History of the European Union
This is the history of the European Union. See also the history of Europe and history of present-day nations and states. The main article on the European Union gives a broader description of the institution.
Since the Fall of the Roman Empire the idea of unity has been present in European culture. Since the early modern period, proposals have been made for unions of European states in some form, from the 19th century as unions of nation-states. The creation of the predecessors to the present European Union was however specific to the years immediately after the Second World War.
Pre-1945 Influences
The Frankish empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire united large areas under a loose administration for hundreds of years.
Once Arabs had conquered ancient centers of Christianity in Syria and Egypt during the 8th century, the concept of "Christendom" became essentially a concept of a unified Europe, but always more of an ideal than an actuality. The Great Schism of 1054 between Orthodoxy and Catholicism rendered the idea of "Christendom" moot. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the first proposal for peaceful methods of unifying Europe against a common enemy emerged. George of Pod Brady, a Hussite king of Bohemia proposed the creation of a union of Christian nations against the Turks in 1464.
In 1569, the Union of Lublin transformed the Polish-Lithuanian personal union into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multi-national federation and elective monarchy, which lasted until the partitions of Poland in 1795.
In 1693, William Penn looked at the devastation of war in Europe and wrote of a 'European dyet, or parliament', to prevent further war.
Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre 1658 – 1743. Proposed the creation of a European league of 18 sovereign states in 1728In 1728, Abbot Charles de Saint-Pierre proposed the creation of a European league of 18 sovereign states, with common treasury, no borders and an economic union. After the American Revolution of 1776 the vision of a United States of Europe similar to the United States of America was shared by some prominent Europeans, notably the Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Kościuszko.Some suggestion of a European union can be found in Immanuel Kant's 1795 proposal for an "eternal peace congress”. In the 1800s, customs union under Napoleon Bonaparte'sContinental system was promulgated in November 1806 as an embargo of British goods in the interests of French hegemony. It demonstrated the flaws of a supranational economic system for Europe.The French socialistSaint-Simon and Augustin Theirry would in 1814 write the essay De la reorganization de la société européenne, already concurring up some form of parliamentary European federation. In the conservative reaction after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the German Confederation was established as a loose association of thirty-eight nominally sovereign German states formed by the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon had swept away the Holy Roman Empire and simplified the map of Germany. In 1834, the Zollverein (German, "customs union") was formed among the states of the Confederation, in order to create better trade flow and reduce internal competition.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 1872, helped define the modern European movement
Italian writer and politician Giuseppe Mazzini called for the creation of a federation of European republics in 1843. This set the stage for perhaps, the best known early proposal for peaceful unification, through cooperation and equality of membership, made by the pacifistVictor Hugo in 1847. Hugo spoke in favor of the idea at a peace congress organized by Mazzini, but was laughed out of the hall. However, he returned to his idea again in 1851.
After the First World War
Following the catastrophe of the First World War, some thinkers and visionaries again began to float the idea of a politically unified Europe. In 1923, the Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europe movement and hosted the First Pan European Congress, held in Vienna in 1926.
In 1929, Aristide Briand, French prime minister, gave a speech in the presence of the League of Nations Assembly in which he proposed the idea of a federation of European nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political and social co-operation. Many eminent economists, among them John Maynard Keynes, supported this view. At the League's request Briand presented a Memorandum on the organization of a system of European Federal Union in 1930.In 1931 the French politician Edouard Herriot published the book The United States of Europe.The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and subsequently World War II prevented this inter war movement gaining further support.
Impact of the Second World war
In 1940, following Germany's military successes in World War II and planning for the creation of a thousand year Empire, a European confederation was proposed by German economists and industrialists. They argued for a "European economic community", with a customs union and fixed internal exchange rates. In 1943, the German ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Cecil von Renthe-Fink eventually proposed the creation of a European confederacy, which would have had a single currency, a central bank in Berlin, a regional principle, a labor policy and economic and trading agreements. The proposed countries to be included were Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Greece and Spain. Such a German-led Europe, it was hoped, would serve as a strong alternative to the CommunistSoviet Union. The later Foreign Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart said: "The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed", while the Vichy French Minister Jacques Benoist-Mechin said that France had to "abandon nationalism and take place in the European community with honor." These pan-European illusions from the early 1940s were never realized because of Germany's defeat. Neither Hitler, nor many of his leading hierarchs such as Gobbles, had the slightest intention of compromising absolute German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation. Although this fact has been used to insinuate the charge of fascism in the EU, the idea is much older than the Nazis, foreseen by John Maynard Keynes, and later Winston Churchill and various anti-Nazi resistance movements.[1] Indeed, the founders of the post-war movements for European unity were firmly anti-fascist and emphasized that unity must be based on democracy and partnership, not domination and conquest.
In Britain the group known as Federal Union was launched in November 1938, and began advocating a Federal Union of Europe as a post-war aim. Its papers and arguments became well known among resistant to fascism across Europe and contributed to their thinking of how to rebuild Europe after the war.
Jean Monnet, (1888 – 1979), regarded by many as the architect of European UnityOne of the most influential figures in this process was Altiero Spinelli, co-author with Ernesto Rossi of the "Ventotene Manifesto" entitled "Towards a Free and United Europe" and smuggled out of their internment camp - the island of Ventotene - as early as 1941, well before the outcome of the war was safely predictable, and widely circulated in the resistance movements. Spinelli, Rossi and some 20 others established, as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp, the Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE). The founding meeting, held in clandestinely in Milan on the 27/28 August 1943, adopted a "political thesis" which, inter alia, stated: "if a post war order is established in which each State retains its complete national sovereignty, the basis for a Third World War would still exist even after the Nazi attempt to establish the domination of the German race in Europe has been frustrated".In 1943, Jean Monnet a member of the National Liberation Committee of the Free French government in exile in Algiers, and regarded by many as the future architect of European unity, is recorded as declaring to the 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..."
Post 1945 impetus
The disastrous course of World War II and the high death toll, gave a strong impetus to plans for some form of union of states in Europe, to prevent future wars and facilitate post-war reconstruction. At the same time, the division of Europe between two rival blocs limited these proposals in effect to western Europe. Public support for some form of European federation or government did emerge, but came to be associated with western Europe. Although he was careful to exclude the United Kingdom from his expostulation, in September 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech at the University of Zurich, calling for a "United States of Europe", employing the term French writer Victor Hugo had used nearly a century earlier to invoke an image of a federalized Europe that would be similar to the United States of America. The principal result of this speech was the formation of the Council of Europe in 1949. The Council of Europe however was (and still remains) a rather restricted organization, like a regional equivalent of the United Nations (though it has developed some powers in the area of human rights, through the European Court of Human Rights.)
The three communities
1952-58 - Foundation: 6 member states.
The European Union grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The latter institution, created by the Treaty of Paris in 1951, had six founding members: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (the Benelux countries), West Germany, France and Italy. Its purpose was to pool the steel and coal resources of the member states under supranational authority, rendering another European war technically impossible while simultaneously spurring economic development. The ECSC was the brainchild of French civil servant Jean Monnet and was publicized by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman. On May 9, 1950 Schuman presented his proposal for the creation of an integrated Europe, stating that it was indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. This proposal, known as the "Schuman Declaration", is considered to be the beginning of the creation of what is now the European Union, which later chose to celebrate May 9 as Europe Day. The British were invited to participate in it, but refused on grounds of national sovereignty; thus the six went ahead alone. (See Text of the Schuman Declaration, Video of the Schuman Declaration).
Further efforts towards integration were immediately undertaken following the success of the ECSC. Encouraged by the United States, an attempt was made to create a European Defence Community (EDC) and a European Political Community (EPC). The EDC called for no less than the creation of a common European army, with joint high command. Its purpose was to allow troops to be raised from Germany (to face the Soviet threat) while overcoming French fears of German rearmament. The purpose of the EPC was to establish a federation of European states - replete with a bicameral parliament, executive organ, and a European Court. These attempts proved overambitious. In 1954 the French National Assembly refused to ratify the EDC treaty, which led to its abandonment; after the failure of the EDC treaty, the EPC, too, was quietly shelved. Nonetheless, the ideas behind both institutions lived on - as testified by later developments such as European Political Co-operation (also called EPC), the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) "pillar" established by the Maastricht treaty, and the European Rapid Reaction Force currently in formation.
The Treaty of Rome signing ceremony - 1957
Despite the failure of the EDC and EPC, the six founding members soon tried again to further their integration. The next major milestone was the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), both through the Treaty of Rome of 1957 (implemented January 1, 1958). The purpose of the EEC was to establish a customs union among the six founding members, based on the "four freedoms": freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and people. Euratom was created to pool the non-military nuclear resources of the states. Of the three institutions now extant - the ECSC, the EEC, and Euratom - the EEC was by far the most important, so much so that it was later renamed simply the European Community (EC).
The growth of these European Communities into what is currently the European Union can be said to consist of two parallel processes -- first their structural evolution and institutional change into a tighter bloc with more competences given to the supranational level, which can be called the process of European integration or the deepening of the Union. The other is the enlargement of the European Communities (and later European Union) from 6 to 27 member states, which is also called the widening of the Union
Enlargement of the EU
1973
1973 - 9 member states. The United Kingdom, Denmark (with Greenland but not the Faroe Islands) and Ireland join. Greenland left in 1985.
In January 1960, Britain and other OEEC members who didn't belong to the EEC formed an alternative association, the European Free Trade Association. But Britain soon realized that the EEC was more successful than the EFTA and decided to apply for membership. Ireland and Denmark, both of whom being heavily reliant on British trade, decided they would go wherever Britain went, and hence also applied to join the Community. Norway also applied at this time.The first application occurred in August 1961 under the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, who was more favorable to Britain joining the EEC than his predecessors. Negotiations started in November 1961 and a provisional agreement was reached in July 1962. However, Britain's membership was vetoed by French president Charles De Gaulle in January 1963 (all EEC founding members had this right). Officially, De Gaulle said that Britain was not sufficiently European-minded yet to break away from the Commonwealth and accept a common agricultural policy. But other reasons include Britain's close relationship with the US in terms of defence (see Nassau agreement) and De Gaulle's fear that Britain's membership would be followed by many other countries joining the EEC, thus making the community lose its cohesion. De Gaulle refused an "Atlantic" Europe. As a result, the whole negotiations with the four countries broke off.
The second application occurred under the Labor government of Harold Wilson. Wilson said in January 1966 that Britain was ready to apply for EEC membership if essential British interests were safeguarded. Negotiations started on May 1967 with the four countries but De Gaulle once again used his veto in September 1967. Officially, De Gaulle said that Britain had to improve its economy but he actually still feared that Britain would act as the US Trojan horse. The whole negotiation broke off once again, and it seemed that Britain wouldn't be able to join the EEC as long as De Gaulle was president.
The third and last application occurred after De Gaulle resigned in 1969 and was replaced by Georges Pompidou. In October 1969, the European Commission asked for new negotiations concerning the applications of the four countries. In November 1969, during a meeting of the foreign ministers of the EC (EEC, ECSC and Euratom had merged into the EC in 1967), French minister Maurice Schumann declared that France would agree to Britain's membership if questions of agricultural finance were settled first. (Then as now the Common Agricultural Policy - for which Britain would have to contribute far more than it would receive from the common fund - was such a contentious issue that it was considered necessary to force Britain to agree to it in its current form as a condition of membership.) Negotiations started in June 1970 under the Conservative government of Edward Heath, who was one of the most strongly pro-European politicians in Britain. Britain agreed to the conditions of the EC: Britain had to accept the Merger Treaty and all decisions taken since the second application, and resolve its problem of adaptation, i.e. conflicts between the EC and the Commonwealth. Finally, Britain joined successfully on January 1, 1973. In 1972, Ireland (application from July 1961), Denmark (application from August 1961), Norway (application from April 1962) held referenda on whether to join. The results were:
- Ireland - 83.1% in favor (May 10) (see also: Third Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland)
- Norway - 46.5% in favor (September 25)
- Denmark - 63.3% in favor (October 2)
Following the rejection by the Norwegian electorate (53.5% against), Norway did not join, an event that was to be repeated again twenty years later, when the government proposed joining along with Austria, Sweden and Finland.