The Symbolic Politics of European Integration

Staging Europe

Jacob Krumrey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319681320
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319681337
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Draws on diplomatic records, media coverage, and the personal papers of key diplomacy actors

Offers insights in to the media coverage, marketing techniques, and political theater of European statesmen and diplomats

Analyses the three main aspects of the European Community's political theater: its parliament, its diplomacy, and its seat

© The Author(s) 2018

Jacob KrumreyThe Symbolic Politics of European Integration https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68133-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The EC as a Theater State

Jacob Krumrey¹

(1)

European University Institute, Florence, Italy

End Abstract

“Europe is born!” declared Jean Monnet on 10 August 1952 in the town hall of Luxembourg City as he inaugurated the bureaucratic creature that he was to preside over: the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). ¹ A year into the ECSC’s operation, Monnet even more candidly revealed what he thought his brainchild’s raison d’être was: “The true significance of the European Coal and Steel Community,” he told a group of journalists, “is not coal, and it is not steel; it is Europe.”² What Monnet claimed for his organization of economists, engineers, and commercial lawyers was nothing less than a mandate to represent the cause of a united Europe.

Fourteen years after Monnet’s emphatic declaration, on 25 January 1967, the French daily Le Monde invited Pierre Chatenet to publish an op-ed piece on its front page. Even though Chatenet headed one of the ECSC’s sister organizations, his piece dealt critically with the emerging idiom of European unification. “When you think about it,” he wrote, “it is surely a singular misadventure of language that has managed to create in the current vocabulary a quasi-synonymity between ‘Europe’ and ‘Common Market’.”³ At first glance, this observation attests to the success of Monnet’s politics. But while Monnet had sought to wed his humble organization to the noble cause of Europe, his editorializing successor implored his readers: “Why pretend to take the part for the whole?”

Chatenet, a French Gaullist, may have had his own political agenda. But his question was not without merit. Kiran K. Patel has recently drawn attention to the “synecdochic qualities of the EC/ EU integration process,”⁴ the propensity of an essentially economic policy regime to stand in for the much larger vision of European union. Taking its cue from that puzzle, this book sets out to reveal the European Community’s (EC) synecdochic qualities as a product of staging . It does so by putting forth a cultural history of European integration that focuses on aspects hitherto neglected in the history of European integration: the EC’s protocol and ceremonies, and its marketing and image in the media . It claims that viewing European integration through the lens of symbolic representation will help us to understand how coal, steel, and agricultural tariffs became the stuff the European dream was made of.

From today’s perspective, the EC’s claim to stand for Europe may not seem too bold. On the contrary, it may seem self-evident, vindicated by history. No lesser authority than the Norwegian Nobel Committee certified its truth when it awarded the European Union (EU), the EC’s successor organization, the 2012 Peace Prize for “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Even its most implacable foes do not deny that the EU is a force to be reckoned with. Even if severely shaken, it is still the world’s most powerful regulator, with a market of 500 million consumers, an annual budget in the hundreds of billions, and the power to bail out—or not to bail out—entire countries.

To inquire into the origins of a major fact of contemporary life is surely a legitimate interest for historians. But it must nor spare them the question of what today’s EU —greatly enlarged , thoroughly metamorphosed several times—has to do with the Coal and Steel Pool and even the Common Market of the 1950s and 1960s, nor that of whether the ready-made assumption of significance can simply be projected back to the postwar period. Even in 1972, the London Times described the organization Britain was about to enter as “a super-combination of a Board of Trade and Ministry of Agriculture.”⁵ Was this description far off the mark? And if not, in what way could such an organization substantiate its boast of peace, prosperity, and European union?

The answers historians give turn out to be surprisingly vague upon closer inspection. Confronted with the popular narrative of the EC as the miracle of surpassing a realist conception of international politics, the now-classic accounts of integration history point out that European integration—even if it implied a partial pooling of sovereignty —was in fact nothing but realism .⁶ They argue that European statesmen, along with their international partners, followed an economic and/or geostrategic rationale: that is, they sought economic growth by increasing markets and sought security from Germany (and obliquely, from the Soviet Union) by pooling strategic resources. This realist view, however, does not shy away from claiming great accomplishments for the EC. Famously, the economic historian Alan Milward declared that European integration had done nothing less than “rescue the nation state.” Curiously, however, such grandiloquence finds no echo in the master narratives of twentieth-century Europe, which often struggle to pinpoint the EC’s exact contribution to postwar history. In recent textbooks, for example, European integration appears as little more than an obligatory interlude.⁷ Perhaps even the most hard-nosed integration historians have not been able to fully escape the EC’s own narrative of itself as Europe.

The EC’s claim to Europe ignores the manifold alternative Europes that were available at the time. If we take a closer look at the front page of the edition of Le Monde where Chatenet published his critical op-ed piece, we find one of these alternatives prominently on display. That day’s cover story was dedicated to British prime minister Harold Wilson, who had delivered an address to Europe on the eve of a tour through Europe’s capitals. Although the purpose of this trip was to build support for the United Kingdom’s membership in the EC, Wilson had not given his speech in an EC forum, but in front of the Council of Europe, founded in 1949 in the wake of the Hague Congress .⁸ Because the Council of Europe had enjoyed the blessing of the European movements at its inception, and because its membership included many countries left out of the later Europe of the Six, it was viewed for a long time as the EC’s most potent rival. The context of Chatenet’s article therefore qualified its message: The synonymity of EC and Europe was evident enough to become the object of plausible criticism, but it was not absolute, nor was it guaranteed.

The Council of Europe was by no means the only competitor. The creation of the EC was part of what Akira Iriye calls the “new internationalism ,”⁹ the surge in international organizations , or multilateral arrangements, in the aftermath of World War II . This new internationalism occurred on a global scale: notable examples are the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, but also the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But this new internationalism had a particularly profound impact upon the transatlantic space between Western Europe and North America, where a dense web of overlapping international arrangements emerged, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ) the most prominent among them. In the area of collective security, complementary arrangement on a European scale had existed before, and continued to exist alongside, NATO —such as the Brussels Pact , which later turned into the Western European Union (WEU). On a smaller scale, there were cases of regional integration, such as the Benelux customs union or, later, the Nordic Council . European integration was part and parcel of this trend toward institutionalized cooperation. The term itself was originally coined by US policymakers for the aims of the Marshall plan and applied to the vast array of organizations dedicated to Europe’s economic reconstruction, from the European Payment Union (EPU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) to the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC).¹⁰ In other words, European integration had existed before the EC. Patel even characterized the EC as a “fragile latecomer,” for which others had paved the way.¹¹

The EC’s own history, too, was more complex than is usually remembered. None of Europe’s mythical founding moments actually created a coherent institutional framework. In fact, the EU’s institutional precursor originated in three mostly separate organizations created at different points in time: the ECSC was founded by the 1951 Paris treaty, which was inspired by the Schuman declaration of 5 May 1950. The later Rome treaties , signed on 27 March 1957, created two sister organizations: the European Economic Community ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The EC as a Theater State
• Part I. Europe on the Diplomatic Stage
• Part II. A Parliament for Europe
• Part III. The Race for the Capital of Europe
• Back Matter