Philomena Murray - Visions of European Unity

Edited by
Philomena Murray and Paul Rich

To John and Stephen, with love
P.M.

To Caroline Swain
P.R.

First published 1996 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Visions of European unity / edited by Philomena B. Murray and Paul B.
Rich.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-8965-8 (hardcover)
1. European Federation. I. Murray, Philomena B. II. Rich, Paul
B., 1950- .
D1060.V57 1996
341.24'2dc20 95-42498
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-21321-3 (hbk)

This book was born of a desire to explore visions and ideals of European Unity at a time of debate on the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. We would like to thank the University of Luton for financial assistance towards the camera-ready production of the book. We would like to thank Lilian Topic for her excellent assistance in reading the first version of the book and rendering it presentable to Westview. We thank Christine Agius, lona Annett, W. E. Paterson, John Polesel, and Lilian Topic for reading parts of the book and offering helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Leslie Holmes for his encouragement of this project. We thank Craig Lonsdale, professional officer of the Department of Political Science of the University of Melbourne for help with printing difficulties and final camera-ready corrections. We would also like to acknowledge Wendy Ruffles for word-processing assistance. Special thanks are also due to Joanne Kummrow for her excellent work on the camera-ready version of the book. We thank our partners, John Polesel and Isabelle Rich, for their support throughout the period of gestation of the book. We are especially grateful to Susan McEachern of Westview Press for her patience and encouragement at all times.

Philomena Murray
Melbourne, Australia

Paul B. Rich
Luton, U.K.

Philomena Murray and Paul Rich

This book addresses the variety of ideals and theories behind the idea of a united Europe. Taken as a whole, we see these ideals and theories forming a series of "visions" of European unification that served as mental maps for those politicians and intellectuals who hoped Europe could develop as a powerful and cohesive political entity, including, for some, strong federal institutions and a common foreign and security policy. The ideals were inspiring and often utopian. What is remarkable is that few have been achieved as they were originally envisaged, even though they continue to influence the course of political debate on European unification. Indeed some analysts such as Simon Serfaty have suggested that European integration has occurred without any real vision at all and more in a fit of absent-mindedness. This is a considerable exaggeration. As the chapters in the volume show, the diplomatic moves towards closer European union from the early 1950s onwards were rooted in a long-term set of political ideals, even though there was not always an immediate consensus on what these necessarily were.

This book attempts to fill in a gap in our understanding of the politics of European Union by carrying out an analysis from international specialists on these ideals and theories. It combines the examination of actual ideals and idealists with theoretical approaches to the study of the central body in the history of European unification the European Community (known since 1 November 1993 as the European Union). These theoretical approaches have often been called, for convenience, integration theory, though, as some chapters make clear, there is a teleological danger in this term. The interesting aspect of the visionaries of European unity is that they were often the early theorists of integration as well as being intellectuals, politicians or bureaucrats. Their visions differed, according to their respective experience, nationality and ideological background. What they had in common was a belief that there could be created, from the ruins of post-World War Europe, a cohesive society of nations which might ultimately transcend the nation state. Where they differed was about both aims and means, reflecting the diversity of ideas on European unification at the end of World War II and the wide social base of those involved in the debate.

The issue of European unity started as an intellectual debate, especially in the years before and after World War II. In more recent years, it is possible to see a populist political reaction in many European countries (particularly at the time of the Danish and French referenda in 1992-1993 on the Maastricht Treaty) to this earlier, rather elitist, debate as many politicians started to play the nationalist political card in reaction to the perceived growing powers of the European Commission and the Brussels bureaucracy. There have been, nevertheless, major historical reasons for this earlier commitment by many intellectuals in Europe to the idea of continental unity. The decade of the 1940s acted in many respects as a watershed in the thinking of the European intelligentsia as earlier hopes in the internationalism of the League of Nations became dashed as Europe drifted into war. Many European intellectuals at this time began to explore the possibilities not only for a wider European political union in some form but also of a common European culture. Indeed, it is possible to see emerging during this period a distinct "Europe of the intellectuals" as numerous seminars, symposia, conferences and discussion groups were held in both Europe and the United States to debate the idea of "European integration." The full intellectual history of this period from the mid to late 1940s to the late 1970s and 1980s remains to be written and this volume is in many ways an incursion into a huge area requiring extensive collaborative research.