number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

Allegiance – The Past and the Future 13
outcome of the traditional foreign policy objectives of states see the historical continuities
in that recently fashionable subject 'The Rise and Fall of Nations'. 12 The
United Kingdom, France and Germany all 'fell' and with them Europe, excluding
Russia and the Soviet Union which, like the USA, 'rose'. The European Communities
are an attempt to protect Europe from the worst effects of its fall, on the whole
a predictable foreign policy response to the relentless flow of historical change. 13
From this idea comes the interest in discovering a pre-history of post-1945 integration
in the inter-war period, in the way in which it may have been foreshadowed by
French diplomacy in the post-1918 settlement or in the Briand proposals, for
example. 14 Those who see integration as an act of human will similarly seek its
intellectual pre-history in the inter-war period, particularly in European federalist
thinking and in the small number of marginal political figures, such as Coudenhove-Kalergi,
who propagandised the idea of a European 'unity'. 15 The assumption
seems to be that there are intellectual links to the founding fathers of the European
Community, although if there are they are proving remarkably hard to discover.
Those who interpret integration as the refoundation of the nation-state see a historical
continuity from the institution of universal suffrage after the First World War,
the growth of mass democratic political parties and their growing domination of
both parliaments and executive government, and the inter-war experiments with
welfare and employment policies. 16 The Weimar Republic peeps shyly from their
work as an infant prototype of the ambitious post-1945 state.
For those, lastly, who see integration as a culmination of irreversible long-run
economic trends the continuities are more broken. The permeability of European
national frontiers to the movement of goods, capital and people was on all measurements
greater between 1870 and 1914 than in the inter-war period and especially
greater than in the 1930s. It is thus the inter-war period with its temporary reversal
of these immutable economic trends which is the historical puzzle. European integration
is the predictable political response to the development of a universal international
capitalist economy, a universal path of technological development, and the
inevitable fact that the proportion of 'national' income earned outside the frontier
will grow as a universal pattern of development requires national economies to
12. P. KENNEDY, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict
from 1500 to 2000, London, 1988.
13. An argument specifically made by B. SUPPLE, "Economic History and the Decline of Britain",
The Economic History Review, vol. XIVII, no. 3, 1994.
14. "Britain’s First "No" to Europe: Britain and the Briand Plan 1929-1930" in European Studies
Review, vol. 10, 1980; P. STIRK (ed.), European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period, London,
1989.
15. A. BOSCO, Federal Union and the Origins of the "Churchill Proposal", The Federalist Debate in
the United Kingdom from Munich to the Fall of France 1938-1940, London, 1992. S. Pistone, "Il
ruolo di Altieri Spinelli nella genesi dell’art. 38 della comunità Europea di Defesa e del progetto di
Comunità Politica Europea" in G. TRAUSCH (ed.), Die europäische Integration vom Schuman-
Plan bis zu den Verträgen von Rom, Beiträge des Kolloquiums in Luxemburg 17.-19. Mai 1989,
Baden-Baden, 1993.
16. A.S. MILWARD and V. SØRENSEN, "Interdependence or integration? A national choice", in A.S.
MILWARD et al., The Frontier, op. cit.