The Politics of European Integration since 1945

From a book that I only read part of for my class on the EU last semester, I've found these thoughts to be very interesting and quite relevant to a senior thesis paper I may be thinking about writing...

From: Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945, by Mark Gilbert.

“Paradoxically, in light of the generally cautious attitude of postwar British governments towards European unification, British thinkers have always been in the forefront of this endeavor. There has been in Britain a long ‘dissenting tradition’ of opposition to the realpolitik traditionally practiced by the Foreign Office. British intellectuals from Tom Paine onward have sustained that the only hope for peace in Europe lay in measures that brought the peoples of Europe into closer cooperation and limited the harmful rivalries of governments. Before, during and after World War One, British liberals argued that peace in Europe depended upon an end to secret diplomacy and the creation of an international organization that would enable the nations of the world to resolve their disputes peacefully and provide a forum for planning their economic development."

“The subsequent failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s did not diminish the enthusiasm of the liberal-socialist intelligentsia in Britain for internationalist solutions to the eternal problems posed by national sovereignty. The doctrine that wars broke out because of the insecurity engendered by the nature of the state system, and by the economic conflicts intrinsic to international capitalism, continued to hold sway. With a combination of prescience and almost comical optimism, British intellectuals asserted that the popular support of the dictators was largely economic in origin and could be undermined by a concerted effort to build a socialist federation among the free states of Europe—a group that was quixotically supposed to include the Soviet Union. A ‘New League’ of socialist states, H. N. contended in 1936, busily dedicated to raising the standards of living of its citizens by economic planning on a Soviet scale, but via British standards of parliamentary government, would set in motion a dynamic that would entice the peoples of Italy and Germany back to the path of democracy. The institutions Brailsford envisaged for the ‘League’—a parliament of delegates drawn from national assemblies and a technocratic central directorate—bore a remarkable resemblance to those subsequently proposed by Jean Monnet for the European Coal and Steel Community.”

“When war broke out, schemes for European integration—which were now held to be an infallible way of inciting the suffering masses of Germany and Italy to revolt—became every intellectual's favorite pastime. This hope was almost as detached from reality as the prewar vision of Joseph Stalin relinquishing the sovereignty of the Soviet Union to an assembly of social democratic worthies from the rest of Europe. But, for all their foolishness over Russia, intellectuals like Brailsford and the political thinkers Harold Laski G. D. H. Cole and E. H. Carr, were making a serious point that would have to be addressed once the war was over. This point was that dictatorship that thriven in the context of the Depression and the concomitant economic nationalism of the 1930s. If Europe was to avoid a return to Fascism in the future, such thinkers reasoned, its countries needed to make boosting production and the welfare of its citizens the centerpiece of their postwar economic strategy. Cooperation in this endeavor would greatly increase the chances of success. In a pamphlet written late in the war, Railsford envisaged EEC-like institutions supervising postwar economic growth. As he perceptively understood, the key to postwar prosperity was the revitalization of Germany. If Germany's industrial prowess could be revived, it would suck in imports of raw materials, consumer goods and foodstuffs from the Mediterranean countries and Eastern Europe, setting in motion a virtuous circle of rising productivity across the continent. At a time when the Allies, including the United States, were contemplating the “pastoralization” of defeated Germany (resolving the problem of postwar security by depriving Germany of its heavy industrial capacity), this understanding of how Europe would have to be rebuilt was very farsighted.”