The concluding chapter of the book summarises the main findings of the present study and puts these in the conceptual and historiographical framework of the introduction of the book. This chapter reconnects to the central question of the present study and shows how and why the developments in the transatlantic management of economic and monetary affairs created decisive political momentum for bold Franco-German (supranational) initiatives in European integration, but also which transatlantic and European ideational and emotional undercurrents co-steered this development. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the increasingly central role of Western Germany in this history.

This introductory chapter deals with the positioning of post-war Western Europe in the ‘Atlantic Century’. During this period of emerging American leadership in international affairs—starting roughly around the time of the American intervention in the First World War—the United States not only gradually accepted the leadership of the free world, it also offered Western Europe protection under the umbrella of an ‘Atlantic Community’. These transatlantic realities offered material and moral comfort, which were indispensable for the reconstruction and resurrection of Europe. Moreover, this new community offered a world of rational policies and democratic politics that was immediately familiar to Europeans. These shared mores fortified the two most resilient beacons of freedom: capitalism and democracy. As such, this transatlantic community transcended national borders while at the same time respecting the concept of the nation-state as the basic model for a new world of cooperation aimed at peace, stability, and prosperity for all. This community of ‘liberal’ states and societies was perceived from the outset as ‘the progeny of Western Christendom’.

This chapter is the third and final building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950, It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the third of these sub-histories. It explains how—against the background of the beginnings of the Cold War and growing British aloofness in European affairs— ‘the (West) German re-entry’ became the driving force in the process of emerging European integration. This development crystallised first in the OEEC, subsequently through the EPU, and finally in the launch of the ECSC. This process was not only political and economic in nature, but also to a great extent intellectual via the deep influence of (German) ordoliberalism in the politics of the FRG and Christian Democracy in Western Europe.

Chapter 3 reconstruct how the (collective) emotions, the political and economic practices, and the geopolitical and societal circumstances of the war times guided Western Europe to a path of deeper international and regional cooperation focused on free trade and valuta convertibility. During exile and occupation, European governments fleshed out plans and schemes for post-war cooperation, primordially in the domains of socio-economic and the financial-economic planning, in greater (practical) detail. These exercises were emotionally charged and driven by the lessons of the war against the Nazis and the post-war period after the First World War—a learning from history in which the churches played a leading role and co-prepared the political ground for the popularity of a new and hugely influential conservative political family in Western Europe: Christian Democracy.

The prologue to this book zooms in on the inherent tensions and harmonies in the transatlantic relations that evolved in the first half of the twentieth century and laid the practical, ideational, and emotional foundations for the take-off of European integration as of 1950. In doing so, the prologue, in a more essayistic way, critically reflects upon the reconstruction of the history of the origins of European integration as presented in this book and the history of European integration in general, and the deeper meaning of both for our understanding of present-day Europe and the unique phenomenon of European integration. The prologue also introduces some key concepts and figures in the historical reconstruction that follows in the chapters, such as the the policies and politics of planning, the functionalism of David Mitrany, and the analysis of the vicissitudes of transatlantic relations by Isaiah Berlin.

This chapter is the second building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950. It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the second of these sub-histories. It traces how the coming about and the workings of the Marshall Plan gradually illuminated an institutional, economic, and political pathway for integration in Western Europe. This second sub-history shows how the gradual (self-)outmanoeuvring of the United Kingdom in matters of European cooperation happened to that country and the West, and how this worked as a catalyst for regional European integration and ‘the emergence of a continental West’.

This chapter assesses the enduring relationship between the military role of the United States in Europe, through its participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and European integration from the Cold War to the present. It argues that, during the Cold War, western European security cooperation was conceived as part of a wider endeavour, which also included the United States and Canada. Also after the end of the East--West division, diverging priorities among the European countries and their preference for intergovernmental rather than supranational cooperation, together with US determination to preserve the transatlantic alliance, bolstered NATO’s role as the bedrock of European defence, while confining the role of European institutions to the range of peacekeeping and crisis management tasks. After reviewing the current state of the art of research on European security and defence, the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section focuses on the relationship between transatlantic and European security in the late 1940s, showing how western Europe’s security initiatives, such as the Dunkirk Treaty and the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), endeavoured to secure a US pledge against the Soviet threat rather than to foster defence integration in Europe. The second section debates the project of a European Defence Community (EDC) in the early 1950s, emphasising diverging west European perceptions of the EDC and of West German rearmament. More specifically, France viewed the EDC mostly as an intergovernmental toolbox to control the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), rather than a truly supranational organisation. This section also argues that the British declined to participate, dreading the prospect of undermining NATO. After the EDC’s failure in 1954, the creation of the Western European Union (WEU) unequivocally left west European defence under the US umbrella.

The treaties establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) contained, from their very beginning, the possibility of enlarging the initial number of six member states. Article 98 ECSC provided that ‘[a]ny European State may request to accede to the present Treaty’ and laid down the enlargement procedure. When the EEC and Euratom Treaties were concluded in 1958, no ECSC enlargements had occurred. The main elements of the enlargement procedure of Article 98 ECSC would not only remain the principal features of the accession provision in the EEC Treaty (Article 237) and Euratom Treaty (Article 205), but also continue to be the key references in the unique accession provision in later versions of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

It is tempting to interpret the convoluted narrative that led to Brexit as a story of British exceptionalism. The fit between European integration and the United Kingdom (UK) had never been easy – much less natural, it would appear, than for any other country in Europe. It was for this reason that the British initially stood aside from the process, spurning repeated chances to join the institutional precursors to the European Union (EU). When they did belatedly change their mind and join the European Economic Community (EEC), moreover, they did so amid sustained domestic controversy. The deep-seated mismatch between Britain and its European partners was to become a leitmotiv of the country’s forty-six years as an EC/EU member state. The UK was never at ease within the EC/EU, but instead at odds with important aspects of the process, divided internally on the necessity of membership and liable to see itself as an ‘awkward partner’, the malcontent within.