The European Union, we are always told, was born in the fires of World War II. In our collective memory, the European project was a phoenix that rose from the ashes of 1945. First there was war. Then there was unity.
But is it really that simple? In reality it was not until 1950 that the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced the intention to build Europe’s first supranational institution. What happened during these five years?
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Europe was a picture of chaos and desolation. Most of its major cities had been damaged or destroyed. Its landscapes had been ravaged, and more than 35 million people killed. Across most of the continent, the institutions that we today take for granted – such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government – were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates had soared, economies had collapsed, and the European population hovered on the brink of starvation.
There was nothing united about Europe during this time. Germans in particular were universally hated. The future Justice Minister of Czechoslovakia, Prokop Drtina, spoke for many when he proclaimed that ‘there are no good Germans, only bad and even worse ones’. The whole German nation had been responsible for bringing Hitler to power, ‘and the whole nation must bear the punishment’. The expulsion of millions of German-speakers – not only from Czechoslovakia but also Poland, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia – lasted for several years, and left much of central Europe in a state of ethnic turmoil.
But it was not only Germans who were hated. As I wrote in Savage Continent, my book about the aftermath of the war, the Nazis had opened a Pandora’s Box of other hatreds all across the continent. Poles and Ukrainians, who had first started massacring one another during the Nazi occupation, continued to do so in 1946 and 1947, long after the war was supposed to be over. Serbs sought revenge upon Croats, Slovenians upon Italians, Slovaks upon Hungarians; and the end of the war brought little respite for Europe’s Jews, who were forced to flee the continent in their hundreds of thousands because of renewed anti-Semitism.
Even more serious was the fratricidal hatred between those who shared the same nationality, but who had differing political beliefs about what the postwar Europe should look like. French resistance fighters executed 10,000 of their own countrymen after the liberation in the name of justice – but many went on to instigate riots and strikes throughout the late 1940s, and even blew up the newly repaired train lines in an attempt to destabilise the new French government. Italian partisans avenged themselves upon more than 15,000 suspected Fascists in the aftermath of the war, but then expanded their campaign of violence to include businessmen, aristocrats and industrialists. Greek Communists fought a brutal civil war against Greek nationalists that lasted until 1949.
The European landscape was so fragmented after 1945 that observers from the United States began to worry about the possibility of a continent-wide civil war. In 1947 American diplomats warned of a possible revolution in northern Italy; and the State Department claimed that Communist influence was so strong in France that they might seize power at any moment. In central and eastern Europe these fears were already coming true. One by one the governments of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia fell to Communist takeovers.
Alarmed by what they were seeing, America finally decided to take action. In 1947 the Secretary of State, George Marshall, proposed a massive program of aid for Europe – partly to help Europeans rebuild, but mostly to stave off the political unrest that threatened to engulf the continent. The program was offered to all of Europe, including the Soviet Union, on the condition that the participating states accepted American industrial practices, dropped trade barriers and cooperated more closely with one another. Unsurprisingly, those states that had already fallen to Communism refused to accept America’s conditions. The countries of western Europe, by contrast, seized the opportunity with both hands. In one move the fault line between East and West had finally broken open.
The Cold War turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Europe. By providing them with a common enemy, it gave western European countries a cause that they could finally unite around. It also gave them an incentive to accept West Germany back into the community of nations at a time when hatred towards Germans was still rife. Over the following decades the European project grew to encompass a common market, common policies, common laws and eventually also common citizenship and a common currency. Such things would have been unthinkable without the Cold War, which turned the idea of unity from a pipe dream into an absolute necessity.
In the long run, the Cold War also played its part in eastern Europe. The brutality of the Eastern Bloc regimes so alienated their own people that, when the Communist system finally broke down, these people also embraced the European dream. It is the memory of Communist atrocities, as much as Nazi ones, that inspires their loyalty to the EU today.
The five years between the end of World War II and the Schuman Declaration remain one of the least appreciate periods of European history. This chaotic time was the primeval swamp out of which today’s Europe crawled. If the EU remains one of our world’s strongest international institutions, it is at least in part because Europeans remember what it was like to have no functioning institutions at all.
The memory of the Second World War might indeed have inspired the desire for European unity, but it was the threat of the Cold War that finally galvanized European statesmen, and their American allies, into action.
Today, when we once again have very real enemies knocking at our door, one can only pray that this too might end up being a blessing in disguise.
Thanks Keith, it is good to be reminded! barbara