Europeans who are unhappy with the European Union find themselves at a disadvantage. The expression ‘Europe’ has a positive allure which Eurosceptics have not been able to puncture. This is why the EU’s supporters exploit it as a synonym for the organisation. Yet the confusion is decidedly unjust, not only because, as is well known, Europe is bigger and older than the EU but also for a more substantial and concrete reason. The process of European integration has historically not been a European project but rather an American one.
It is an American project both ideologically and politically. Ideologically because, from the American viewpoint, the European continent is home to quarrelsome micro-states still trapped in their own history, unlike the United States of America which broke away from its past, discovered the secret of good government in 1776, and never looked back. That secret is to be found in federalism and constructivism—the idea that a polity can be created ex nihilo, based on rational principles alone, and free from the determinisms of history. It is this invented nature of the American republic that gives it its famous millenarianism—novus ordo saeclorum or “the end of history” as it has been more commonly known in recent years. The European project is inspired by the same idea that Europe should turn its back on its own history and embrace a constructivist and rationalist project in order to achieve peace.
Politically, this deep American conviction that Europe should Americanise has been conjugated since 1945 with the conviction that the U.S. needs to maintain a military presence in Europe to ensure its global hegemony. Without a bridgehead on the Eurasian continent, the “island” state cannot hope to dominate the “World Island,” to use Sir Halford Mackinder’s terms for the U.S.A. and the Eurasian continent. Americans hold their inter-war isolationism responsible for the outbreak of World War II because, with a Hobbesian logic, they believe that their power is the only antidote to the otherwise anarchical society of international relations.
American politicians started to formulate these ideas as war raged in Europe, specifically attacking the sovereignty of European states. In the summer of 1941, the future secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who had spent much of the 1920s and ’30s campaigning for world peace through internationalism, having been Robert Lansing’s secretary at Versailles, expressed his conviction that Europe’s “system of sovereign states” had “constantly and inevitably bred war.” Continental Europe, he urged, had to be organised as a “federated commonwealth.” This was several months before the U.S.A. even entered the conflict.
Dulles returned to this theme after the war. In January 1947, in a speech entitled “Europe must federate or perish,” he specifically said that American federalism was the model for Europe. Two months later, on 21 March, the U.S. Senate voted a resolution calling for “the creation of a United States of Europe.” In June, George Marshall, the Secretary of State, announced his plan in a speech at Harvard: it was accurately spun by the New York Times the following morning as “Marshall pleads for European Unity” because the 1948 European Recovery Act which his speech led to specifically called for an integrated European market. The Organisation for European Economic Cooperation was set up to create this integrated market, and in November 1949 it called for trade to be liberalised in Europe and for the creation of “a large single market in Europe”.
All these American initiatives long predate the famous Declaration of 9 May 1950, read out by the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, which announced the French proposal to create a Coal and Steel Community. This is usually but wrongly presented as the starting point of today’s European construction but the impetus for European unity did not come from Europe. It came largely from the U.S.A.
The U.S.A. was determined to unite Europe militarily, politically, and economically for its own purposes, and the Cold War provided much of the pretext. Indeed, the American determination to forge a bridgehead on the European continent was a contributory factor to the outbreak of the East-West conflict which continues to wrack the continent to this day: the Soviets protested, as soon as the Marshall plan was announced, that it would compromise the independence of the states which agreed to be involved. Moscow did not, at that stage, envisage Europe being divided into two blocs. Stalin hoped until the 1950s that Germany would remain neutral like Austria and Finland.
Certainly, the first stages of European integration were inseparable from the creation of specifically trans-Atlantic structures. The dates speak for themselves. May 1948: the Europe Congress at The Hague; summer 1948: the creation of the American Committee on United Europe, chaired by the former head of the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA), Bill Donovan, with Allen Dulles, future Director of the CIA, as his Number 2; October 1948: the creation of the European Movement, secretly financed by the ACUE; 4 April 1949: the signature of the Washington treaty creating NATO; 5 May 1949: the signature of the Treaty of London creating the Council of Europe; 29 May 1949: the division of Germany by the creation of the (Western) Federal Republic out of the American, British, and French zones. NATO and the European construction are two sides of the same coin.
As the historian Richard Aldrich has shown, the European Movement would never have survived without the covert financial support it received from the U.S.A. Indeed, there was little appetite among Europeans themselves for reconciliation so the Americans decided to create it, or at least the appearance of it. The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, played an especially important role in the years 1948-1950. He helped marginalise the new Council of Europe as soon as the ink was dry on the London treaty which created it, because it had British intergovernmental—and not federalist—fingerprints all over it. Acheson told his continental European counterparts in October 1949 that nothing should stop them creating a federal structure, without Britain if necessary.
This is what they did when Schuman announced the Coal and Steel Community on 9 May 1950, an initiative from which Britain was excluded even though it was the biggest producer of coal and steel in Europe at the time. The real purpose of the Coal and Steel Community was to create a supranational structure with teeth in order to side-line the neutered talking-shop in Strasbourg. It was no coincidence that Dean Acheson met Schuman and Jean Monnet, the author of the Schuman plan, in Paris on 8 May 1950, the day before the famous Declaration. The countries concerned—the Benelux states and Italy—were themselves only told of the impending Declaration during the course of that same day, while the French waited until the next morning, the day of the Declaration itself (read out at 6pm) before informing the German Chancellor’s office of their plans, which had been concocted in secret: Jean Monnet himself referred to it as “a conspiracy.” So much for “Europe” coming together: the Schuman Declaration was a Franco-American ambush. In any case, the new “European Coal and Steel Community” took over from the International Authority for the Ruhr which the Americans had created, in collaboration with Jean Monnet, in 1947, to control Germany’s coal and steel production.
Events accelerated after the Schuman Declaration, largely because of the outbreak of the Korean war in June 1950. At a NATO meeting in September, Dean Acheson told Ernest Bevin and Robert Schuman that the U.S. had decided to rearm Germany, abandoning five years of U.S. policy based on demilitarisation, and also to station American troops permanently in Europe in order to redress the military imbalance vis-à-vis the Soviets. This, the Americans feared, could enable a Korean scenario to occur in Europe. “I want to see the Germans in uniform by the end of the year,” Acheson told his colleagues.
The minutes of that meeting show Robert Schuman demurring, saying that French public opinion was not ready for the re-creation of the Wehrmacht which had occupied France only a few years previously. The dilemma was resolved when the French decided to dress up the American proposal as a European plan. Just over a fortnight after Schuman returned from New York, his boss, the French Prime Minister, René Pleven, announced a “European Defence Community” or European army. When Pleven addressed the French National Assembly, he specifically said that the new European army was intended to defend “the Atlantic community”. It was also at this time that an integrated command structure was created within NATO, placing all NATO armies under American command. (The decision was taken in late 1950 and actioned in April 1951.) This had not been in the original Washington treaty.
Ever since these decisive U.S. initiatives, American policy has been consistently in favour of European integration under American leadership—with the single exception of the Trump administration. Eastern Europeans are more lucid than Westerners about this: they invariably talk about “Euro-Atlantic” and not just “European” integration. Over the decades, successive U.S. presidents have reiterated this long-standing position, often re-launching it with new initiatives; concomitantly, tensions have arisen between London and Washington over the UK’s Euroscepticism.
Of course, the Americans have always worked together with Europeans to achieve their aims. But these European allies have invariably been both federalist and pro-American. The key figures from this early period are the most emblematic of this Euro-Americanism: Jean Monnet himself, the first president of the Coal and Steel Community, and its architect, who was as much at home in New York and Washington DC as he was in Paris, and who worked at different times for the French, British, and U.S. governments; Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who sponsored the Congress of Europe in The Hague in 1948 and who then went on to create the Bilderberg Group in 1954, its role being specifically to foster relations between Europe and North America; and Paul-Henri Spaak who went from being president of the European Movement from 1950-1955 to becoming the Secretary-general of NATO in 1957.
As the extraordinary EU-U.S. solidarity in the face of the war in Ukraine has shown, in which the EU pays the price for decisions taken in Washington—it was Joe Biden, not the German chancellor, who announced in February that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would not enter into operation if Russia invaded Ukraine—the United States of Europe has always been the Europe of the United States.
