Robert Schuman: Neo-Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe (review)

The author of this book about the religious roots of European integration states its objective admirably clearly in the introduction. It is

to demonstrate that the character of that European community which emerged from the declaration of 9th May 1950 [the "Schuman Plan"] resulted from the self-conscious application by the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman of the Papal Social Magisterium and of Neo-Thomistic political philosophy to the relations of European states.

(p. 17)

This is a bold claim that is not, however, corroborated in this form by the empirical evidence utilized for this book that has many conceptual and methodological flaws, including the complete absence of a list of sources used and of a bibliography and citations of literature in footnotes in the form of the author's surname and the year of publication only.

Fimister has structured his book in four parts. The first chapter introduces the reader to the evolution of neo-Thomistic thought from Popes Leo XIII to Pius XII. The second chapter is devoted to the reception of the Social Magisterium in France and its (alleged) influence on the attitudes of political Catholicism there to the Republic, "Europe," and European cooperation or integration. The third amounts to a biographical sketch of the life of Schuman, who was born in Luxembourg, studied at German universities, and worked as a lawyer in Metz when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the German Reich. Schuman opted for France after World War I; became a member of the French parliament; and, after World War II, French foreign and prime minister in various centrist governments. Finally, in the fourth chapter, the author attempts to link Schuman's intellectual ideas to Western European integration in the European Union from 1950 onward. Whereas the first three chapters are based entirely on (some of) the available literature, chapter 4 is mostly based on sources from Schuman's private papers. However, as Schuman destroyed all of his correspondence from the interwar period at the start of World War II, and very little of relevance is left for the early postwar years, most of these documents consist of his public speeches after he was replaced as foreign minister by Georges Bidault.

The survey in the first two chapters of this book is competent, but no linear evolution existed from the thinking of Leo XIII through that of Jacques Maritain, who Fimister alleges (but fails to demonstrate) must have had a formative influence on Schuman. However, Schuman never had direct personal links with Maritain in interwar France, and in the short period when Maritain actually supported European integration when he was in exile in the United States during World War II, Schuman was under house arrest and then in hiding in Vichy France. As the author himself admits, Maritain became exclusively interested in world government after 1945 and regarded European integration as driven too much by anticommunism. Anticommunism, however, was one main motivation among others for Schuman to support European integration, and it was clearly by far the most important motive behind Pius XII's eventual guarded support for it. Schuman's Catholicism is clearly one explanatory factor—for example, for his strong support for the creation of "core Europe" without Britain—but other factors such as his interest in Franco-German rapprochement also help explain his preference for European integration as a much more multifaceted phenomenon than it appears to be in this book. Crucially, Schuman's ex post factum rationalization of his policies in speeches for public consumption hardly corroborate Fimister's neat linkage between Leo XIII and Schuman.

To claim, however, that the Catholic motivation of Schuman's policies in turn accounts for the origins of the present-day European Union is outright absurd. The proposal for sector integration in coal and steel was prepared within the French government by Jean Monnet, who had socialist technocratic policy preferences. Schuman took it up only...