Almost seven decades have passed since the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was established as the earliest forerunner of the European Union. Today's awareness of the problems, successes and failures in the integration process over the ensuing decades hinders an evaluation of the EU's predecessors such as the ECSC. National interests, as well as the pressure of the Cold War present at its founding, cannot allow either the daring or the European idealism of these initial European institutions to be forgotten. Caution is quite advisable, then, when evaluating the ‘visionary thinkers’ of the nineteenth century and the interwar years. The supranational European integration after the Second World War, in which national governments put themselves under a higher European authority in specific policy areas, would to a significant extent come about as the consequence of the experience of that war, under the pressure of international developments. Yet there are substantial similarities between the foresight of these ‘visionary thinkers’ and subsequent European integration. The combination of economic integration and the promotion of prosperity, on the one hand, and peace in Europe, on the other, is but one example. Other recurring elements include the conviction that European institutions might create a sense of a shared European destiny as well as the perceived need for European unity in order to give Europe weight in world politics.

European Cooperation Before the Second World War

If there was ever any talk of cooperation and unity in (part of) Europe in past centuries, then it was seldom based on any grand design. Sometimes the circumstances obliged political leaders to cooperate economically or militarily. At other times unity was the consequence of wars motivated by economic gain or power politics. Occasionally, plans were made for peaceful, unforced political or economic integration– literally the fusion of parts into a greater whole. Some of these plans and initiatives were intended as mere means to promote economic prosperity; for others, European political unity was the ultimate goal. Between these ‘functional’ and ‘idealist’ plans, however, no hard and fast dividing line can be drawn.

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, count of Saint-Simon, was one of the important early thinkers of European political unification. In October 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and on the eve of the Congress of Vienna, he drew up a sketch for a united Europe.