Guess who invented the EU? It was Quisling
John Laughland reveals that before his notorious act of collaboration with the Nazis, the Norwegian politician was lobbying for a European Confederation Ten years ago I wrote a book the first chapter of which examined Nazi and fascist arguments in favour of a united Europe. I used this Nazi pro-Europeanism scurrilously to discredit the claim made by today’s pro-Europeans that the European idea was born out of reaction against Hitler, and to show that hostility to national sovereignty has an anti-democratic pedigree. Most of the quotations dated from 1941, European propaganda having been emphasised when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By 1942, a conference was organised in Berlin by leading Nazi party officials and industrialists entitled ‘European Economic Community’.
Of course, the Nazis did not invent the idea of a united Europe. That dream has been around since the collapse of the Roman empire, gaining new attractiveness after the Reformation and after the first world war. But Nazi pro-Europeanism was very detailed, concentrating on many of the technical aspects which we associate with the EU today, especially the Europeanisation of industry and agriculture.
However, in the course of writing A History of Political Trials from Charles I to Saddam Hussein, I have discovered that another European statesman had conceived ideas of European unity even before they became popular in Berlin in 1941. On 11 October 1939, Germany’s Polish campaign having come to an end, a Norwegian politician sent a telegram to the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, in which he made a last-minute plea for peace between Britain and Germany. The only way to achieve this, he said, was ‘to fuse British, French and German interests into a European Confederation on the initiative of Great Britain, in order to create a community of interests and co-operation, beneficent to all parties. Under these circumstances ... I deferentially appeal to your immense authority and responsibility to suggest that the British government — in accordance with the method of federalisation in America, South Africa and Australia invite every European State to choose ten representatives to a congress charged with the task of preparing a constitution for an empire of European nations, to be submitted to a plebiscite in each country for acceptance or rejection.’ The author of this imaginative idea was a then relatively obscure former Norwegian minister of defence, Major Vidkun Quisling, CBE. Quisling had been decorated for his services as British chargé d’affaires in Moscow from 1927 to 1929, at a time when the United Kingdom had broken off relations with the USSR and when Quisling resided temporarily in the British embassy on the banks of the Moscow river. As a friend of Britain and Germany alike, Quisling paid fulsome tribute to Chamberlain’s ‘peace for our time’ speech of 30 September 1938, the one he delivered on his return from Munich, and promptly sat down to write a detailed draft for an armistice between the two countries.
Quisling was catapulted into notoriety six months later when he installed himself as leader of Norway following the German invasion of that country on 9 April 1940. As a result of certain unfortunate misunderstandings, the German Chancellor had been obliged to send troops into Norway pre-emptively to prevent the British from violating her neutrality by mining her ports. Quisling was the first collaborationist leader in Western Europe, and his surname passed into the language as a byword for all that is most contemptible about treachery. The Times coined the term within days of Quisling’s assumption of power: ‘To writers, the word quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters.’ Quisling got no reply from the British for his imaginative proposals about European confederation. Perhaps Chamberlain thought that the idea would never work, much as Sir Anthony Eden was to shun the Messina con ference of 1956 which led to the creation of the EEC. The only thanks he got was to be stripped of his CBE after noisy protests in the House of Commons. But he continued to believe, like modern pro-Europeans, that a united Europe was the antidote to war. He even fantasised that ‘in the politics of ideas, I considered Hitler my subordinate and my tool’. After the war was over, on 21 June 1945, in a statement prepared in prison for the court which was to execute him, Quisling recalled his pro-European initiative with pride. ‘I referred,’ he wrote, ‘to the joint declaration, which had been notified at Munich between Great Britain and Germany as a basis for world peace and appealed to him [Chamberlain] in the most earnest manner to summon a European Congress that could come to an arrangement.’ In a further statement on 7 August 1945, Quisling again evoked his federalist ideas, mentioning his 1930 essay ‘Russia and Us’ in which he had called for a Nordic Union to include Scandinavia, Britain, Holland, Germany and eventually the British dominions and even North America. This last idea has recently resurfaced among some British and American Eurosceptics, notably in the Heritage Foundation in Washington, who regard such a grouping as a realistic alternative to today’s EU.
Quisling died before his ideas could come to fruition. Being on the losing side of history, his career did not culminate in him becoming a European commissioner or the chairman of a UN committee. Instead he fell under a hail of bullets on 24 October 1945 in the same Akershus Fortress in which he had sat as Minister-President of Norway. But the idea to which Quisling gave his name — that it is better to collaborate than to sit carping on the sidelines — has had a better fate. Not only does it carry the day among British pro-Europeans now, it was also widely held during the second world war itself, even among Quisling’s personal enemies: the president of the supreme court which sent Quisling to his death was his old rival in collaboration, Paal Berg, who immediately after the German invasion proposed that the supreme court appoint a collaborationist council to govern the country under German occupation, and who was a member of it when it took over from Quisling on 15 April 1940. (The Council was a shortlived affair and Quisling was back in the driving seat by September.) On the other hand, the idea that parliamentary powers should be handed over to executive bodies like the EU Council of Ministers was popular with Quisling’s enemies. The Nygaardsvold government was able to return from exile in London to execute him (on the basis of retroactive legislation to reintroduce the death penalty) only because, on 9 April 1940, the Norwegian parliament had voted to transfer all its powers to the government. This was, of course, precisely what the French parliament was to do on 10 July 1940 when it voted to hand full powers to the then prime minister, Marshal Pétain.
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