"Yalta Europe": 1945-1989

The attempt at European unification since 1945 thus stands out from all earlier attempts by being both peaceful and implemented -- and, thus far, successful, at least in the rudimentary sense of lasting longer without being undone. Now the idealistic interpretation of this historical abnormality is, of course, that we Europeans have at last learned from history. The "European civil war" of 1914 to 1945, that second and still bloodier Thirty Years War, finally brought us to our senses.

Yet this requires a little closer examination. For a start, "peaceful" applies only in the sense of "the absence of hot war," and even that applies only to the continent west of the iron curtain. Think of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, or that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, or even martial law in Poland in 1981-82 -- for which the official Polish term was stan wojenny, literally "the state of war." Moreover, the whole continent was shaped by the experience of cold war, and its twin sister, detente, which might be described as the continuation of cold war by other means. It has become almost commonplace to observe that only after the end of the Cold War do we discover just how much European integration owed to it. Minerva's owl again flies at dusk.

Firstly, there was the Soviet Union as negative external integrator. West Europeans pulled together in face of the common enemy: as they had before the Turks or the Tatars. Secondly, there was the United States as positive external integrator. Particularly in the earlier years, the United States pushed very strongly for West European integration, making it almost a condition for further Marshall [Plan] aid. Before the EEC there was the American-led Economic Cooperation Agency. A speech by its administrator, Paul Hoffman, in October 1949, reads like a recipe for the EC's "single market" of 1992. Without wanting to get into an academic debate about the definition of a hegemon, there was certainly a hegemonic element in this pressure for integration. In later decades, the United States was at times more ambivalent about building up what might be a rival trading bloc, but in broad geopolitical terms it did support West European integration throughout the Cold War.

Thirdly, the Cold War helped, quite brutally, by cutting off most of Central and Eastern Europe behind the iron curtain. This meant that European integration could begin between a relatively small number of nation-states, bourgeois democracies at a roughly comparable economic level, and with important older elements of common history. As has often been pointed out, the frontiers of the original European Economic Community of six are roughly coterminous with those of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. It was also centered around what economic historians have nicely called the "golden banana" of European economic development, stretching from Manchester to Milan, via the low countries, eastern France and western Germany. The balance changed with the accession of the poorer southern states of Spain and Portugal, and the south-eastern European Greece, but by that time other member-states (and above all the German Croesus) seemed rich enough to "carry" them, with substantial transfers from richer to poorer through the Community budget.

Moreover, within this corner of the continent there were important convergences, or trade-offs between the political and economic interests of the nations involved. Alan Milward has powerfully argued that what happened in the political economy of the post-war years was not the end of the nation-state but, to quote his striking title, The European Rescue of the Nation-State. The crucial trade-offs were, of course, between France and Germany. Painting with a very broad brush one could say: between French iron and German coal, making the European Coal and Steel Community, traditionally considered the first major step on the high road to European Union; between the massive protection of French agriculture by the Common Agricultural Policy, and easier European market access for German industry, in the European Economic Community; and, especially from the Elysée Treaty of 1963 onward, between France's interest in maintaining its position as the grande nation by exercising the political leadership of "Europe" and Germany's interest in international rehabilitation after Nazism, exporting to the European market and securing Western support for its Ostpolitik.

Next page: National Self-Interest vs. Idealism: 1945-1989