the ideology of das Abendland.
In his discussion of monetary order, Stephen Gross likewise illustrates how the path toward European integration after 1945 was constrained, in this case by problems generated by the Great Depression and the collapse of the gold standard. He shows how a certain logic structured the way Europeans envisioned a new monetary order for their continent, insofar as a common set of challenges that included international debts, capital scarcity, bilateralism and the rigidity of gold animated both Nazi integration planning in 1940 and the course of European monetary integration after 1945. Both sets of experts – in Germany's case key advisors remained the same from 1940 to 1950 – proposed similar solutions to the underlying question they faced, namely, how to anchor Europe's currencies to one another in a way that allowed goods to flow across borders yet simultaneously avoided the imbalances of the gold standard.
The forum thus demonstrates how the space for European integration after 1945 looked both more open and contested and more constrained and limited depending on whether one approaches the subject from a geopolitical, political, ideological or economic perspective. Yet all of the essays underscore the deep-rooted continuities in integration thought as well as in many of the personalities involved from the 1920s and 1930s to the 1950s and 1960s. Just as the post-1945 US-supported global order had its origins in interwar internationalism, so too did the project of European unification draw heavily on mentalities, ideologies, challenges and constraints that emerged in the regional internationalism of an earlier era.
