Now the EU would say that it is
committed to (a) democracy, (b) ending wars, (c) the market economy.
But some would say that the priorities are the reverse of the above.
Whatever we may think, all paths to Euro-federalism seem to originate
with Jen Monnet (1888-1979), and Prof. Tim Congdon, in his review of
Leach, Rodney (2004) A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union.
4th edition, states:
"Leach favours the cooperative and
democratic vision of Europe, but he believes that - at present - he
is on the losing side. In his words, the federalists and bureaucrats
have "won the upper hand", not because of the merits of
their case than because of "the forethought and subtlety of the
Common Market's architects". In particular, Jean Monnet is
credited with the clever tactic of incrementalism, of never going
backwards but always adding small, ratchet-like steps on the path to
union."
Now this concept of ratcheting reminds
me of the diagram in my last article on “Survival Society,
Self-fulfilment Society and Quixotic Society” (Issue No 57):
The flow chart does in fact depict the
interaction of survival society and self-fulfilment society: as with
rock-climbing you ensure that each move across the rock-face is
reversible. You only move to a new position if you are in a safe
position already, and you only stay in the new position if it is
safe. And this is clearly the opposite in principle to ratcheting:
you make sure that when people advance there is no going back. Now
the ‘ratcheteers’ would reply that we have a totally different
situation: we are trying to move from a Quixotic Society to a
Survival Society, where in the example of the EEC/EU, our first
priority is that we wish to avoid wars.
Now this is to some extent
understandable: Jean Monnet’s career dates back to 1916, when at
the ‘ripe’ age of 26 he pressed on the French PM a scheme of
war-time co-operation. Nowadays we think of the Nazis as the
archetype warmongers, but in those days the French wanted a war –
partly to avenge the 1871-2 Franco-Prussian War – as long as they
didn’t start it. And in August 1943 Monnet declared to the French
National Liberation Committee:
There will be no peace in Europe, if
the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty...
The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the
necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must
constitute themselves into a federation...
But what becomes apparent is that in
the early days, when France was much stronger than the defeated
Germany, France wanted access to German resources. France initially
wanted to detach the coal-rich Ruhr region, and in the face of
American opposition to this, only consented to the establishment of
the Federal Republic (West Germany) when they agreed to placing the
Ruhr under allied control. And then they only stopped dismantling
German industry when Germany agreed to the European Coal and Steel
Industry.So when we view all this we realise that the Survival
Society being created was very much French Survival Society before
German ascendancy took effect.
But we now see that the quest for
Survival Society, be it French, German, EEC or EU was in effect
Quixotic Society: the measures to bypass or manipulate democracy
meant that a bureaucracy was being built up which could impose its
own agenda, and we certainly see this in the imposition of the
prevailing neo-liberal policies: a philosophy of institutionalised
Quixotry that fuelled Nazism during the depression, and now fuels
neo-Nazism in Greece. In effect the attempts to bring in measures to
avoid wars may well be counter-productive, and maybe Leach’s vision
of a co-operative and democratic Europe is the right one after all.
Indeed it is said that the only time two democratic countries have
been at war was Britain and Finland.
Martin Prior
