FROM ALBERT SPEER TO JACQUES DELORS

John Keegan on how wartime

experiences help explain the great debate about Europe

WHAT HAS THE 40th anniversary of the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) — which fell this week — got to do with the great debate about Europe? How could the establishment of a body so banal help us to find answers to the two great 'whys': why do the British — and the Danes — dislike Europe so much and why do the other members of the Community not dis- like it more than they do?

Help nonetheless it does, for two rea- sons. The first is that the ECSC was the direct precursor of the European Commu- nity and that the debate over its powers and institutions — High Authority, Coun- cil of Ministers, Court of Justice, parlia- mentary assembly — exactly anticipated those current in the EEC member states, which have abruptly woken up and realised how much more sovereignty they are called upon to surrender by the Maas- tricht Treaty. The second is that the motives underlying the foundation of the ECSC, represented at the time and still today as the first manifestation of the 'European' ideal, are open to an entirely different interpretation.

The ECSC was the child of Jean Monnet and Maurice Schuman, the two Frenchmen who share the title of 'father of Europe'. No one — certainly not I — would disclaim their reputation both as genuine patriots and European idealists. Both made their way from France to England to serve de Gaulle when Vichy had declared him a traitor. Both returned to France deter- mined to restore their country's economy and to put its relations with Germany on a footing of permanent friendship. Prosperity and harmony are the central European ideas. Little fault, it might seem, is to be found therefore with the ECSC; none at all, indeed — unless one sees the ECSC as a reconstitution of a German instrument of wartime economic rationalisation, organ- ised in a form designed to distribute rather than concentrate German power.

There are two histories of 'Europe'. The first runs something like this. Enlightened Europeans, after 1918 and before 1939, were moving towards an ideal of interna- tionalism. They had been horrified by the hatreds released in 1914. They had come to share the view of Jose Ortega y Gasset that 'the State has become a puny thing' (though capable of bringing European civilisation close to collapse), and that 'only the determination to construct a great nation from the group of peoples of the Continent would give a new life to the puls- es of Europe'. After 1939, this noble ideal was taken up by the Resistance in the countries subordinated to German con- quest, between whose writings on the European future a narrow congruence can be demonstrated. United by a hatred of Nazism and Fascism, the internal Resis- tance in all countries liberated in 1945 joined hands — among themselves and with the returning external Resistance, Per- sonified by Monnet and Schuman — t° work together towards Ortega y Gasset s pre-war vision. The common agency of co-operation was Christian Democracy — MPR in France, CDU in Germany and so on — and its du): sen instruments such bodies as the Council of Europe (1949), the Western European

Union (1954), the European Defence Community, the Organisation for Eco- nomic Co-operation and Development (1959), as well as the ECSC. Some of these bodies were more successful than others — the Defence Community failed alto- gether — but all tended towards the same end. In retrospect, the ECSC may be seen as the most significant, because it was the first to which the individual states made actual transfers of sovereignty. Its High Authority's powers over the member states' coal and steel industries so exactly anticipated those of the European Com- mission over general trade and industry that the two bodies were simply merged in 1967. Between Ortega y Gasset's brilliant vision and its realisation in the Treaty of Rome, therefore, the Coal and Steel Com- munity had provided the crucial bridge.

The other history of 'Europe' runs quite differently. It begins with the uncomfort- able reminder that the coal and steel resources of France, Belgium and western Germany had twice before been run as a single unit, once during the first world war, once during the second, as a result of Ger- man conquest. In both wars, north-eastern France was placed under the authority of the Military Governor of Belgium and its industrial resources administered as an entity. There were not, as is often thought, two governmental zones in France between 1940 and November 1942 but three: Vichy, the occupied zone, and the north-east.

This arrangement suited German pur- poses; but it was not wholly inimical to French interests either. Indeed, German occupation policy throughout western Europe was tailored to circumstances. Its aim was to yield Germany the largest pos- sible returns for the least possible outlay on security measures; its method was the greatest measure of indirect rule consistent With that aim. Hence Vichy and hence, too, the policy of leaving constitutional government intact in Denmark, where free Parliamentary elections were held as late as 1943. (Those who leap to the conclusion that Denmark's 'No' vote in the Maastricht referendum reflects pride in the continuity of the country's parliamentary institutions may be on to something.)

The more brutish sort of Nazi occupa- tion official despised the indirect principle. Otto Sauckel, commissioner for forced labour, paid no heed to it in his campaign to strip western as well as eastern Europe of skilled manpower. The technocrats, Albert Speer foremost among them, came eventually to a more subtle view. Speer Was enormously impressed by the skills Shown by Jean I3ichelonne, Vichy's indus- trY minister, in manipulting the Franco- German Armistice Commission towards Policies that met the needs of German Industry while keeping French industrial capacity intact. He eventually succeeded in having Bichelonne received at Berlin as a guest of the state, where together they dis-

cussed plans for creating, in effect, a Euro- pean common market. Speer had decided that exploitation was inefficient and that the future lay in co-operation. 'It would have been the supposition,' he explained to his interrogators after the war, 'that the tariff was lifted from this large economic area and through this a mutual production was really achieved. For any deeply think- ing individual it is clear that the tariffs which we have in western Europe are unbearable. So the possibility for produc- ing on a large scale only exists through this scheme.'

Speer's conception — greatly influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, which includ- ed not only that of the Gross- raumwirkschaft (large economic area) but also of a European 'Monroe doctrine' designed to exclude 'alien powers' — made some headway; during 1943-44, gen- uine measures of co-operation between French and German industrialists were agreed. It could not prevail, however, in circumstances where the finance of inter- national trade was entirely dominated by the system of 'occupation costs' levied at a rate of exchange fixed by the Deutsche Ver- rechnungskasse (German Clearing Bank). All occupied countries were forced to pay the cost of their occupation by German troops out of export earnings from accounts held in the Clearing Bank. The bank so overvalued the mark, however, that exports could never bridge the deficit, which had to be made good by increasing direct taxation at home; as a result in France, for example, payments to the Clearing Bank totalled 49 per cent of pub- lic expenditure between 1940 and 1944.

Speer's common market proved, there-

fore, to be Europe through the looking- glass, but experienced as a nightmare rather than a dream. It taught the whole of western Europe — including Italy, one of the worst sufferers after Mussolini's fall — how punitive German economic primacy could be, and how essential it would be, after liberation came, to set permanent limits to German power. Disarmament would be a necessary but not sufficient lim- itation. The intrinsic capacity of German industry and banks to set the terms of trade, once war damage had been repaired, demanded institutional measures. Jean Monnet, on his return to France, saw so at once. He recalls in his memoirs how the German coal and steel cartels had robbed their French equivalents of markets during the 1930s and how horrified he was to dis- cover that the French coal and steel mas- ters' one thought, after 1945, was to win measures of tariff protection that would shield their inefficiencies from renewed competition.

He had different intentions. One was to replicate in France the machinery of cen- tralised economic organisation which Speer had so brilliantly directed. The outcome was the Ministry of Planning and Equip- ment, whose young executives — among them Jacques Delors — were eventually to achieve a genuine modernisation of French industry. The second was to avert the effects of German cartelisation by restoring the wartime integration of the German, French and Belgian coal and steel enter- prises, but under conditions that would not only outlaw tariffs, price-fixing and subsi- dies but levy enforceable sanctions against transgressors. The Coal and Steel Commu- nity, which was the result, forced the non- German members into , uncomfortable competition but denied the Germans the Opportunity to use extra-industrial means — in particular, tax concessions levied on a larger fiscal base — to heighten their com- petitive advantage.

From the Coal and Steel Community to the Treaty of Rome was but a short step, for the treaty introduced nothing new. It merely extended over the whole of the economic life of the Six the authority of the institutions the ECSC had set up. Thir- ty-five years on, the Delors plan — to which the Treaty of Maastricht was to give force — did go much further. Delors was motivated by the fear that, unless the greatly enlarged European Community took wider powers, those it already pos- sessed would be eroded. He therefore hur- ried the Twelve into the Single European Act and the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and urged them towards federalism, a sin- gle currency and a common foreign and defence policy.

It was at this point that the Danes jibbed and the British Euro-sceptics in parliament threatened to block ratification. The Euro- sceptics have many objections to Maas- tricht. One way of encapsulating them, however, is to say that they do not under- stand why all that seems so important to them — above all, the accountability of the executive to elected representatives, hard- won over centuries of history — is some- thing that continental politicians should be so ready to surrender for as yet undeliv- ered economic advantages.

It is a genuine incomprehension, because the British, whether declared Euro-sceptics or not, have not undergone in their lifetime the awful experiences through which the Delors generation lived. They might buy the idealised, Ortega y Gasset `history' of Europe. They simply do not grasp the reality of the other `history', because, while it was unrolling, their own wartime generation was fighting frantically against it: Their version of the second World war is a simple one of how a brutal German conquest of the continent was rolled back by the military efforts of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union, which eventually brought liberation to its enslaved peoples. They do not perceive the complexities of the German wartime empire, which was simultaneously fiscal and industrial as well as military. An understandable continental Silence on the extensiveness of 'collabora- tion' — no more than a necessity for pro- prietors with a business to run — hinders any attempt they might make to see how Delors' federal Europe' and Speer's 'large economic area' overlap in the continental consciousness.

The two may indeed be seen as equiva- lent to each other in 'good' and 'bad' forms. The European Commission is a ver- sion of the Franco-German Armistice Commission in a good form, since in it the French are the equals of the Germans. The Exchange Rate Mechanism, with the mark as its key currency, is certainly a bet- ter version of the German Clearing Bank with its 'occupation costs' mark, even if parities are effectively set by the Bundes- bank for German domestic purposes. Pay- ing for German re-unification is a great deal less onerous than paying for the war in the east. The European Parliament, however feeble, is a great deal better than nothing, since wartime Europe, except Denmark, had no parliamentary life at all. The European Court is very much better, since the rule of international law disap- peared altogether in Europe between 1940-44. There are even personal analo- gies: Jacques Delors, the product of a Vichy lycee, may be seen as a 'good' ver- sion of Jean Bichelonne, to whom, in his overpowering intelligence and relentless energy, he bears a striking resemblance. Bichelonne, moreover, was in his own way a patriot, who sought to curb German power from a position of weakness. Delors, from a position of strength, is pur- suing the same object, as patriotically as Monnet and Schuman at the outset.

It is there that those who underwent occupation and those who did not come to the parting of the ways. The Euro-sceptics, whatever our short-term difficulties, are probably wrong in thinking that Britain has any economic future outside Europe. They are right, however, in their political anxieties, which the Prime Minister has best expressed in his warnings about the growth of a 'European superstate'. To the continental politicians, whose polities were subsumed in a monstrous German super- state in 1940, the surrenders of sovereignty their quite infant parliamentary systems are now called upon to make must look of trifling significance when contrasted with the outright robbery of sovereignty they experienced in that terrible year. Delors' 'federal Europe' is a comfortable place by comparison even with Speer's 'large eco- nomic area'.

Yet Delors, as the Danish vote has per- haps brought home to him, has gone too far. The permanent constraint of German economic power need not entail the sur- render of sovereignties to Brussels by the Community's member states that his plan demands. To re-read the objections made in 1950-52 by French, Dutch, Belgian and even German constitutionalists to the intended nature of the Coal and Steel Community — that it required jumblings of legislative, judicial and executive func- tions', that its High Authority would be 'autocratic', its parliamentary assembly 'powerless' and its court an instrument of 'economic review', and that 'a permanently outvoted member would not be able to threaten to withdraw', in which case 'how would unity be preserved if one member wanted to leave?' and 'how would the infi- del be punished?' — is to be carried not into the past but face to face with the pre- sent. The objections were not answered then. They have resurfaced to torment us now. If they are not met, and if constitu- tional measures are not framed to accom- modate them while Britain — the one member state unafflicted by memories of occupation — holds the Community's pres- idency, the EEC is unlikely to survive as an entity.

John Keegan is defence editor of the Daily Telegraph.

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