European Integration During World War II
The outbreak of World War II did not put an end to attempts at integration, though, because of the conflict, these took other forms.
18.3.1 The Franco-British Union (June 1940)
The beginning of the war almost brought about an unexpected union that would have been inconceivable during a period of peace: the merging of historic rivals France and the United Kingdom into a single state.
Initially, the project was only of a theoretical nature, but starting on March 28, 1940, it seemed to be materializing when the French and British governments mutually pledged not to negotiate a separate armistice and to maintain, after the peace, a joint effort aimed at reconstruction. On June 16, 1940, the British government proposed the constitution of a Franco-British union to the French government.[1170]Churchill, with De Gaulle at his side, even phoned French President Paul Reynaud to convey London’s proposal to him (Diamond 2007, 100). The call, however, came too late, as Reynaud finally decided to resign and the new President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, had entrusted the task of forming a government to
Marshal Petain, a strong supporter of signing an armistice. The would-be Franco- British union became but a historical curiosity.[1171]
18.3.2 Hitlerian Europe
It is well known that Hitler managed to militarily dominate most of the Continent in the early years of World War II. It is less clear, however, whether at any point he seriously considered European unity.
On the one hand, it seems that in Mein Kampf, he makes it clear that the only important thing for him was the supremacy of the Aryan race and its need to expand its living space (Lebensraum), essentially eastward. Thus, it is not surprising that Hitler originally did not have the creation of a united Europe in mind.[1172] It was only as German domination spread throughout Europe, and especially after the start of the war against Russia (June 1941), that he began to conceive the idea of placing the entire Continent under the Third Reich.[1173] To bring about this Great Germany Hitler acted to install satellite and puppet regimes in neighboring nations, with governments willing to do Germany’s bidding.
The idea of organizing a united Europe according to the fascist or National Socialist model had already been advanced by the likes of Carl Schmitt,[1174] whose ideas were taken up by Joseph Goebbels, who saw to it that they were disseminated by his official propaganda apparatus. Goebbels proposed forming a European Lebensraum that would encompass “White Russia” and the Ukraine, territories whose occupation he considered indispensable to Europe’s provisioning. In total the Third Reich aimed to occupy some 6 million km2, home to 450 million people, aiming at constituting an anti-Bolshevik Europe under what came to be called the “New Order”.[1175]
The first step was the annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March of 1938. In the absence of any resistance by the Allies, Hitler moved to also annex the Sudetenland region, the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia, where the majority of the population was German-speaking, at which point Europe teetered on the brink of war. The leaders of France (Daladier) and the United Kingdom (Chamberlain), however, met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich and accepted the situation in September 1938 (Hildebrand 1973, 65-73). War seemed to have been averted (Weinberg 2010, 526-638).
For Nazi leaders the integration of European was to be forged not through the creation of federal institutions, but by way of ensuring that the Continent’s different political regimes embraced their peculiar political philosophy.[1176] This vision of the Europe of the New Order was shared by collaborationist elements, motivated by their extreme anti-communism, and the governments of German satellite regimes (such as Vichy France, headed by Marshall Petain), theoretically independent (Chopra 1974, 4-6).[1177] In other cases, as in the case of Franco’s Spain, for example, support for integration came only in the form of armed divisions sent to fight on the Russian front, such as the Spanish Blue Division, commanded by General Agustin Munoz Grandes (Payne 2008, 160-161).[1178]
Most Europeans, however, wanted nothing to do with this anti-Bolshevik, German, racist and totalitarian “new Europe”, organizing, and supporting resistance movements to defy Nazi Germany and its allies.
18.3.3 The “Integrationist” Idea in Anti-Hitlerian Europe
18.3.3.1 The Resistance and the “United States of Europe”
The anti-Nazi resistance was from the beginning much more amenable to the idea of a united Europe (Mommsen 2003, 246-259).[1179] In June of 1941, a handful of antifascist prisoners on the island of Ventotene, led by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, released a manifesto (the Ventotene Manifesto) in favor of a European federation (Spinelli and Rossi 2006). After Mussolini’s fall, the initiative resulted in the creation of the European Federalist Movement.[1180]
18.3.3.2 Towards a Federal Europe?
In general, in those countries not occupied by the Nazis there arose movements receptive to European federalism. In Britain, there appeared the “Federal Union” movement, which endorsed a worldwide form of federalism. Also, in 1942 Coudenhove-Kalergi founded a research institute at the University of New York (Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer 2012, 100) to establish a European federation after the war, and convened a pan-European congress made up of politicians in exile. His activities were widely reported by the American and European press, allowing for the broad dissemination of pan-European ideas.
18.3.3.3 Governments in Exile and European Integration
These movements translated into political action, as most governments in exile, whose countries had been occupied by Hitler, set about laying the foundations for the organization of Europe once a peace had been signed. The Belgians and the Dutch began to negotiate the terms of a future customs union, the Greeks and Yugoslavs managed to sign a cooperation agreement, and the Poles and Czechs founded a “Coordinating Committee”. Most importantly, it was during this time and against this backdrop that there emerged the first major proponents of European integration, leading to the first real union of European states: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.[1181]
18.3.3.4 The Benelux Is Formed
Negotiations were held with the aim of initiating a process of European integration in the year 1942, but they were discontinued in 1943 because, on the one hand, Soviet authorities were opposed to any incorporation of Central European countries not under Soviet control, and, on the other, the countries of northern Europe rejected any proposal for a union without Great Britain’s participation.
In the end, the only positive result of all of these attempts was an agreement signed between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg to establish a customs and economic union, created on September 5, 1944: the Benelux (Harryvan 2009, 69-98)18.3.3.5 The Tepid Europeanism of Free France
The French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) was also concerned about how Europe would be organized after the war. In France, the project of European integration was spearheaded by Jean Monnet who, after having launched the “Victory Program” in the United States to bolster the development of the American arms industry, became the commissioner for the provisioning and armament of the CFLN. Monnet managed for Rene Mayer, a senior official who worked with him at the CFLN’s provisioning service, to send a note to General de Gaulle on September 30, 1944, in which he specifically proposed to the leader of free France the creation of a “Federation of Western Europe”. General de Gaulle was willing to study the proposal, but his advisers were not enthusiastic about the prospect of integrating free France into a coherent European Union project. In the end, on March 18, 1944, before the Consultative Assembly of Algiers, De Gaulle presented the CFLN’s official position, one of timid support for the integration of Western Europe (Chopra 1974, 8-12; Warlouzet 2011, 419-434).
The initiative would fail, however, because of the strong opposition put up by Soviet authorities to any such western alliance, and because De Gaulle thought he needed Moscow to counterbalance the growing power of the Anglo-Saxon bloc. In fact, the leader of free France traveled to Russia on December 10, 1944, to sign a Franco-Soviet alliance with Stalin (Reynolds 1994, 99).
18.3.3.6 Churchill as an Early Champion of European Unity
In the end, however, France was unable to play a key role in the reconstruction of the world order because it was excluded from the crucial post-war conferences at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, where the only Western European power present was the United Kingdom, represented by Churchill.
The main concerns of Britain’s then prime minister were maintaining the cohesion of the Commonwealth and strengthening the tight relations between Great Britain and the United States (Harbutt 2010, 284-288). However, Churchill was sympathetic to the idea of a European alliance because he feared that a political vacuum might be created when American troops left the European continent, ripe for exploitation by the Soviets to expand their sphere of influence.[1182]
At his successive meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin Churchill proposed the creation of three international councils: one for the Americas, one for Europe and a third for Asia. His proposition met with American opposition, however, as Roosevelt believed that the terms of the peace ought to be determined by the two great superpowers of the time: the Soviet Union and the United States. Roosevelt was convinced that a European Council without the United States would encourage American isolationism, and that France’s weakness would lead to a Europe dominated by Britain, which would worry the Soviet Union and jeopardize world peace. This is why the ailing U.S. President (who would die just 2 months after the Yalta Conference) acquiesced to Stalin’s views on Eastern Europe.[1183]
Roosevelt’s notion of a world split between two areas of influence would eventually prevail, as Europe was, unfortunately, torn in two, with Western Europe under American influence and Eastern Europe under Soviet power. It is true that at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945), Roosevelt and Churchill managed to convince Stalin to sign the “Declaration of Liberated Europe”, which provided for the establishment of democratic governments by way of free elections for all nations previously under German control (Miscamble 2007, 66). The countries of Western Europe, however, lacked the capacity to ensure respect for the democratic principle in Eastern Europe, which led to the falling of the “Iron Curtain”, a figurative barrier which would divide Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (Muller 1999).
18.4