EUROPE'S UNHOLY GODFATHERS

The European idea is not necessarily

liberal. Noel Malcolm investigates the shadier

branches of its family tree

AS WITH war and the generals, the history of the 'European' movement is too important to be left to the pro-Europeans themselves. The EEC's approved version of its own intellectual ancestry is an exer- cise in selective piety. From the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, for example, you can obtain free of charge a booklet entitled Jean Monnet, a Grand Design for Europe, from which you will learn that 'the process of European unification stems essentially from the search for a new brand of humanism .... With this aim in mind, the "Father of Europe" set out to promote a new moral base for Europe. ...'

Search the official histories of the 'Euro- pean idea' and you will find no mention, for example, of the Union Movement, founded to promote European union in 1948, nor of its monthly magazine, The European, which ran from 1953 to 1959, nor even of the 'European Declaration' promoted by this movement and adopted by an international conference at Venice in 1962. 'Europe', said the Declaration, 'shall have a common government for purposes of foreign policy, defence, economic poli- cy, finance and scientific development.' What could be more respectable than that? And yet the founder of the Union Move- ment, Sir Oswald Mosley, has not gone down in history even as the Uncle of Europe.

The signatories of this declaration have been variously described as neo-fascists and as ex-fascists. Explaining his own position in his autobiography (published in 1968), Sir Oswald put the emphasis, natur- ally, on the 'ex'; but at the same time he was honest enough to admit some continui- ty between his post-war and pre-war philo- sophies. Perhaps the most important com- mon thread was an impatience with any form of human organisation which was confrontational and divisive and therefore inefficient. Both in the Sixties and in the Thirties he advocated a 'government of national consensus' to overcome the ineffi- ciencies of adversarial party politics; both before the war and after it he attacked the 'anarchy' of a free market in labour. Although the Europe he envisaged would have a parliamentary constitution, its raison d'être would be to regulate the economy on a grand scale, to enforce social progress by encouraging industrial 'co- partnership' and workers' control, and to promote 'scientific' solutions to Europe- wide problems.

The basic pattern of thought here is Corporatism, an 'ism' not in its elaborate theoretical shape (as constructed by Italian fascist theorists) but in the form of an assumption, an instinct, a type of attitude towards politics. The Corporatist attitude, if developed to an ex- treme, leads to fascism, but in its milder forms it appeals to two kinds of moderate people: the managerial-minded, who are offended by the inefficiency of adversa- rial politics, and the men of good will, who are distressed by the disuni- ty and hostility which are produced by any sys- tem in which the repre- sentatives of one interest-group can fight against those of another. In the first category be- olut4 long those politicians and businessmen who see the unification of Europe primarily as a way of optimising our ability to compete against Japan. And in the second category one might place those voters, prominent in the British political history of the last eight years, who instinc- tively warm to three ideas in particular: a 'centre party', coalition government and European unity.

Jean Monnet's Memoirs seem to place him firmly in the first of these categories. At times the portrait he paints of himself there seems too innocent to be true: an ingenu cognac salesman who was in- terested only in finding solutions to organi- sational problems — and who; incidental- ly, wouldn't have recognised a new brand of humanism even if it had been poured out of the bottle in front of him. This is how he describes his disappointment at the disbanding of Allied joint economic plan- ning at the end of the first world war: 'Once the interlude of war was over, they all went back to the rules and customs of traditional parliamentary democracies. I felt out of my depth.' Traditional politics was so maddeningly inefficient, so condu- cive to partial or imperfect solutions. 'But If', he writes, 'each interested party in these circumstances, instead of facing another party with opposing interests, is presented with the problem as a whole, there can be no doubt that all parties' Points of view will be modified.'

What could be more reasonable than that? And yet the ultimate tendency of this argument is profoundly anti-democratic: for it implies that to identify with any Particular grouping, with its own common interests or common aims, is to render one's position illegitimate. It is an argu- ment which Monnet developed as a weapon against nation-states; perhaps in- nocence really is the explanation for his failure to see that it could just as easily be turned against the very nature of party Politics and justify the creation of a Cor- poratist state.

The reasons why people have been so reluctant to suggest any link between the European movement and Corporatism are obvious enough. Corporatism is associated With fascism and Nazism; they are re- garded as the ultimate expressions of nationalism, with its 'inevitable' tendencies to intra-European war; historically, they are the problem and European unity is the solution.

That Mussolini and Hitler drew heavily on nationalist emotions for their support is obvious, and that both of them ridiculed liberal dreams of 'Pan-Europe' in the inter-war years is a matter of fact. No doubt special reasons can be found to explain the manifesto of Mussolini's Re- public of Salo, which called for 'the realisa- tion of a European Community, with a federation of all nations'. But in the case of Hitler there is something radically miscon- ceived about calling his movement the Ultimate form of nationalism, or the ulti- mate product of a system of nation-states. It's not just that this is like calling a burglar the ultimate exponent of a system of private property. The point is that, strictly Speaking, Hitler was not a nationalist at all. (True, his movement was called Vazional- Sozialismus'; but 'socialism' was the sub- stantive there, and 'national' the qualifier. Had it been the other way round, they would have gone down in history as the Sozis.) Hitler's theoretical foundation- stone was not the nation, and certainly not the nation-state: it was race. Even in its looser phrases about the German nation, this theory considered that nation not as a Political entity but as a Volk, Indeed, the intellectual origins of Hitler's so-called nationalism lie in transnational German movements at the turn of the century, which attacked Prussian nationalism and reacted against the Czech nationalist movement within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As it happens, Adolf Hitler did create a sort of united Europe, covering much of the area now within the EEC. A 'Euro- pean Congress' was held in Berlin in 1941, and German radio broadcast a 'new Euro- pean song' to celebrate the occasion. This was cynical propaganda, of course: Hitler's New Order in Europe was to be a Reich, not a federation of free people. And yet when Walter Funk, his Minister of Econo- mics, declared that one of Germany's war aims was to create 'a profitable and perma- nent European community', he was not being altogether cynical. Funk's plan, over ruled at first by Goring but then promoted by Speer, was for a tariff-free zone, accom- panied by the integration of the western European economies.

It would be tempting to say that this was an arrangement dictated to the Nazis by the facts of economics and geography. But that would be to risk adopting the same mentality as many of the Nazi theorists themselves, who believed that the facts of economic geography ought to dictate poli- tical arrangements — particularly the small matter of the location of frontiers. Hitler's thinking here was dominated by the Ger- man tradition of Grossraum (large space') theories, which divided the world up into a number of 'natural' economic units: hence, for example, his obsession with the idea that Ukrainian agriculture 'naturally' be- longed in the same unit as German indus- try. It is this underlying assumption that large-scale economic 'facts' should dictate large-scale political ones, rather than any direct transmission of ideas or the mere creation of the Reich, that gives Hitler his family resemblance to some of our present- day campaigners for European unity. It is an attitude towards politics which one might call 'Economism'. It may be plausi- ble in pure theory, but history shows it to be nonsense: if the world map had been drawn on these a priori principles, neither Switzerland nor Taiwan nor South Korea — nor, for that matter, West Germany — would ever have existed.

A more familiar variety of Economism is the Marxist view of history, in which political institutions and nation-states are irrelevant flotsam and jetsam on a sea of economic reality. Most Marxist theorists in this century have been hostile to the idea of European unity, seeing it either as a capitalist combine or as a strategic threat to the Soviet Union. But Marxism is more fundamentally hostile to the very existence of nation-states, which it regards as tools of capitalism. 'The aim of socialism', Lenin wrote in 1914, 'is not only to end the division of mankind into tiny states .. . it is not only the rapprochement of nations but also their fusion.' One of the slogans of

Comintern for mbst of the 1920s was `a Soviet United States of Europe'.

Altiero Spinelli (who is regarded, along- side Monnet, as a founding father of Europe) was one of Italy's leading com- munist militants in the 1920s. He is often described as having abandoned Marxism after 1929, but anyone who studies his writings carefully will be inclined to doubt this. Most influential of all was his Ven- totene Manifesto of 1941, which demanded European unification after the war and had a huge influence on the thinking of resist- ance leaders throughout Europe. (He was also, as the author of the Draft Treaty for European Union of 1984, the direct prog- enitor of the Single European Act.)

The Ventotene Manifesto draws on many liberal sources for its arguments, but its underlying theme is straightforwardly Mar- xist. The concept of national independ- ence has been a powerful stimulus to progress', it concedes, 'but this concept carried within itself the seeds of capitalist imperialism'. It continues:

If in future the [revolutionary] struggle is still confined by the traditional framework, it will be extremely difficult to escape the old impasses.... The forces of reaction will fight obstinately to maintain their old supremacy .... The fulcrum on which these elements will try to lever themselves into power will be the restoration of the nation-state. Even if these states are democratic and socialist in appearance, the return to power of the reactionaries will merely be a matter of time.

By 'democratic in appearance' in that last sentence, what Spinelli meant was 'demo- cratic'. The thought that national democra- tic institutions might prevent the coming of what he called 'the revolutionary crisis' was just too much to bear.

Corporatism and Economism are just two of the traits which recur in the Euro- pean Idea's extended family. To these Marxism adds, in an extreme form, another trait which fascist ideologies share: Determinism. History is moving inevitably in one direction; to oppose it is to go against logical necessity. This is an attitude which is abhorrent to all good liberals who have read their Berlin and their Popper; yet, curiously, it is an attitude never more clearly displayed than when liberal-minded Euro-enthusiasts describe the inevitability of European union and the danger of being 'left behind'.

Who said: 'I have to fuse these nations into a higher order , ... Just as the concep- tion of the nation was a revolutionary change from the purely dynastic feudal states, and just as it introduced a biological conception, that of the Volk, so our own revolution is a further step, or rather, the final step'? Answer: Hitler — obviously. And who said; The conception of the nation has become meaningless'? Correct answer: Hitler — less obviously. Possible answers: Lenin, Mosley, Monnet, Spinelli, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities .... The list seems endless, and grows longer every day.