9 May 1950 stands out as a foundational event, the birth of the ‘European Community’. Every year, citizens of what is now the European Union (EU) are thus invited to celebrate the anniversary.Footnote 1 When polled, however, few of them seem to be aware of what really happened on that specific Tuesday.
On 9 May 1950 the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed that ‘Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organisation open to participation of the other countries of Europe’. This ‘economic community’ (and not ‘economic system’ as the current official English translation puts it) was envisioned as ‘the leaven from which may grow a wider and deeper community’, as well as the ‘first concrete foundation of a European federation’.Footnote 2 Through a series of measures, including the modernisation of production and the levelling of market prices, it was planned to gradually create the conditions that would ‘spontaneously provide for the more rational distribution of production at the highest level of productivity’. According to the proposal, decisions were to be taken by a High Authority that was to be ‘composed of independent persons appointed by the governments’. In contrast, the declaration did not mention the three other institutions that came to characterise the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) when it was created in 1951–2, alongside the High Authority: a court, a council of ministers and a parliamentary assembly (or, for that matter, some sort of parliamentary control) to check and balance the power of the High Authority in charge of managing key sectors of the economy.
Over time, the Schuman Declaration became a focal point of efforts by EU institutions to create a historical narrative of European integration, sometimes with a little help from academics.Footnote 3 As such, the date is quite a unique coincidence, although not intended. It offers an opportunity to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Europe the day after having commemorated the end of the Second World War. The 1950 declaration is usually described as a break with past wanderings and mistakes that led to the catastrophe and as a starting point from which the ECSC, the European Economic Community (EEC) created in 1957–8, if not ‘Europe’ as a whole, developed.
This article challenges the idea that the Schuman Declaration opened up a completely new path. As with every other ‘event’, 9 May 1950 can either be considered negligible in long-term economic and social processes, or decisive in the political sequence of early European construction, in brief as a vector of continuity or change. The purpose of the article is not to come back to the existing historiography.Footnote 4 Instead, it is to show that the short-term sequence of events in which the Schuman Plan was embedded, and therefore the declaration itself, conceals one of the keys to longer-term continuities regarding a very precise issue: the institutional design of European organisations. First, it claims that the political economy (understood here as the relationship between economics and politics through a specific institutional design) of the Schuman Declaration was deeply rooted in the interwar corporatist and communitarian ‘third way’ ideology. Then, it argues that the ‘plan’ was crushed by the powerful dynamic of institutionalisation of transnational parliamentarianism which had unfolded since the Congress of Europe at The Hague on 7–11 May 1948. In other words, contrary to interpretations which regard the creation of the ECSC as the result of a rational design, or even a rational choice, this article argues that the genesis of the High Authority and the Common Assembly in the ECSC Treaty of 18 April 1951 is the result of contradictory logics of contending legitimacies.
For quite some time the literature on post-war European integration overlooked networks and ideas that gained momentum during Nazi Occupation, for example in Vichy France. Instead, it usually traced the origins of European integration back to the resistance movements to Nazism.Footnote 5 Since the end of the 1990s these somewhat hidden legacies have been better explored.Footnote 6 It sometimes feels, however, that this scholarship fails to relate grand ideologies to more mundane questions of the institutional design of European organisations. This article intends to explain how and to what extent a set of ideas that were formalised before 1945 concretely influenced the course of the negotiations of European organisations after 1945. This implies carving pieces of a more complex and nuanced ideology out of the interwar period and pointing to the moments and places where this ideology has been reformulated piece by piece in post-war debates and discourses. There is a risk that specialists of both European interwar ideologies and European post-war integration will be frustrated. I nevertheless argue that looking across the Second World War is key to understanding Europe's would-be polity. The distribution of institutional power (seats, votes, rules, etc.) invariably generates cleavages among contending elites, and the immediate post-war period was one of the densest in the history of higher rule making at the national and international level. Institutions therefore constituted a crucial issue per se. Finally, the article illustrates that insofar as history can be ‘transnational’ it nevertheless must be anchored in its constitutive national dimensions.
The first section of the article considers the national dimension of the Schuman Declaration that primarily makes sense in the French context.Footnote 7 It analyses the wording of the declaration and the design of the institutional set-up of the High Authority. The section traces the origins of the concept of ‘economic community’ and pays particular attention to what the most influential French economist of the time, François Perroux, called a ‘communitarian economy’. At the core of this concept were two elements of institutional design: corporatist representation and expert arbitration. The section then points to the broader network of actors that came to share the ideas of the communitarian revolution as a specific branch of the National Revolution during the Vichy regime. This network included the main drafters of the Schuman Declaration, Paul Reuter and Pierre Uri, and many of the future leaders of the French federalist movement. The section concludes by discussing the complex intricacies of resistance and collaboration in France which account for the continuities of ‘third way’ networks and ideas from the interwar to the post-war period, across the Vichy regime.
The second section analyses the transnational dimension of the Schuman Declaration. It argues that the Schuman Plan and subsequent ECSC treaty has to be understood as the product of transnational dynamics.Footnote 8 The French proposal was a key contribution to a larger debate over the institutional design of European organisations. The origins of this transnational battle lay in the 1948 congress of The Hague where a cleavage arose between elected members of national parliaments and non-elected participants and, more generally, between parliamentarian and corporatist forms of representation. During the debates politicians indeed felt compelled to reaffirm their monopoly on political positions as well as political decision making that seemed to be contested in the planned European organisation. Over the next three years this became a key issue. It explains why the Schuman Declaration sounded a little odd in not mentioning any sort of parliamentary control and that soon after a parliamentary assembly was suggested to exert control over the High Authority. Thus, long-lasting cleavages at the national level about the fate of parliamentarianism eventually became institutionalised in separate institutions in different organisations at the international level.
The article is based on previous research in a wide range of archives in Europe and the United States, within which original documents on the drafters of the Schuman Declaration were unearthed. These included the National Archives in Paris, the Archives of the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l'Europe in Lausanne and the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. In addition, it is based on an exhaustive corpus of printed primary sources, mostly from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris. The research aimed at tracing the emergence, expansion and signification of the notion of ‘community’ in third-way ideology, which implied to identify authors writing under pseudonyms under the Vichy regimeFootnote 9. Community is indeed a thread of Ariane to go back in time, from the post-war to the interwar and back again.
States of Minds from Interwar to Post-War Europe
In his memoirs Jean Monnet claims that the term ‘European community’ was his invention.Footnote 10 So does Étienne Hirsch in his own recollections, with which Pierre Uri concurs.Footnote 11 At the same time Monnet identifies Paul Reuter as the true designer of the High Authority.Footnote 12 Uri agrees, although Hirsch does not seem to remember the presence of Reuter before the final polishing of the text.Footnote 13 In any case, the four men together can be considered as the drafters of the declaration. At that time Monnet was the head the French Planning Commissariat, Hirsch his deputy, Uri the economic and financial advisor of the Commissariat and Reuter a law professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence and legal advisor of the foreign ministry.
Before working together the four men had had very different trajectories. Monnet and Hirsch came from the private sector. Hirsch worked his entire career at Kuhlmann, a leading French chemical company. Monnet spent most of the interwar period on Wall Street as an investment banker, although he had been a deputy secretary general of the League of Nations between 1919 and 1923.Footnote 14 Monnet and Hirsch joined the Free French government in London and Algiers where Hirsch worked as an advisor to Monnet, who was a member of the French Committee for National Liberation. In contrast, Reuter and Uri came from the public sector. Uri was a high school philosophy professor and Reuter a university law professor. Both stayed in metropolitan France during the Occupation and both had an ambivalent connection to the Vichy regime.
In 1941 Reuter became one of the leading professors of the École Nationale des Cadres, located at Uriage, in the Alps. It was created by Marshal Pétain to teach the leaders of the youth movements of the Vichy regime.Footnote 15 At the same time he joined the resistance movement Liberté, which was later merged in a broader movement called Combat. Uri was expelled from the civil service as a result of the Statute on Jews – something that he paradoxically recalled as an opportunity to embark on a doctorate in economics. Nonetheless, he soon joined one of the new structures resulting from the corporative reforms introduced by the Vichy regime to manage the economy: the Committee for the Organisation of Brush-Making, Marquetry and Other Diverse Industries (Comité d'organisation de la brosserie, tabletterie et industries diverses). For the purpose of this article, however, their complicated personal experiences during the occupation are not as central as the ideas they developed and expressed at this time.
At Uriage the teaching programme for 1942 was entirely dedicated to the notion of ‘community’. In 1941 Marshal Pétain had proclaimed the so-called Principles of Community as the cornerstone of the new regime, and the character of his proclaimed National Revolution was commonly thought of as ‘communitarian’. Accordingly, the teaching programme of the school included lectures on ‘work communities’ (companies, professions), ‘blood community’ (the family) and ‘national community’.Footnote 16 It amounted to a communitarian declension of the regime's motto: ‘Work, Family, Fatherland’. The teaching programme was the brainchild of Reuter's, together with Hubert Beuve-Méry, who later became the founder of the daily newspaper Le Monde. Reuter himself taught the introduction to different parts of the programme.Footnote 17 More particularly, he was personally in charge of the lectures on the ‘European community’.
In these lectures Reuter expressed the idea that ‘Europe must be constructed as a unity through both political and economic federalism’, which will ‘deprive the states of their sovereignty’.Footnote 18 For him, this implied the creation of a federal budget, federal armed forces, European civil services and European supreme courts, as well as the unification of legislations, the abolition of customs and so forth.Footnote 19 As he put it in a pamphlet published at Uriage in 1942: ‘most European states are absolutely incapable of being self-sufficient and need economic unification, which is essential for their prosperity. This economic unification must be done taking into account the requirements of an economy that is integrally human. It thus implies a beginning of political federalism amongst these states.’Footnote 20
Uri gave lectures and published articles on the same topic, for example on the much debated issue of the agreements and differences between ‘Community and Communism’, but, like many during the occupation, not under his real name. Amongst these was a short chapter on economic competition in modern markets. Referring to the example of those two sectors that less than a decade later would form the core of the ECSC, i.e. coal and steel, which he characterised as a ‘bilateral monopoly’, Uri concluded that competition does not exist in modern markets unless the state organises it, given the tendency towards monopoly of modern industries.Footnote 21 Cartels and trusts were indeed a common preoccupation of Reuter and Uri. Both believed that they should be regulated in what they advocated as a ‘communitarian economy’.
Reuter and Uri were heavily influenced by François Perroux. A professor at the Law Faculty of Paris, Perroux introduced foreign economists like Joseph Schumpeter and Ludwig von Mises to French political economy. He himself sought to reconcile the communitarian philosophy of Christian thinkers with the corporatist doctrine of fascist theorists. The revolution Perroux advocated in the 1930s was communitarian and corporatist, personalist and federalist, a French version of the third way between socialism and liberalism, through the conciliation of economic planning and market forces and reconciliation of the national and the social, aiming at the ‘integration of the proletariat into the nation’. The objectives were indeed the achievement of ‘class collaboration’ in a working community (communauté de travail), and the accomplishment of the human person (personne humaine).Footnote 22 In short, Perroux synthesised ideas that had been virulent in third way networks for quite some time and made them coherent with a specific economic structure, in which social interests would be represented.
The issue of social versus political representation indeed reaches back to the institutionalisation of parliamentarianism. By the first decades of the twentieth century schemes of corporatist alternatives to parliamentarianism had spread all over Europe, in authoritarian regimes like Italy and Germany but also in democratic countries like France and the United Kingdom, pushing some to prophesy that it would be the ‘century of corporatism’.Footnote 23 In fact, the notion that societal interests should be represented in an organised way, and that this was crucial to democracy, was to some extent legitimised by the Versailles Treaty, Part XIII. This created the International Labour Organization, discussed by Lorenzo Mechi in his article in this special issue, which included a General Conference of Representatives of the Members to be composed, on an equal basis, of four delegates per state, ‘of whom two shall be Government delegates and the two others shall be Delegates representing respectively the employers and the workpeople’, and this according to the principle of the ‘most representative’ organisations (Article 389).
In France, where corporatism eventually triumphed with the Vichy regime and its Charte du Travail,Footnote 24 the confrontation between parliamentary and corporatist conceptions dated from the restoration of the Republic in the late 1870s, if not the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 25 By the end of the nineteenth century in any case, corporatist representation was vividly debated.Footnote 26 Some, like the prominent republican law professor Adhémar Esmein, thought that national sovereignty excluded the possibility of the representation of social interests of any kind. Others like the royalist Marquis de La Tour du Pin, a member of the Action française, believed that corporatism was co-constitutive for a Christian social order. In any case, political parties and trade unions were only established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and official employers’ unions only after the First World War. The first experiment with institutionalised interest representation dated from 1925 with the creation of the National Economic Council.
At that time many loathed parliamentarianism and saw it as a lesser or greater evil, attitudes that contributed to the demise of liberal democracy in many European countries in the interwar period.Footnote 27 Where the parliamentary system continued to exist as in France, parliamentarianism was under constant attack by all sorts of movements. Alternatives to parliamentary democracy were scarce, however, beyond the widespread call for the restoration of authority and strong leadership. Admittedly, third way supporters (including some of the future leaders of La Fédération) had monarchist inclinations and wanted to call back the heir of the crown from exile,Footnote 28 while others hoped for a charismatic leader of more plebeian background.Footnote 29 Most of them nevertheless found common ground on an alternative form of representativeness, to embody the various social and economic forces in an institutionalised form. This could be done either in hierarchies of corporations where workers and employers would collaborate under the mediation of ‘experts’, or in corporative assemblies where regions, professions, associations, churches, societies and companies, as well as families, would either replace the elected parliament or at least become a second house. In both cases, unions and parties would have to disappear.Footnote 30 Perroux became a leading protagonist of this approach.
These third way networks had emerged at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s under the combined impact of the rise of the Communist Party, the condemnation of the Action française by the Vatican, the stock market crash of 1929 and the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Various social circles connected those young men in their thirties, who came from all walks of life but were most frequently intellectual bohemians, and who were united by a set of powerful beliefs which they soon expounded in all sorts of movements and journals.Footnote 31 Equally opposed to capitalism and communism, liberalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism, nationalism and internationalism, they argued that third way solutions were necessary: personalism and communitarianism in social terms and corporatism and federalism in institutional terms.
Amongst these intellectuals Alexandre Marc and Emmanuel Mounier developed much of the personalist and communitarian glossary, although who invented what and when has been much debated.Footnote 32 Against modern forms of society their philosophy pleaded for the return to tradition and community, where the person could finally blossom. Theirs was a conservative revolution, not fundamentally different as an intellectual construct from the German variant that they often regarded as precursory.Footnote 33 In fact, Marc was much inspired by left-wing national socialism in Germany, where he often travelled. Mounier in his turn inspired the movement Communauté in Belgium, where he lived for some time.Footnote 34 Channels of transnational circulation of third way ideas were numerous. Thus, Perroux travelled to Berlin in 1935 and came back enthused by the various forms of ‘community’ promoted by the Nazi regime, in particular in the workplace (the Betriebsgemeinschaft), although he was a little sceptical about its racist undertones.Footnote 35
Frequently writing for Esprit, the journal founded by Mounier,Footnote 36 Perroux provided the personalist and communitarian philosophy with concrete economic meaning, through the successive publications of Capitalisme et communauté de travail (1938), a journey through the Europe of corporatism, and Communauté (1942), two landmark publications which gave him a wide and long-lasting readership and audience.Footnote 37 When Esprit was finally censored by the Vichy regime in 1941, Perroux took the torch deep into the National Revolution with a new journal, La Communauté française (The French Community): ‘National Revolution, said the Marshal. Our community will help’.Footnote 38 In the first issue, entitled ‘Community and Society’, Uri published an article on the ‘Measure of Community’ (signed with an anagram of his surname), that was instantly praised by Reuter in Jeunesse France, the journal of Uriage.
By 1943 third way networks and ideas had become so influential in Vichy France that the time seemed to have come for a synthesis of the ‘communitarian revolution’. In April a huge meeting was held at Mont-Dore, under the patronage of Pétain. Representatives of the Marshall were present, as well as those of the German Embassy and, of course, most of the leaders of the communitarian movements created before or during the Occupation. The meeting once more evoked the idea of a European community:
Europe is a group of nations which could form a community that is only virtual today. We want to establish its institutions and its means of existence. Every community requires a set of mutual obligations. The institutions in question are only viable if the states forming the community voluntarily delegate a part of their sovereignty – not to a state which would exert hegemony – but to a communitarian order made concrete by federal institutions.Footnote 39
Triumphant as it was, the communitarian ideology was nevertheless in a fragile position. From 1940 to the end of 1942 the different factions of the regime fiercely competed with each other over the ultimate goal and intermediate means of the National Revolution – with the fascist-totalitarian wing moving towards a deeper collaboration and the personalist-communitarian wing towards a stronger resistance. Even before Esprit was censored, Mounier imprisoned and Uriage closed down, part of the third way networks had in fact joined resistance movements, carrying the communitarian ideology in their intellectual luggage. This is particularly true of Combat, headed by Henri Frenay (later to become a leader of the European Movement), who recruited amongst the leaders of Uriage.Footnote 40 Not everyone joined the resistance. In fact, that some did and others did not is central to understanding the survival of the third way beyond the Vichy regime.
La Fédération, the first and main federalist movement in France, is an interesting case in point. It is best known for the prominent intellectuals who joined its ranks, including Marc, Robert Aron and Denis de Rougemont. All three had been significant figures of the third way in the 1930s and continued to play that role in the European Union of Federalists after 1945. However, La Fédération was created in 1944 by Jacques Bassot and André Voisin [Bourgeois], both rather obscure, yet very active, figures. Indeed, most members of La Fédération came from the Institut d’Études Corporatives et Sociales, headed by Maurice Bouvier-Ajam until 1944 and supported by Marshal Pétain.Footnote 41 In 1949 intelligence officers of the French police summarised their backgrounds quite correctly:
In the beginning, La Fédération grouped together members mostly coming from the monarchist movements or the former PSF [Parti Social Français].Footnote 42 Besides, its doctrine is impregnated with corporatism and anti-parliamentarianism, under the impulse of its leader André Voisin, ex-secretary of the Count of Paris. In certain respects, La Fédération could appear to be, in 1946, a means of propaganda of the Action Française, but its orientation has been clarified since then: relegating the Maurrassian ideology to the background, it is dedicated to the pursuit of the objectives defined in its statutes whilst remaining distinctly anti-communist.Footnote 43
Thus, to make a long story short, on winding roads and over misty crossroads, third way networks and their ideas travelled from the 1930s to the 1950s across the Vichy regime, bringing along with them the personalist and communitarian, corporatist and federalist ideology in sometimes unrecognisable pieces from the 1943 Mont Dore conference to the congress of Europe at The Hague in 1948. These transnational venues indeed offered unexpected opportunities for third way supporters to express their old-time ideas, even when the agenda was apparently completely different.
The purpose of the next section is therefore to analyse, in a reverse angle, the transnational dynamics into which these ideas where tentatively infused, and point at their impact on the institutional design of post-war European organisations.
A Parliament Beyond Nation States
The Congress of Europe at The Hague was a defining moment in the early history of post-war European construction.Footnote 44 From an institutional perspective participants mainly debated the creation of a transnational assembly. Speaking on behalf of the International Coordinating Committee of the Movements for European Unity (ICCMEU), René Courtin, a professor of Economics at the Law Faculty of Paris and rapporteur for drafting the political committee's final resolution, summarised the stakes of the deliberations:
This assembly would be appointed by the different national parliaments, on the basis of one delegate per million inhabitants, and I should add that we reckoned it would be advantageous if this European delegation were of a mixed structure, that is to say that it would include members of parliament, who would be the only ones having sufficient political authority, and individuals not attached to a parliament, elected by the parliaments but having no other special obligations in their countries, which would leave them absolutely free so they could, consequently, deal with the solution of the many technical problems that would be brought to them.Footnote 45
During the debates the Union des fédéralistes français, emanating from La Fédération, tried to advocate the idea that the future European assembly should not solely rest on universal suffrage and parliamentary representation, but also on a socio-professional representation:
If you want an assembly that truly represents the countries you have to integrate the living forces of those countries and not only the political parties. It is for that reason and for that purpose only that we request that the governments of Europe call together, within six months, a European assembly of members elected by the parliaments of the participating nations, but also by the representatives of different professional trade unions, cultural and social organisations, etc., it being understood that these representatives are freely chosen by these organisations themselves. It has been claimed that such a suggestion is a return to corporatism and even fascism. One really has to know very little about federalism to assimilate it to fascism or corporatism, which are two absolutely different views.Footnote 46
Members of Parliaments were nevertheless sceptical. The French André Noël, a deputy for the Christian democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), questioned the arbitrary nature of such a ‘doctrine’ that, in his view, ‘has always been associated with corporatist regimes’.Footnote 47 For most parliamentarians, the key issue was indeed that of sovereignty: not so much understood as national sovereignty than as popular sovereignty.
Therefore, whilst this controversy may seem to have been limited to French representatives at The Hague, it encapsulated a much larger cleavage between members of business, trade union and intellectual elites, dominant amongst the federalists, who demanded some form of representation from different social groups, and members of national parliaments, who felt that the source of legitimacy should ultimately rest on popular sovereignty expressed through universal suffrage. One of the key struggles from the interwar period thus re-emerged in an unexpected way post-war: the fate of parliamentarianism, but this time as a transnational institution.
After 1945 people who came to be known as ‘integral federalists’ strongly advocated for corporatist representation at the supranational level. It was a mixed and heterogeneous group influenced inter alia by the interwar Action française, Christian socialism and fascist social thought and experiments, as well as communitarian and personalist philosophy and cross-sectional concepts of a corporatist political economy. This ideology pervaded the French dominated European Union of Federalists as one of several constituent groups in the European Movement created in 1948–9 after The Hague. In a draft ‘Declaration of Human and Community Rights’ he submitted to the cultural committee of the Congress, Alexandre Marc even thought of a supreme court including a corporatist representation of ‘religious, cultural and social corporations’.Footnote 48 Against all odds, Louis Salleron, a leader of the Peasant Corporation during the Vichy regime, backed the motion enthusiastically.
The eminent international law professor George Scelle, one of the inspirers of the National Economic Council before the war and a delegate at The Hague after the war, had argued in 1943 that ‘corporatism is federalism’ in the journal of the Institut d’Études Corporatives et Sociales: ‘one cannot conceive of the corporatist legal order without a dominating state-controlled legal order. Going a little bit further, we even think that neither can be conceived without an international legal order that dominates and coordinates both through its federalist achievement.’Footnote 49 From this perspective, the deeper meaning of the Uriage programme and the conclusions at the Mont Dore conference therefore laid in the notion that regions, corporations, professions and companies are all institutional expressions of ‘authentic’ communities that should remain autonomous but could only be concretely organised through a hierarchical federation beyond the nation state in a European Community.
Arguably, few people really cared about the deeper meaning and historical roots of all the proposals that the federalists propagated and disseminated in transnational circles after the Second World War. But the federalists had something else to offer to leaders invested in these transnational circles, who came from all walks of life including academia, the churches and trade unions, but especially the corporate world:Footnote 50 an institutional design to legitimise the claim that they, vested interests, should be represented at the supranational level if any kind of institution was to be created. Thus, the two logics became intertwined: the different views of ideologues and of businessmen found common ground. This convergence of sorts helped create a powerful coalition in early European integration for creating a supranational assembly that could satisfy the interests of all – including federalists and leaders of the various social forces, as well as politicians who claimed to be the only legitimate expression of universal suffrage. This would be an assembly with a ‘mixed structure’ as it was negotiated and proposed by the nascent European Movement at The Hague.
The cleavage and compromise reached at The Hague over forms of representation at the supranational level are critical for understanding the subsequent dynamics. One year after the congress, in May 1949, the Statute of the Council of Europe (CoE) was signed in London. During the negotiations, which mainly took place in the intergovernmental framework of the Western Union (WU), created by a Treaty signed in Brussels on 17 March 1948 and entered into force on 28 August 1948, the ICCMEU kept knocking on the door of ambassadors and ministers for ‘non-parliamentary’ representation. On 18 August, before the negotiations even started, the ICCMEU demanded that the statute itself be drafted by a ‘conference’ made of delegates ‘chosen indistinctly among members of parliaments or outside parliamentary circles’, and again on 29 September, that this conference be convened by ‘the independent organisations that campaign for European unity’.Footnote 51 It raised strong reservations inside the Consultative Council of the WU, which instead created a more modest Committee for the Study of European Unity.Footnote 52 Federalists had been completely marginalised.Footnote 53 Inside the Committee various options were debated regarding the would-be ‘European Consultative Assembly’, but the idea that ‘the members of the Assembly shall be chosen by the various European legislative chambers’ prevailed, parliaments being of course sovereign to send non-parliamentary delegates depending on their own constitutions.Footnote 54 On 28 February 1949 the ICCMEU insisted that, in that case, the delegates should be designated ‘in such a way that all living forces of each country shall be represented’, and that it was ‘highly desirable that each national representation shall be comprised of both parliamentary and non-parliamentary elements’. On 6 April and 3 May they reiterated: ‘so that each national delegation adequately represent the living forces of its country, it must be comprised not only of political leaders but also of eminent personalities from the economic and spiritual life of the nation. As a result, the selection cannot be limited to the sole parliamentarians.’Footnote 55
Memorandums and Declarations could not help. The rather convoluted compromise of national parliaments sending delegates chosen inside and outside houses to represent their country in a transnational assembly did not even pass the test of the ambassadors, less so of the ministers, in the two successive conferences of March–April and April–May. Article 25 of the Statute indeed stipulated that the Consultative Assembly would consist of representatives of the member states ‘appointed in such a manner as the Government of that Member shall decide’, still letting a narrow door open to a mixed representation. From the point of view of integral federalists, however, the first session of the Consultative Assembly in August 1949 was disappointing. Contrary to what had been debated at The Hague and to the (rather ambiguous) letter of the Statute, the Consultative Assembly was exclusively composed of members of national parliaments. This was a source of disillusionment for integral federalists, but also for organised business and trade unions.
There it was, however: for the first time in the life of nations, a transnational assembly had been designated by national parliaments through indirect, if imperfect, universal suffrage. Although the creation of the Consultative Assembly was thereafter minimised, it was unprecedented in history. More so, it clearly resulted from the sequence of negotiations that if the WU was to ever become a proper ‘organisation’, which it was not, and the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) to become permanent, after the European Recovery Program would have come to an end in 1952, the CoE would be the appropriate forum to review the activities of ‘ministers’ and ‘technicians’: any ‘supranational authority’ should therefore be made accountable. The Schuman Declaration devised by Monnet and his co-drafters should be read against this specific background.
To a large extent the French Planning Commissariat with Monnet and Hirsch at the helm thrived on third way networks and ideas. Building on the experience of the Vichy regime, as well as of British war economy, the Planning Commissariat was set up in 1946.Footnote 56 Its main goals were to bring together employers and workers and to get the forces of production (whose representatives were actually co-opted in the commissions of the Commissariat) to collaborate under the mediation of experts. Moreover, after the liberation the new French government initially had to rely quite heavily on experts and civil servants who had in one way or another served the Vichy regime. The continuity in administrative structures and personnel is impressive.Footnote 57 Most members of Monnet's entourage had profiles from the grey zone of French wartime politics. They included the demographer Alfred Sauvy, a former member of various study committees created by the Vichy regime and a participant at the Mont Dore, with whom Monnet created the Planning Commissariat; the law professor Maurice Duverger, a former member of the Parti Populaire FrançaisFootnote 58 and a contributor to the Institut d’Études Corporatives et Sociales, with whom Monnet tried to reform the institutions of the Fourth Republic; and the state councillor Maurice Lagrange, a drafter of the Statute on Jews, with whom Monnet drew up the ECSC Treaty.
Whereas Monnet and Hirsch were strongly opposed to collaboration and immediately joined the Free French, the Planning Commissariat nevertheless inherited much from the Vichy regime. And whilst Monnet never endorsed the corporatist version of the third way, he nevertheless shared the idea that the management of the market should not be left to parliamentary chattering. Both men were convinced that representatives of business should have a say in economic planning, possibly even in legislation. In 1940, for instance, Hirsch advocated the creation of a Senate that would represent ‘professional and economic interests’ elected by employers and workers’ organisations, chambers of agriculture and commerce and intellectual and liberal professions (engineers, public servants, lawyers, physicians and academics).Footnote 59 To him, ‘a state with purely political assemblies cannot efficiently exert its economic functions’.Footnote 60
The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 is usually read and interpreted outside of this context. At both the economic and institutional levels the suggested measures were typical of the ‘organised economy’ that Perroux advocated and Monnet put in practice with the Planning Commissariat. The idea was to create an ‘economic community’ with a ‘high authority’ to be ‘composed of independent persons’ to pool and manage the coal and steel markets. What the declaration did not explicitly state was even more important: the absence of any sort of procedure for national parliaments or a transnational assembly, like the Consultative Assembly of the CoE, to check the High Authority in the original design for the proposed ECSC.
Starting the next day, on 10 May 1950, however, the original intent behind the declaration was confronted with the powerful dynamic set in motion long before – the same dynamic that had already crushed the idea of a mixed structure assembly proposed at The Hague. In the few days following the publication of the Schuman Plan, politicians and diplomats claimed their monopoly over politico-bureaucratic decision making procedures. Before the negotiation even started, French ambassadors to Brussels and The Hague reported that, in the view of foreign leaders, democratic control of some sort should be created.Footnote 61 Sir Oliver Harvey, the British Ambassador to France, mocked the proposed ‘supra-national Authority controlled by supermen’.Footnote 62 In view of mounting criticism Monnet quickly had to make concessions. On the day of the opening of the negotiations in Paris on 20 June 1950 he therefore announced the creation of an ‘interparliamentary common assembly’, with very limited powers, to review once a year the annual report of the High Authority so as to ensure some sort of ‘democratic control’.Footnote 63 The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee nevertheless expressed his concerns in the House of Commons: ‘we on this side are not prepared to accept the principle that the most vital economic forces of this country should be handed over to an authority that is utterly undemocratic and is responsible to nobody.’Footnote 64
During the the ECSC treaty negotiations the issue was raised over and over again.Footnote 65 The outcome of the negotiations marked a stalemate between conflicting conceptions of the respective roles of ministers, bureaucrats, experts and parliamentarians in the decision making process. On 18 April 1951 the ECSC Treaty created a Special Council of Ministers and a Common Assembly. Even if the assembly remained marginal, both organs were strongholds of existing political elites. But the ECSC Treaty also established a High Authority in line with the original intention, as well as a Consultative Committee comprised of representatives of the producers and workers designated by the Council of Ministers on a list drawn up by business and labour organisations – something that, as Wolfram Kaiser shows in his article in this special issue, mattered for policy-making outcomes in the ECSC.Footnote 66 Another feature remained: this was not a mere ‘Union’ or ‘Council’ or ‘Organisation’ or ‘Association’ – all options that had been debated so far and ultimately became the birth name of existing transnational settings – but a ‘Community’, a ‘European Community’.
Meanwhile the federalists opened up another front. After the second session of the Consultative Assembly of the CoE, representatives of European Union of Federalists, of the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe and of the Nouvelles Équipes Internationales, with the financial support of the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), called for the creation of a European Council of Vigilance. The aim, as it was expounded to William Donovan, Allen Dulles, Thomas Braden and the likes during a meeting of the executive committee of the ACUE, was for the European Council of Vigilance to be recognised as the upper house of the Consultative Assembly, comprising the same number of delegates but ‘selected from prominent political, social, and economic leaders outside the official delegates to the Council of Europe’.Footnote 67
Thus, on November 1950 the European Council of Vigilance, also called the Council of European Peoples, met at the Orangery in Strasbourg.Footnote 68 It comprised representatives of political, intellectual, economic and trade union sectors. In his opening speech the president of the assembly, Fernand Dehousse, stressed the very reason why it was convened in lamenting that ‘governments made an error the day the interpreted Article 25 [of the Statute of London] as to only send to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe deputies and senators of the member states’.Footnote 69 Applause broke out. But it was a swan song. After that, the European Council of Vigilance never met again.
In the 1950s classical forms of parliamentary representation proliferated, with the institutionalisation of two other transnational assemblies in 1955, those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Western European Union. On the contrary, corporatist federalism seemed to have lost momentum. The attempt to create an Economic and Social Council in the draft European Political Community treaty of 10 March 1953 paved the way for the 1957 EEC treaty creating an Economic and Social Committee, which still exists as a consultative institution within the present-day EU. But vested interests abandoned the idea of corporatist representation in a supranational assembly. Instead, they took a different path: to be represented at the European level through interest groups. These were flourishing in the wake of the OEEC, ECSC and EECFootnote 70. Theoreticians of European ‘integration’ even started describing (or was it really prescribing) a ‘would-be polity’ that bore, as Wolfgang Streeck and Philippe Schmitter put it, ‘strong resemblance to a model of interest politics that sometime later came to be known to students of politics as “neocorporatism”’, in which bureaucrats governed a mixed economy ‘according to rules of technical and professional expertise whose prudent application was to help avoid social conflict and disruption’, entailing ‘a shift away from the territorial-electoral-parliamentary realm of politics, toward powerful mechanisms of functional representation of producer groups’, and everything ‘through privileged participation of organized interests in policy and through mutually supportive organizational arrangements between the machineries of government on the one hand and of large, centralized interest organizations on the other’.Footnote 71
Conclusion
In the immediate post-war period many plans to create a European assembly were drafted and debated. All of these initiatives were characterised by the same pattern of conflict over the mandate, representation and legitimacy of transnational institutions that were rooted in the long-term history of parliamentarianism. In interwar Europe politicians constantly had to reaffirm the monopoly they had conquered over parliamentary power against the rival pretentions of economic, bureaucratic and academic elites to exert power more competently or efficiently. Many people opposed parliamentary representation with different forms of representation and party politics with alternative schemes of organised politics. Crucially, as this article has shown, this conflict did not vanish with the demise of corporatist and fascist regimes. Instead, it re-emerged in renewed forms in post-war Western Europe, including in transnational forums. Early European integration can only be fully understood in the light of this process, with its strong continuities from the interwar to the post-war period.
At each and every step of this process, however, third way networks and ideas moved a little further away from their ideological roots. Before the Second World War, their advocates often praised the corporatist reforms of authoritarian regimes in countries like Austria and Portugal. Many supporters of third way ideas also sought inspiration in national socialist policies ‘equally distant from liberal capitalism and socialism’, as Perroux put it.Footnote 72 From the perspective of 1945 these experiments had obviously failed, and it was hard to find anybody who praised them openly. The federalist and personalist ideology that was still promoted by third way movements and intellectuals, including at the 1948 congress of The Hague, became disconnected from its more obscure communitarian and corporatist antecedents. Superficially, therefore, discontinuities appear to have been stronger than continuities, all the more since these continuities were purposely hidden by the actors themselves.
