A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe

1. A GRAND ILLUSION

1 A GRAND ILLUSION THE EUROPEAN Coal and Steel Community was born in 1951 from an idea conceived by Jean Monnet and proposed by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in May 1950. In 1958 it became the European Economic Community, popularly referred to as the "Europe ofSix" (France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries ). This prosperous, "far-western" Europe then took in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland to become the "Europe of Nine," after which it grew larger still and became the "Europe of Twelve" with the addition in the 1980s of Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The most recent members-Austria, Sweden, and Finlandbring its number to fifteen. When people refer to possible future adherents they now quite simply and unblushingly speak of a country-Slovenia, Poland- "joining Europe." This curious locution shows how much Europe today is not so much a place as an idea, a peaceful, prosperous, international community of shared interests and collaborating parts; a "Europe of the mind," of human rights, of the free movement of goods, ideas, and persons, of ever-greater cooperation and unity. The emergence of { 3 } TONY JUDT this hyper-real Europe, more European than the continent itself, an inward and future projection of all the higher values of the ancient civilization but shorn of its darker qualities, cannot be attributed just to the imprisonment of Europe's other, eastern, half under Communism . After all, not only the people's democracies stood apart from this new "Europe" but also Switzerland , Norway, and (until recently) Austria and Sweden, exemplars of many of the social and civic virtues that "Europeans" have been seeking to embody in their new institutions. If we are to understand the sources-and, as I shall argue, the limitations and perhaps the risksof this "Europe" now held before us as guide and promise , we must go back to a moment in the recent past when the prospects for any kind of Europe looked particularly grim. It is an understandable mistake to suppose, in retrospect , that postwar Western Europe was rebuilt by idealists for a united continent. Such people unquestionably existed, belonging to organizations like the European Unity Movement of 1947. But they had no discernible real-world impact. In a curious way it was British leaders , who were to play no active role in the actual construction of European unity in the years to come, who had the most to say on the subject ofa unified continent: in October 1942 Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, that "it would be a measureless disaster if Russian bolshevism overlaid the culture and independence of the [4 } A GRAND ILLUSION? ancient states of Europe. Hard as it is to say now, I trust that the European family may act unitedly as one, under a Council of Europe."! There certainly was an idealist mood in 1945 across the liberated lands of continental Europe, but the goals of most of its spokesmen were domestic: change and reform at home, along lines set down by the various coalitions that had come together during the war to form resistance movements against Nazi occupation. Well into the 1950s it was uncommon to find intellectuals or politicians in Europe interested primarily in the future of a united continent rather than in the politics of their own country. If it was not idealism that drove Europeans in those years, nor was it the manifest imperatives of historical destiny. Very little in the postwar years suggested a natural or inevitable coming together of the survivors of Hitler's war. In 1944 the American journalist Janet Flanner, in one of her regular dispatches for The New Yorker, foresaw rather the opposite: a coming era of intra-European competition for scarce resources among desperate nations. That the states of Western Europe would need to cooperate in some way was of course obvious ; but the extent and the forms of that cooperation 1. Churchill would go on to make speeches about a united Europe after the war as well, in Zurich in September 1946 and at London's Albert Hall in May 1947. But like most British politicians he imagined and wanted little more than a meeting place and talking shop, which is what the "Council of Europe" eventually became and has remained. [ 5 } TONY JUDT were not inscribed in the mere fact of postwar exhaustion and collective destitution. And many possible forms...