To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, ‘the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe’.Footnote 1 The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states’ resolution ‘to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’.Footnote 2 Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the ‘core Europe’ of the ECSC as a collective ‘supranational’ break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.
This special issue takes a different approach. It challenges the sometimes explicit and more often implicit assumptions that have remained prominent in the broader public and have also impacted the academic literature about 8 May 1945 as a ‘zero hour’, heralding a new age of European cooperation and integration. Instead, the contributions to this special issue explore a specific form of connections among proposals and practices of ‘governing’ Europe between the interwar, war and post-war periods during the twentieth century. We do not follow the thread of others who have traced such links at the level of intellectual history, examining how ideas about European unity travelled from the 1920s to the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 3 Instead of lofty ideas we focus on the concrete nuts and bolts of cooperation and integration in Europe as much neglected carriers of continuity.
The various articles in this special issue assess continuities and discontinuities at the levels of governments, experts and international organisations by examining technicalities and concrete practices on which European integration came to be built – the forms of legal reasoning to justify governance beyond the nation state, administrative techniques of cooperation and economic expertise needed to design and execute common policies. We are interested in these seemingly non-politicised and mundane forms of interaction, as well as the biographic continuities of actors in the second or third chain of decision making.
In doing so, all texts start from the assumption that forms of cooperation launched after 1918, or even earlier, carried over into the post-1945 years, and that after the Second World War policy makers and advisors had to look back in order to move forward and that these continuities constitute a crucial factor for explaining the history of post-war international relations. The main empirical focus lies on the period between the First World War and the multiple forms of Western European institutionalisation up until the end of the 1950s. However, our conclusions are also relevant for understanding contemporary Europe, the EU and the mechanics of international cooperation more generally.
In doing so we pay close attention to what the various actors actually meant when they debated or constructed ‘Europe’.Footnote 4 Geographies and mental maps changed in the light of the dynamics of the interwar years, the Second World War and the effects of the Cold War. Reference to ‘Europe’ in the European Coal and Steel Community, for instance, included an element of bravado, given that only six Western European states initially formed its basis. Hence, it is important to consider the shifting meaning of a concept such as Europe, as well as the overlap between various debates. Experts did not just claim that their expertise offered solutions to the various economic and social issues at stake, they also pretended to speak in the name of Europe. They thus tried to detach themselves from established international negotiation processes driven by national interest and the pursuit of power, instead foregrounding the vision of a utopian unity engineered by rational cooperation – sometimes for idealistic reasons, sometimes to hide national or other agendas. Hence, we also need to consider the power of rhetoric and of the notion of ‘Europe’ as a seemingly unpolitical reference point drawing on an alleged shared past and plans for a better future.
Bridging Gaps: Historiographical Concerns
This special issue contributes to three major sets of literature and creates new bridges between them. First, it helps to rethink the agenda of Western Europe's international history. Many scholars of European integration have viewed ‘core Europe’ institutionalisation after 1945 as marking the strong rejection of interwar trends. ‘Supranational’ integration was meant to break decisively with ideological conflict, extreme nationalism, autarky, terror, war and mass murder. To be sure, the Second World War, the Cold War and decolonisation, which ended Europe's global ascendancy and divided most of the continent into two rival camps, did change Europe's international relations after 1945 in fundamental ways. But while delimiting their intentions and actions from the interwar years was an important strategy of politicians and experts after 1945, research on the contemporary history of Europe has often adopted this perspective too quickly. In fact, as this special issue argues, not all forms and formats of cooperation during the post-war era were as radically new as some like Jean Monnet, the first president of the ECSC High Authority, made them look.
Existing research on the history of European integration has for a long time concentrated on the apparently novel ‘supranational’ features of the ECSC, the EEC and the present-day EU. The first forays into the field emphasised the innovative character of federalist preferences as the alleged driving force behind the Schuman Plan and ‘core Europe’ formation in the 1950s. These federalist historians wrote about European integration with a strong focus on the history of ideas and intellectual projects of European unity. And yet, they were not able to demonstrate strong (let alone causal) links between federalist and other plans and actual economic and political developments in post-war Europe.Footnote 5 They also tended to ignore the fact that the ECSC was far from fully supranational, and that it was also not the first organisation to display such features, as the latest research has shown.Footnote 6
Since the 1980s revisionist attacks on this history of ideas have questioned its teleological character and emphasised the continued strong role of states and governments in European integration. Neither the economic history approach, as advocated most prominently by Alan S. Milward,Footnote 7 nor a methodologically more traditional diplomatic history of integration as the outcome of negotiations about foreign policy interests amongst governments fundamentally challenged the view of post-war European integration as a break with the past, however.Footnote 8 Despite its growing conceptual and narrative sophistication, ‘integration’ historiography since the 1990s has reinforced a fixation on the ‘core Europe’ of the present-day EU. It has also focused almost entirely on developments since 1945, segregating the various periods along the established divides of political history. Practical and methodological reasons have reinforced this tendency: multi-archival research with its linguistic, logistical and narrative challenges has led to a focus on short time spans at the expense of the longue durée.Footnote 9 So far only few studies have pushed the boundaries and consistently stressed longer continuities, be it at the level of economic structures or governance mechanisms.Footnote 10
Second, this special issue contributes to a recent trend in International History more broadly, which is in the process of rediscovering the interwar years as a fascinating laboratory of policy debates and experiments and not just a failure to settle the post-war political conflicts. Recent studies have also underscored the broad variety of internationalisms unfolding at the time.Footnote 11 As early as 1979 Walter McDougall suggested that ‘historians interested in the process of European integration in the twentieth century ought to transfer a portion of their attention away from the “ideological” forerunners of the Common Market towards the pragmatic technocrats of all nations who emerged from the experience of war economies after 1918 with the conviction that they had seen the future’.Footnote 12 Admittedly, the League of Nations created after the First World War did not prevent the second. The International Labour Organization (ILO) set up as part of the League system had no means to oppose effectively the slashing of workers’ rights in Nazi Germany and other dictatorships. But, as research from the last ten to fifteen years has stressed, the 1920s and 1930s also saw important agreements and achievements. Some of these concerned rather mundane – but by no means irrelevant – issues such as health regulation or drug trafficking. Others did not last, or were not implemented in the first place, but demonstrated that there was a real alternative to ideological radicalism and nationalism and the abyss of the Second World War. Moreover, knowledge predating 1939 was carried over into later periods. Some scholars have therefore ventured to expand chronologies, assessing the links to post-war forms of internationalism under the auspices of the United Nations and to other forms of governance beyond the nation state.Footnote 13 Most of this work, however, focuses on the global level of governance. This is quite ironic given that Europe was the most densely networked region of the world prior to 1945 and continued to be so thereafter.Footnote 14 This special issue thus brings in the dearly missing regional dimension to the growing literature about the global level.
Third, this special issue helps to link and anchor the International History of Western Europe more firmly in the historiography of European societies. For a long time, not only the historiography of European integration, but also that of countries like Germany and Italy conceived of the end of the Second World War as a kind of ‘zero hour’ – a break that allowed for a fresh start after years of dictatorship in terms of economic system, political organisation and social relations.Footnote 15 Research since the 1970s has highlighted important continuities across the Second World War, however. They concern the means of production, the composition of political and bureaucratic elites and other key aspects of politics and policy making in the newly consolidated Western European democracies.Footnote 16
Similar arguments have been made for countries such as France, the Netherlands and Denmark. The older historiography emphasised the rupture created by the German occupation and continuities in the resistance against it. Newer work has complicated the story, however, revealing the various ways in which resistance and collaboration have intersected, thus challenging the idea of 1945 as a clear turning point.Footnote 17 These studies on the domestic developments in Western European countries have had limited impact on the international history of Western Europe after 1945, however, which underscored the novel features of post-war European integration exactly at the time when the historiographies on specific countries commenced to stress continuities. The findings of this special issue close the gap between these literatures on the domestic and international realms.
Europe's Nuts and Bolts
Researching such hitherto ‘hidden continuities’Footnote 18 necessitates a focus on the nuts and bolts of European cooperation and integration instead of grand designs and visions of unity. So far, however, little research has been done on the technicalities and concrete practices on which European integration came to be built – justifying governance beyond the nation state by creating new forms of legal reasoning along with novel administrative techniques and bureaucratic procedures, while also providing the economic expertise to steer and guide such policies. European integration was not driven by federalist thinkers or by any collective feeling of ‘Europeanness’ after 1945. It was largely shaped by politicians, officials, experts and lobbyists and their legal, economic and other knowledge, their transnational political and administrative practices and the rules and technical regulations that they agreed and administered. This special issue zooms in on their action and practices.
Our focus on long-term continuities in European cooperation requires our collection of articles to de-centre the present-day EU as the most important or even the only relevant organisation of European cooperation in the post-war period. Instead, this special issue also considers other international forums and formats. It treats the ECSC, the European Communities (EC) after the 1967 institutional merger between the ECSC, the EEC and Euratom, and the present-day EU as part of a broader alphabet soup of international institutions in twentieth century (Western) Europe. This alphabet soup included the UN system including the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Council of Europe and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as it was called after its 1961–2 reform.Footnote 19 It also comprised many specialised so-called technical organisations which have only attracted the attention of historians in recent years. Dealing with issues such as transnational railway connections and electricity, television standards and radio frequencies, such work has revealed layers of international cooperation largely ignored before.Footnote 20 Several of these agencies fall into the category of what at the time was called international administrative unions. They collected and published materials and provided references. They also set technical standards that helped shape transnational technological and business infrastructures. The International Telecommunications Union, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the International Union for the Publication of Customs Tariffs are examples for this sort of organisation.Footnote 21
Still, this special issue goes an important step further than existing work. It does not treat these organisations in isolation. Instead, it analyses the links between them as well as the question of how findings on lesser-known forums shed new light on the history of the EU and its predecessors. On questions of transport, for instance, the EC entered the stage rather late. Its marginal role can only be explained by factoring in the activities of other bodies that had shaped this sector since the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 22 We argue that the EC could only develop into the primadonna of (Western) European cooperation from the 1970s onwards because it was embedded in a wider range of networks and organisations.Footnote 23
Carriers of Continuity
This special issue investigates three different carriers of continuity. First, international organisations created in the interwar period (or even before) that continued to exist after 1945 formed bridges of continuity. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is a good example. Established in 1930 to ease Germany's reparations from the First World War, the BIS soon outgrew this role to become an international organisation and financial institution, primarily in the service of central banks. During the war it helped international organisations such as the Red Cross, but it also assisted Nazi Germany. Directly after 1945 it helped solve the monetary deadlock in Western Europe.Footnote 24 Many even less known technical organisations served similar purposes, such as the International Telecommunications Union, which was established as early as 1865 and has existed under its present name since 1932. Such institutional continuities only appear straightforward at first glance. As the example of the BIS reveals, institutions changed their forms, philosophies and fields of action, and their relevance and geography often also varied over time. Institutional continuities therefore matter, but they always deserve closer scrutiny.
Individuals and informal transnational networks constituted a second trajectory of continuity. Beyond a few experts in both Dutch history and banking history, Johan Willem Beyen is only known to the broader public as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of post-war European integration. As foreign minister, he played an important role in the creation of the EEC. During the interwar years, however, Beyen worked for the BIS, for some years as its vice president and from 1937 onwards as its president. In 1944 he contributed to the Bretton Woods conference, laying the foundations for the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as instruments of Western economic and monetary governance.Footnote 25 Jean Monnet is another example. He worked for the Allied Maritime Transport Council during the First World War and the League of Nations from 1919 to 1923. Monnet helped coordinate Allied armaments production and procurement during the Second World War before influencing ‘core Europe’ integration from the late 1940s onwards.Footnote 26
Many of these actors provided the technical and bureaucratic scaffolding of European cooperation. They aimed to replace diplomatic interstate bargaining with debate and decision making by experts which would depoliticise issues with high potential for conflict, and they hoped to tame states through the rule of law and multilateral procedures. The articles in this special issue predominantly focus on these often less known actors – not leading politicians like Konrad Adenauer and Alicide Di Gasperi or thinkers such as Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, who are sometimes seen as bridge builders between the interwar and the post-war era.Footnote 27
Beyond specific individuals, experts cooperating in the technical sub-organisations of the League of Nations often created networks of knowledge and contacts that they then carried into the post-war world.Footnote 28 But there were also other networks of actors that established meaningful chronological bridges. Christian democratic politicians, for example, intensified their cooperation during the interwar years, and some of these contacts then provided the bedrock for efforts of institutionalised forms of cooperation after 1945.Footnote 29
Third, learning processes from one period to another also created a form of linkage. Mark Mazower has contended that ‘most participants in planning for the post-war world were prompted by the desire to avoid whatever it was that they had thought had gone wrong last time’.Footnote 30 In this special issue we argue that learning processes took three different forms: direct learning, for example in the form of skills and insights acquired during an earlier period; learning from ‘mistakes’ in the past, for instance through delimitation from tried policy solutions seen in retrospect as having been guided by inappropriate motives and objectives or as having been ineffective; and unexplored alternatives – forms of continuities that had materialised in expert reports, academic writing, private letters, etc. of an earlier period but that had not been acted upon and hence hibernated until being activated in later years.
Thus, League of Nations reports – with their statistical information and some of their policy recommendations – served as blueprints for policy debates after 1945. Economic and other forms of nationalism, along with a lack of international cooperation, became the cautionary tale from which actors were keen to learn and from which they sought to delimit their action. The failure of the 1933 World Economic Conference, for example, was often invoked during later periods to highlight the flaws of this form of economic diplomacy.Footnote 31 The League of Nations’ 1939 Bruce Report, finally, did not have a significant impact on the organisation when it was produced – not least due to the outbreak of the Second World War in the same year. Its recommendations did, however, play an important role in the medium term and fed into the creation of the United Nations.
The variety of such temporal links across the Second World War is rooted in biographical experiences, networks of actors and institutional rules and practices. These connections also refer to specific forms of knowledge, which were often based on transnational notions of professionalism and expertise developed since the nineteenth century. When analysing such continuities at the level of knowledge, it is productive to distinguish between ‘celebrated’ and ‘covered up’ continuities. In some cases, actors and organisations invoked connections to legitimise their ends. In other cases continuities existed that actors were loath to discuss in public. This holds particularly true for continuities from wartime cooperation into the post-war era. After all, the very idea of reconstructing and ‘rescuing’ European nation states after 1945 hinged on the notion of trimming their links to a tainted past. In sum, learning processes took many different forms, but they impacted substantially on post-war efforts of European cooperation and integration.
A fine-grained analysis of these temporal links as in this special issue has important methodological implications. Besides the need to scrutinise the motivations and actions of individuals and institutions, it underscores the role of a history of knowledge. It is necessary to assess processes of creating, stabilising, transferring, appropriating and implementing knowledge. This in turn requires that researchers are aware of the ephemeral and fragile forms of political, economic and legal knowledge. They also need to pay attention to professional bodies and formal and informal networks amongst experts, business representatives and others, as well as their role in the production of knowledge and in international organisation. Such work needs to be informed by the insights of cultural history and historical sociology interested in questions of narrative description and representation of knowledge. Moreover, our approach sees decision making moments – so central to diplomatic history of the realistic brand – as only one dimension of a wider and more complex policy making cycle. In this context, setting agendas and reviewing policy can be as important as political deals such as ‘grand bargains’ in the form of treaties or treaty revisions.Footnote 32
In studying these different carriers of continuity, and European cooperation in the twentieth century more generally, we embrace transnational history in the full sense. International Relations scholars in particular tend to reduce transnationality to the involvement of non-state actors in international politics.Footnote 33 We take a more comprehensive approach and define transnational history as a perspective, interested in the analysis of phenomena that transcend nations and nation states and that span territorial borders and boundaries. It premises that transfers are always selective and that they never lead to direct copying from one intellectual or institutional context to the other.Footnote 34
This is particularly important when considering the ‘darker’ continuities at stake. Some forms of cooperation during the Nazi German occupation of large parts of Europe continued after 1945. In this sense, the standard story of liberal democrats cooperating in their efforts to build Europe has to be complicated and complemented with the influence of anti-liberal Europeanisation efforts and their legacy.Footnote 35 This, however, does not imply that all roots of cooperation were tainted and that European integration is but an extension of Hitler's aspirations to dominate Europe.Footnote 36 We require detailed and nuanced analyses, not the search for schematic similarities without taking into consideration changing motives and intentions behind European cooperation and integration. In general, European cooperation after 1945 has many parents, ranging from governments in exileFootnote 37 to collaborating elites and many other carriers of continuity, even if many of them were not acknowledged at the time.
Some of these parents were not even of European pedigree, or added global dimensions in other ways. In that sense Europe cannot be seen in isolation. During the nineteenth century and continuing into the interwar years, colonialism made ‘Europe’ a global affair, and it remained so for some time after 1945. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's 1923 Pan-Europe plan, for instance, treated continental Europe's colonies as a natural part of the entity that he proposed to create.Footnote 38 Similarly, some plans of the late 1940s and 1950s dreamed of a ‘Eurafrique’ – a combination of the resources of European countries with those of their colonies to create a third world power.Footnote 39 Even plans focusing on cooperation within Europe often had important global implications. Coudenhove's role model for how to integrate Europe was Pan-Americanism. More recently, the present-day EU has served as an inspiration for other regional integration organisations around the world.Footnote 40 Beyond adding a regional dimension to the debate about continuity in international government and governance, therefore, the articles in this special issue draw attention to strong links and interferences between global and European dynamics.Footnote 41
One non-European country deserves particular attention in this context: the United States of America. The United States did not only provide Western Europe with a security and nuclear umbrella in the post-war era as a necessary precondition for regional integration. In many ways the United States also facilitated and vitalised European cooperation efforts. Recent research has shown, for example, how much interwar internationalism hinged on the financial and intellectual support of American philanthropic organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Footnote 42 During the Second World War the United States turned into a safe harbour for parts of the League of Nations. Given the insecurity of Geneva they relocated to Princeton, NJ, while the International Labour Organization opted for Montreal in Canada.Footnote 43 Besides the relocation of entire organisations with some of their personnel, paper trail and knowledge, several actors, who are central to our question about continuity and change in European organisation, also had strong American links. Monnet for instance spent much time in North America in the 1920s and 1930s, working in the business sector. During the Second World War he coordinated British arms procurement in the United States, played a key role in planning Allied armaments production and also advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Footnote 44 Some carriers of continuity for European cooperation were thus surprisingly global.
Futures Past and Future Pasts
Even if questions of continuity lie at the heart of much historical research, such work raises fundamental ontological and epistemological issues that few projects address explicitly. In the mid-nineteenth century, pioneers of modern professional history such as Johann Gustav Droysen first reflected about the concept of historical continuity. Droysen delimited the continuity of history, seen as a continuous advance, from the continuity of nature, characterised by repetition. This idealistic notion was not based on the simplistic idea of progress with a clearly defined end; instead, it referred to an elevating process in which the new built on existing features.Footnote 45 Scholars such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans-Michael Baumgartner and Aleida Assmann have challenged such idealistic notions of continuity. From a Foucauldian point of view continuity is but an illusion – an illusion building on the idea that history has a consistent subject. Seen from such a radical vantage point, continuity cannot be a useful analytical lens.Footnote 46
This special issue is closer to a middle ground in this debate, influenced by the work of Reinhart Koselleck, amongst others. Koselleck has reminded us that it is basically impossible to escape teleological allegations; what can be done to move beyond simple, causal claims is to weigh in alternative options in the past, thus demonstrating the openness of the situation and one's own perspective.Footnote 47
What does this mean for our object of study? Seen from the perspective of 1923, 1930 or 1938, European cooperation and integration as it came to unfold after 1945 was only one of many possible futures – and an unlikely one at that. Conversely, many likely future scenarios of the 1930s and early 1940s became unrealistic only a few years later. Instead of these futures past, what was then a rather marginal perspective (with associated prospective institutions, actors and forms and containers of knowledge) gained in importance in the post-war era. From the perspective of 1950 or 1960, in other words, efforts of cooperation and integration of these earlier periods became a significant past.
High Modernity
Each article in this special issue focuses on the years from the First World War or before up to the 1950s and beyond. During the First World War state interventionism, mobilisation and economic planning reached new levels, strengthening the role of experts and expert knowledge in political decision making. The war also led to new forms of international cooperation in Europe and beyond. The Allied Maritime Transport Council, for instance, was a training ground for Jean Monnet. Arthur Salter, one of Monnet's colleagues, considered it ‘an experiment in international administration’ due to its particularly intensive and innovative forms of cooperation.Footnote 48 While the origins of some of the networks and organisations discussed in the articles in this special issue predate 1914 and take into account earlier periods whenever necessary, the 1920s and 1930s are of particular importance for the analysis, as a period that saw a reorganisation and intensification of international life and various efforts of European cooperation.
Why, then, continue beyond 1945 with a focus on the institutionalisation of European cooperation and integration in the first fifteen years after the war? The Second World War led to profound discussions about European organisation amongst the Western Allies, governments in exile, in the resistance movements and amongst Nazi planners. A whole set of new institutions emerged after 1945, such as the UNECE, the OECD, the Council of Europe and the EEC/EC. The EC, originating in the Treaties of Rome in 1957, initially only had six member states. It developed its own common trade policy as well as policies for competition and agriculture during the 1960s. The EC enlarged in 1973 when they accepted the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland as new members, with Greece following in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. It combined its spatial expansion with a strategy during the 1980s for abolishing non-tariff barriers to create an internal market, which required a stronger EC role in regulation. These and other factors combined to make the EC the foremost, and in many ways hegemonic, forum of Western European cooperation and integration. This transformation in times of economic crisis after 1973 was already managed by different politicians, experts, businessmen and lobbyists from the political generation that had stood at the cradle of post-war integration and personalised continuities across the wars. Jean Monnet, who died in 1979, is the best example of a wider circle of actors. The articles highlight continuities and discontinuities in European cooperation and integration after the 1950s in their outlook, thus linking their historical findings to more recent and present-day concerns.Footnote 49
Taken together, the phase from the interwar years to the early 1970s witnessed considerable state-led political intervention. It is therefore sometimes interpreted as the culmination of ‘high modernity’ in Europe. Many of the politicians and experts who feature in this special issue emphasised the interconnectedness of technological and societal progress, the feasibility of technocratic change and the possibility and desirability of a rational design of social, economic and political order. Most of their ideas pivoted on political action at the state level, and this is what the bulk of the existing research has focused on. Some of these expert-driven plans to design a new order were also targeted at the transnational level of European cooperation and integration, however, often to reinforce national modernisation plans.Footnote 50
Cooperation and Integration
But why speak of ‘cooperation’ and ‘integration’? The bulk of the literature uses these terms rather uncritically. ‘Integration’ is normally reserved for the EU and its predecessors, whereas ‘cooperation’ is employed to characterise less intense forms of internationalism, without supranational components.Footnote 51 Given that supranationality has never been fully realised, this distinction has its problems. Considering the history of the terms accentuates these concerns further. Historical research has shown that the term ‘integration’ in various languages is not innocent. With reference to post-war forms of international cooperation, it was first used in the context of the Marshall Plan and of US-analyses and programmes for Western Europe since the late 1940s and early 1950s. Up to that point actors themselves had often spoken of ‘unifying’ or ‘federalising’ Europe. Paul G. Hoffman, director of the Economic Cooperation Administration, the US organisation administering the Marshall Plan, played a prominent role in popularising the new term. In a 1949 talk, for instance, he argued that ‘no path toward integration should be left unexplored’.Footnote 52 He and many others who referred to ‘integration’ in the early post-war period strove to emulate the political model of the United States. The concept of integration, long normalised in European languages, thus has strong political connotations with highly normative assumptions and a supranational undercurrent.Footnote 53 Embedding the historical study of the EU and its predecessors both chronologically and systematically in a wider history of international governance therefore pushes not only empirical but also important conceptual frontiers.
Institutions, Actors and Knowledge
The following articles fall roughly into three categories, centring on the role of institutions, actors or forms of knowledge that served as vectors of continuity. The first set of contributions, focusing on the work of organisations, begins with the article by Antoine Vauchez. Playing with the title of an authoritative biography of Jean Monnet,Footnote 54 Vauchez stresses the idea of independent statesmen and institutions in the context of European cooperation and integration. He argues that in the course of the period under study European institutions frequently strove to create a space and statutory independence for themselves, which had no equivalent in national political settings. According to this newly established grammar of international political legitimacy, such independence from the parliamentary and diplomatic fields was seen as a necessary device to build Europe. Vauchez traces this idea back to the League of Nations's foundational period. He contends that this concept was, and still is, constitutive for the present-day EU polity in terms of its valued modes of legitimacy and established types of authority.
In his article, Vincent Lagendijk explores the continuities and discontinuities related to the notion of a European electricity system. Starting in the 1920s he shows how the so-called technical bodies of the League of Nations in fields like financial and economic affairs, health and infrastructure received praise from contemporaries and often had tangible results with long-term effects. The 1939 Bruce Report proposed to reform the League with these technical agencies at its core. These bodies’ (apparently) non-political, ‘technical’ approach was regarded as an alternative to more traditional diplomatic methods. Moreover, the work of some of these technical bodies, which focused on Europe, made a regional approach to cooperation and integration more logical and legitimate. Tracing its intellectual roots in the interwar period sheds light on the institutions, including the UNECE created in 1947 and the Union for the Coordination of Production and Transmission of Electricity (UCPTE) formed in 1951. Lagendijk shows that the UCPTE became the organisational cornerstone of the post-war European electricity system, which would be transformed into the material basis of the EU's internal electricity market from the 1990s onwards.
The third contribution in this section turns to debates about the labour market in international forums. Lorenzo Mechi argues that supporters of European economic integration during the post-war era saw their projects as key steps to achieve the kind of social stabilisation that the ILO had advocated during the interwar years. During the 1920s and 1930s the Geneva-based organisation had created a blueprint combining economic integration and social stabilisation. Thanks to the influence of American reformist milieus, this vision continued to characterise the ILO agenda during the war and became dominant after 1945. The article shows how the approach of the interwar ILO impacted directly on the first steps of post-war European integration.
The second set of articles features the contribution of specific actors, and groups or networks of actors. It starts with Wolfram Kaiser's analysis of the continuities in the institutional concepts, design and working practices of transnational cooperation in the steel sector from the end of the First World War through to the formation and early period of the ECSC. Far from marking a revolutionary shift towards the ‘supranational’ organisation of Western continental Europe as a competitive market economy, the ECSC actually drew substantially on established patterns of technocratic internationalism and experience (including Jean Monnet's) with European cooperation amongst states and companies. Notwithstanding the long-term innovative potential of the ECSC's judicial system and parliamentary component, the article highlights two resulting continuities: the first concerns the strong belief in the power of expert-driven policy-making for fostering peace in Europe and the second the institutional practice of pervasive business influence, especially concerning the market concentration and cartel issues, which resulted in neo-corporatist rather than ‘supranational’ practices.
The second contribution to this section shifts the focus from professionals to politicians. In his article, Brian Shaev addresses how French Socialist (SFIO) and German Social Democratic (SPD) policies on tariffs and the organisation of international trade constitute a hidden continuity between the interwar and post-war periods. These two political parties, which are crucial for understanding the post-war political order, shared a narrative that presented tariffs and protectionism as an extension of war by other means. Trade liberalisation was the default position of each party. They broadly shared a belief that a large economic bloc was necessary to overcome the ‘Balkanised Europe’ of the interwar period and the bloc economies of the early Cold War. Shaev reveals the interwar SFIO/SPD policy precedents for two of the key features of the 1957 Treaties of Rome: a transfer of sovereign powers from states to a supranational community and a customs union limited to certain European states. The parties placed their support for lower tariffs and a European customs union within a larger economic vision that called for an ‘organisation’ of markets at the international level, a condition that was accompanied within the SFIO by a perceived necessity of maintaining parity in industrial strength with a newly ascendant West German economy.
The special issue's third section underlines the role of knowledge that formed a carrier of continuity. It opens with a contribution by Christian Henrich-Franke on the governing of infrastructures in the European transport and telecommunication sectors. He highlights the negative attitude of leading experts in these infrastructure sectors to forms of ‘core Europe’ cooperation. He shows how organisations like the International Railway Union, the International Telecommunication Union and the League of Nations Committee on Communications and Transit created transnational expert communities with particular cultures of regulation and standardisation which these experts sought to preserve after 1945. The article shows that these cultures initially impeded the EEC/EC from expanding into the regulatory governance of both sectors. Whereas the EEC Treaty at least contained a declaration of intent for transport, telecommunication was not even mentioned.
Léonard Laborie follows up by turning to cooperation in postal networks, formerly the main infrastructure for information and light goods circulation across borders. At least six plans to build Europe on postal networks were on the agenda of high-level intergovernmental discussions between the late 1920s and the end of the 1950s. For the promoters of these plans, it seemed natural to mobilise existing postal networks. These expert-driven networks had already operated transnationally. Their work was both essential and tangible for citizens in their daily life. Despite differences, all plans shared the same rationale: deeper cooperation would facilitate communication and commercial transactions amongst Europeans and convey, via the postman and mail, the image and sense of a new polity in the making to the remotest parts of Europe. Two of these plans were implemented: one during the Second World War and the other in the form of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations after 1945 with significant continuities from one to the other. Experts from the national postal administrations largely managed to drive these political processes in line with their own international practice, which did not change much from the interwar to the post-war period. It was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that the EC began to regulate communication networks.
Antonin Cohen then traces the political economy of the Schuman Plan of 9 May 1950, which led to the formation of the ECSC some two years later. He reconstructs the conceptions of economics and politics which informed the proposed creation of an independent authority to regulate a free market outside direct parliamentary control: an integrated European ‘communitarian economy’. Relating to Wolfram Kaiser's findings, Cohen identifies corporatist representation and expert arbitration as key features of the ECSC's institutional design. He sees the origins of these concepts (rather than practices) in a broader network of actors who came to share the ideas of a ‘communitarian revolution’ during the French Vichy regime. These roots help account for the continuity of some ‘third way’ concepts from interwar to post-war Europe – concepts that conflicted strongly with the alternative conceptions of ‘core Europe’ as an emerging European parliamentary system.
In sum, the findings of the individual articles highlight the continuities in European cooperation and integration from the interwar to the post-war period, their roots and the reasons for their persistence. This special issue also addresses how such a better grasp of continuities across the Second World War can inform our understanding of what is actually novel (if anything) about the present-day EU as it has developed out of the ‘core Europe’ organisations formed in the 1950s.
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