The U.S. Helped Make Europe. Can It Break It?

Walt Rostow, who became Lyndon B. Johnson’s national-security adviser during the Vietnam War, had also been working on postwar plans to incorporate Germany into the rest of Western Europe by means of economic coöperation. Morgan believes that Rostow came to that idea first, before Monnet, and, indeed, that Rostow passed his views on to the Frenchman, who spent much of the war in Washington, D.C.

Morgan is right that Americans played a hugely important role in shaping postwar Europe, but he underestimates the European contributions, not least when he casts Monnet as Rostow’s pupil. The idea of pooling natural resources to prevent another war between major European powers, especially Germany and France, had been championed at the end of the First World War by a French politician named Étienne Clémentel. He called for a “new economic order” based on interdependence. His assistant was Monnet, who had suggested combining the British and French economies to defeat Germany in the Great War. In 1940, when France was invaded once again, Monnet went further and suggested a Franco-British union. None of this came to pass, but it’s clear that Monnet didn’t need Rostow to fire his pan-European imagination.

Nor were the Frenchmen alone. One of the more interesting and eccentric unifiers was the half Japanese Austro-Hungarian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. His book “Pan-Europa,” published in 1923, sparked the “Pan-Europa movement.” In his dream of pan-European leadership, those in charge would not necessarily be men of high birth but gentlemen imbued with an “aristocracy of the spirit”—an idea that was perhaps not so very far removed from Kennan’s notion of “spiritual vigor.” Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement, too, came to little. But his proposal that Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” serve as the European anthem endured; it is still played on official E.U. occasions.

In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe. German dissidents inside Hitler’s Reich, such as the Kreisau Circle, associated with Helmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis, in 1945, for “treason,” also drew up plans for a postwar European union. Many members of his circle were fellow-aristocrats, some of them kindred spirits of Coudenhove-Kalergi. And the Nazis themselves had pan-European ideals, albeit under the firm rule of the Herrenvolk.

There’s another side of postwar pan-Europeanism that is hard to associate with the twentieth-century American establishment: the deep Roman Catholic background of most of the founders, which made them receptive to a supranational order. Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman were all devout Catholics, and Monnet, though not a religious man, was born into a pious Catholic family. Adenauer was also a Rhinelander who loathed the largely Protestant and Prussian eastern part of Germany. He is said to have muttered “Asia again” whenever his train crossed the Elbe on the way to Berlin. For him, the West ended at the old borders of the Roman Empire, which had cut through the Teutonic territories. Ancient Rome was not his only model. John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany from 1949 to 1952, recalled that Adenauer spoke of the Holy Roman Empire as if it were recent history.

This Catholic genealogy helped arouse British suspicions of European integration. The journalist Hugo Young, himself brought up Catholic, observed in his book “This Blessed Plot” that such “feelings were not limited to superstition. They acquired a strong political formulation among people who saw in the Schuman Plan the beginnings of a Vatican conspiracy, or even more luridly, an attempt to recreate the Holy Roman Empire.”

Cartoon by Seth Fleishman

In Germany, however, the strongest opposition to Adenauer’s efforts to anchor the Federal Republic in an American-led Western alliance, through European integration and NATO, came from the left rather than the revanchist right. The Social Democrats, led by Kurt Schumacher, a prickly figure who had suffered horribly for resisting the Nazis, were mistrustful of the United States and hoped to reunify Germany as a neutral state at the center of Europe. A defense pact with America was anathema to Schumacher, since it threatened to make permanent the country’s division into two hostile states. Adenauer reached the opposite conclusion. Membership in NATO, he believed, offered the surest route to restoring West German sovereignty and the right to rearm. That it also cemented the division of Germany suited him fine.