Book review: Robin M. Allers on Mathieu Segers, 'The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951'

 

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Allers on Segers, 'The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951' [Review]

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Segers, Mathieu.  The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. $29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781009379427.

Reviewed by Robin M. Allers (Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies)
Published on H-Diplo (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60570

Anyone studying the European Union has come across the policymakers and planners who are commonly known as its founding fathers. Thousands of books and articles have been written about and programs, universities, and buildings are named after the Frenchmen Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the German Konrad Adenauer, the Belgian Paul Henri Spaak, the Italian Alcide de Gasperi, and a handful of others. These individuals, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, conceived and implemented the truly revolutionary plan to bring former wartime enemies together in a Western European community and to pool their coal and steel industries in a new organizational construct that combined intergovernmental and supranational elements. Textbooks and general introductions to the history of the European Union usually start with a chapter on the first steps of this integration process, which started in the late 1940s as part of broader conversations on the postwar international order.[1] Most also include some pages or paragraphs on earlier plans for a united Europe, going back to the interwar years and the Second World War, when resistance movements, as well as individuals, groups, and governments in exile, took part in discussions about the postwar international order and different schemes for European cooperation, many of them motivated by a dream to prevent future wars.[2] The lasting fame of the founding fathers, who the historian Alan S. Milward sarcastically called “the European Saints,” is due to the fact that they, with the help of the United States, designed and implemented organizational structures that, at least partly, achieved these dreams in the western part of Europe.[3]

This “pre-history of today’s European Union” is the theme of this book that seeks to “re-discover the history of the origins and beginnings of the present-day Europe of European integration” (pp. 4-5). More specifically, it wants to “open the complex genealogy” of Western Europe by analyzing the discussions about Europe’s postwar future as “a battle of blueprints” and describing the interaction of thinkers, movers, and shakers as a virtual “European Republic of Planning” (pp. 18, 3, 5).

The author, Mathieu Segers, tragically passed away after completing this work, which, according to his own account, is the product of ten years of research. With the book, he builds on his earlier studies on Dutch and German European policy while at the same time synthesizing research conducted as part of a multiyear project on the historiography of European history and European integration with a focus on emotions and ecclesiastical actors.[4] In addition to an impressive mastery of the existing literature on European integration, European and transatlantic policy networks, and intellectual debates in resistance movements among economists and in ecclesiastical circles, the book is based on a significant number of published and unpublished sources from British, Dutch, German, and EU archives. Segers aims at tackling two weaknesses in the historiography that have been identified in recent years: much of the literature remains state centrist and there is a lack of focus on ideas. By bringing together different trends, perspectives, and approaches, he wants to discover new links between the history and the prehistory of European integration. His approach builds on three insights from recent literature. First, governments were unable to control the process that emerged out of the myriads of ideas for postwar cooperation. Second, to find the roots of the integration process one needs to go further back in history, to the interwar years and to the dissolution of empires. Third, historical analysis must delve beneath the surface of day-to-day politics, diplomacy, and institution building and take a closer look at the battle of ideas and of concepts. Segers wants to enrich these new trends with the addition of two “innovative conceptual elements”: a focus on the psychological sphere of “emotions” (that is, intellectual struggles at the individual and collective levels) and more attention on leading ecclesiastics and their networks (pp. 16, 37).

The author’s ambition to combine and introduce several new approaches and concepts and to shift between different levels of analysis makes his book at times challenging to follow. Therefore, I would not recommend using it as a first introduction to the prehistory of European integration. The book’s ambitious approach and complex design are also reflected in a rather complicated structure. Following three and a half pages of acknowledgments and a ten-page prologue, a thirty-two-page introduction—titled “The Genealogy of Western Europe”—presents the book’s main themes, discusses the historiography, and outlines the book’s structure. The following eight chapters (episodes) are divided into two parts before the book ends with a conclusion and an epilogue. While this book might not be suitable for first-year college students, scholars who seek to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of which ideas influenced the first steps in the process of European integration and how these ideas transformed into concrete plans and eventually successful policy initiatives will find a trove of material that future accounts of the process of European integration will not be able to ignore.

The first part, “Beyond Americanisation (1937-1947),” looks at the battle of ideas during the Second World War and in the first years of the postwar period. Here, the reader gets a detailed understanding of how schools of thought like Anglo-Saxon market liberalism, the Austrian school of economics, Keynesianism, and ordoliberalism debated economic, monetary, and social as well as moral and ethical questions. Intellectuals like Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Wilhelm Röpke not only shaped academic debates but also became influential policy advisers. Some moved between the academic world and official roles. The father of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), Ludwig Erhard, was a professor of economics and an adviser to the US military government in Bavaria before he became minister of economics and later chancellor of the Federal Republic. A transnational network, the Mont Pélerin Society, founded in 1947, became “an influential ideas-incubator-hub for the post-war liberal order of the west.” The Bonhoeffer Kreis, a “religiously motivated working group” named after the theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had connections to so-called Freiburg Circles in which the ordoliberal ideas that would shape both German economic policy and the blueprints of European integration developed (p. 182). At the same time, Christian democracy rose to a dominant position as a new political family to which many of the most important thinkers and policymakers of Western Europe felt attached. Somewhat surprising (although understandable given the focus on the forces that would later shape the emerging European communities), Segers says little about discussions on postwar Europe among socialists and social democrats in exile. To be sure, many of them were in opposition to the way European integration materialized in the 1950s, yet some, like the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, shared the dream of a “united states of Europe” already during his Scandinavian exile. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he became key to the process of European integration as foreign minister and chancellor.[5] The Italian social democrat Altiero Spinelli, who in 1941 co-drafted and secretly distributed a manifesto for a free and united Europe, figures on the EU’s own list of founding fathers.[6]

The second part, “The Making of European Integration (1947-1951),” analyzes how ideas became “blueprints” and follows the first steps of institution building in the context of the emerging Cold War, from the Marshall Plan and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) via the European Payments Union (EPU) to the launch of the Schuman Plan and the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In this part, the reader learns more about how ideas and discussions “converged into a pragmatic and growing transatlantic and western European consensus about the institutional design, practical planning, and moral embedding of this future Europe” (p. 19). Segers sees leading planners like Monnet as a “new elite of experts” whose “legacy ... acquired mythical quality,” and he emphasizes the role of US diplomats and policymakers in the emergence of Western Europe as an economic and political pillar of the new transatlantic community (pp. 204, 4). But this is also the story of a seminal change from bilateralism to multilateralism and from global to more regional approaches in international relations. During the late 1940s, American plans for the postwar world developed from a “One World” approach that had led to the conception of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Bretton Woods system for monetary management to more regional approaches. Under the pressure of the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, detailed, tailor-made models for “building Europe” won over “building Atlantis.” Other key developments of this phase were the United Kingdom’s disappearance from discussions about European integration and the emergence of the Franco-German “engine” as a new power center in Western Europe. The conclusion is followed by an epilogue that uses the exchange between “two highly influential friends in the transatlantic Anglo-Saxon epicentre of this extraordinary period in the history of the West and Europe”—the American diplomat George Kennan and the Oxford philosopher Isiah Berlin—to reflect on the book’s conclusions “in a more essayistic way” (p. 45).

Whether or not one finds the introduction of new terms like “European Republic of planning” or the focus on “emotions” convincing, Seger’s book makes an important contribution to the prehistory of the European integration process in several areas. It contributes to the intellectual history of the early twentieth century and it enriches our understanding of planning (and the planners behind it), it is an important addition to the study of transatlantic relations in the crucial phase of transition from postwar to Cold War, and it adds new insights to the institutional history of European and Western cooperation. Both as a synthesis of earlier research and because of its novel approaches and hitherto unpublished material, the book will be indispensable for those who want to understand how different ideas and schools of thought influenced the planning for the postwar international order and for the reconstruction of Europe. It is a must-read for scholars studying how the interaction of intellectuals, academics, planners, and policymakers contributed to the emergence of the European Union that we know today. While the book provides a detailed analysis of the prehistory of European integration, it also provokes reflection on current challenges to European cooperation and international relations.

Notes

[1]. Still one of the best introductions in English is Desmond Dinan, Europe Recast: A History of the European Union, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynn Riener Publishers, 2014).

[2]. Dinan, Europe Recast, 1-5.

[3]. Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 318.

[4]. Funded by the Dutch Research Council, the “Blueprints of Hope” project had its closing conference in early 2024. See Dutch Research Council, “Blueprints of Hope: Designing Post-War Europe; Ideas, Emotions, Networks and Negotiations (1930-1963),” accessed October 22, 2024, https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/360-52-190.

[5]. See the dissertation by Pénélope Léa Patry, “Willy Brandts frühe Europavorstellungen aus dem skandinavischen Exil (1933-1947): Entstehung und Ausformung eines außenpolitischen Bewusstseins zwischen Internationalismus und Europäismus” (PhD diss., L’université de Lyon, 2019), which was awarded the Willy Brandt Prize by the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation for 2024 (see https://willy-brandt.de/en/willy-brandt/research/research-funding/). See also Jan De Graaf, Socialism across the Iron Curtain: Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[6]. European Commission, “The Founding Fathers and Other Stories from the Past,” 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/comm/items/625131/en.

Robin Allers is associate professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS) and program director for the master’s program at the Norwegian Defence University College (FHS). He earned his PhD in history at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on German-Norwegian relations and the first enlargement of the European Communities in the era of Willy Brandt as foreign minister and chancellor. His current research and teaching focuses on European security and Norway’s security and defense relations with close allies.

Citation: Robin M. Allers. Review of Segers, Mathieu. The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60570

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.