Prologue: Churchill’s Congress From 7 to 10 May 1948, 722 representative figures from twenty-eight European countries met in The Hague to discuss paths and possibilities for a unification of Europe. Six former prime ministers of European countries took part in the gathering along with fourteen active and forty-five former ministers. In addition, West German governors, leading members of parliaments, business leaders, key representatives from organized labor, academics, artists and religious officials were present. Winston Churchill, Britain’s celebrated prime minister during the war years and now leader of the opposition in the House of Commons gave the opening address. Outside the official halls, public interest was evident. Around forty thousand people attended a public declaration during the third day of nego- tiations. The congress led to the formation of the European Movement and indi- rectly to the founding of the Council of Europe.1 Four Driving Forces The Hague Congress set off crucial negotiations for the creation of European institutions. These negotiations—otherwise than the talks around the proposal for “a kind of federative association” among the peoples of Europe that had been proposed by French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand in September 1929 to the assembly of the League of Nations—would prove successful and lead to the foun- dation of a European community that today has great influence over the lives of Europeans. This community concentrated movements that aimed to overcome the functional deficits of nation states and of the nation-state-dominated Euro- pean political system and that had developed as early as the First World War. They were driven by four varying yet closely linked agendas. 2 The first objective was to deal with the problem of anarchy among states which had been the spark for all “classical” plans to secure the peace, ranging 1 On the pre-history and course of The Hague Congress, cf. Frank Niess, Die europäische Idee aus dem Geist des Widerstands, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 158–173 and 181–220; Wil- fried Loth, “Vor 60 Jahren: Der Haager Europa-Kongress,” in: Integration 31 (2008), pp. 179–190; Jean-Michel Guieu and Christophe Le Dréau (eds.), Le “Congrès de l’Europe” à la Haye (1948– 2008), Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009. 2 This systematization was presented for the first time in Wilfried Loth, “Der Prozess der eu- ropäischen Integration. Antriebskräfte, Entscheidungen und Perspektiven,” in: Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 1 (2000), pp. 17–30. For a complete presentation developing these moti- vations, cf. Wilfried Loth: Der Weg nach Europa. Geschichte der europäischen Integration 1939– 1957, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990, 3rd edition, 1996. 2 Prologue: Churchill’s Congress from Dante to Kant. The urgency of finding a better institutional solution to deal with its prospects was ever more pressing with the development of modern military technology and the resulting death of millions of victims followed by economic damage of a magnitude unimagined in the era of cabinet warfare. Hence, the experience of the First World War had led to multiple European peace initiatives, of which the “Pan-Europe” campaign by Count Richard Cou- denhove-Kalergi and Aristide Briand’s Europe Plan were the most notable. With the peace order established at Versailles incrementally breaking down from 1938 onward, this movement received further impetus. For example, Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader and prime minister of the People’s Front governments of 1936 to 1938, wrote in the spring of 1941: “In one point, my convictions are pro- found and unshakable, whatever the world may say. If this war does not at last give rise to fundamentally stable international institutions, to a really effective international power, then it will not be the last war.”3 A special challenge to secure the peace involved the German question: How to allow the strongest nation in the center of the European continent to develop while at the same time avoiding the consolidation of German hegemony? Or con- versely: How to put a check on the Germans without provoking renewed desires for revenge via one-sided discrimination against them? Blum captured the view of many authors from the Resistance against the German occupation and the National Socialist regime as he wrote “there is only a single way to resolve the con- tradiction, to make Germany harmless in a peaceful and stable Europe, and that is the incorporation of the German nation in an international community.”4 This would include not merely the supervision of the Ruhr District but also a common steering of all European heavy industry, not only a reduction of German military sovereignty, but a common command over all European armed forces. After the failure of the peace order established at Versailles and the rise of National Social- ism, the value of these measures could not be ignored. A third functional deficit of the nation-state system stemmed from the devel- opment of productive forces in the industrial age. Over the course of time, it became more and more clear that national markets in Europe were too narrow for rational production methods. Mutual walling-off only made sense temporarily and for some sectors—over the long term, however, it resulted in a loss of produc- tivity. This had an economic as well as a power-political aspect; both had been present since the 1920s, above all in the form of American competition. Thus, 3 Léon Blum, For All Mankind, London and New York: Gollancz, 1946, pp. 116f. (French original written in 1941). Cf. Wilfried Loth, Sozialismus und Internationalismus. Die französischen Sozia- listen und die Nachkriegsordnung Europas 1940–1950, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977. 4 Blum, p. 121. Four Driving Forces 3 unification initiatives in the economic sphere were correspondingly numerous, and here too the experience of the Second World War provided an additional motivational push: Whereas the Europeans largely exhausted their resources in that conflict, the US more than doubled its production for being the most import- ant supplier of materiel to the Allied coalition in addition to being favored by the absence of European countries from the world market. The fourth reason for European unification initiatives has thus already been touched upon: The effort of European nations to assert themselves vis-à-vis the new world powers. The concern over American economic and political suprem- acy as well as the fear of an expansion of the Bolshevik Revolution had already provided motives for European unification plans in the 1920s. Both were strength- ened by the power-political results of the Second World War. With the US as the leading world power and the Soviet Union as the strongest military power on the European continent, earlier divergences in interests among the European nation- states lost meaning to the benefit of the common interest in autonomy and in avoiding a conflict between the two main victors of the war. British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who was to serve as prime minis- ter from 1945 to 1951 captured this dynamic best in 1939: “Europe must federate or perish.”5 This became a plausible slogan in several respects in the aftermath of the First World War already, when the insufficiency of the peace order established at Versailles was criticized. The plausibility increased when the Munich Agreement made it clear that the established order was no longer sustainable; and increas- ingly from 1943 onwards when Allied victory was in the offing. This watchword evoked fascination in the most divergent political camps. It also created links extending across national borders and—as must be emphasized given the later fixation on the East-West conflict and the resultant ahistorical attitude toward the countries that belonged to the Soviet Bloc until 1990—it was by no means only a Western-European phenomenon. The European organizations had branches in Prague and Budapest, just as they did in Paris and Brussels.6 The numerous unification plans developed in the resistance all over Europe did not immediately coalesce at the end of the conflict into a concrete unification policy. Joseph Stalin blocked any kind of federation in Eastern Europe (so sys- 5 Speech before the Labour MPs on 8 Nov. 1939, in: Clement R. Attlee, Labour’s Peace Aims, London: Peace Book Co., 1940, pp. 12ff. 6 Cf. Walter Lipgens, A History of European Integration 1945–1947. The Formation of the European Unity Movement, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; idem. (ed.), Documents on the History of Euro- pean Integration, vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union, 1939–1945, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1985; vol. 2: Plans for European Union in Great Britain and in Exile, 1939–1945, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1986; Michel Dumoulin (ed.), Plans des temps de guerre pour l’Europe d’après-guerre 1940–1947, Brussels: Émile Bruylant, 1995. 4 Prologue: Churchill’s Congress tematically that such plans passed out of memory there); at the same time, every step toward unification in Western Europe threatened to deepen the division of the continent between East and West. This made it questionable whether the peace could be secured through unification initiatives. Many shrank back from making substantive decisions, including the British government under Winston Churchill—and that was decisive given the power relations among Hitler’s oppo- nents in Europe. Furthermore, France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle enmeshed itself in demands for separating the territories on the left bank of the Rhine along with the Ruhr District from the German federation, something for which his British allies had little enthusiasm. Churchill was however the first European politician of rank to put the theme of European unification back on the agenda of international politics after the war. In July of 1945, just after his hard-won victory over Hitler, Churchill had been sent into the opposition following elections in Britain.