If in Ukraine the admiration and absolute lack of criticism towards the European Union were a bit tiring, we also idealize this entity. While the conservative part of society sees the abuses and shortcomings of the community, we see in the roots of the EU some idealized creation of a ‘Europe of nations’ or a ‘Europe of homelands’. This slogan was the crowning European calling card of General Charles de Gaulle, whose anti-American and relatively pro-Soviet stance should certainly not inspire the Poles.
Another aspect of idealizing the beginnings of the EU is the repetition of statements about the Christian worldview of the creators of Western unification – Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet and Alcide De Gasperi. However, all four statesmen had many pan-European demands that are not necessarily inconsistent with the current direction of EU development. The right likes to judge Altiero Spinelli, the Italian communist whose manifesto from Ventonete was supposed to poison the continent with the idea of federalism, of the honor and faith of Altiero Spinelli.
And so we have a fairy tale about the Union with holy knights and an evil dragon, after the defeat we will live happily ever after.
In the meantime, there are many traces that Europe was already put on the track of ‘federalization’ at the beginning of unification. The very fact that the ‘under-determination’ of the objectives and the ‘under-determination’ of the EU language has become an unwritten rule of the treaties is a certain indication of this. If these ‘holy’ creators of the EU wanted a community of nations, where are the precise provisions on this?
In the preamble to the Treaty on the European Coal and Steel Community of 18 April 1951, the authors wrote that they were determined:
lay the foundations for institutions that can from now on manage their general interest.
It’s hard not to read this sentence preparations for the supremacy of the center over the periphery. Especially because the treaty presupposes a response to the challenges of a new era, which was seen as a game of large political entities.
Jean Monnet commented on this problem:
The sovereign nations of the past no longer provide a space in which the problems of the present can be solved. The community as such is only a stage towards the organizational forms of tomorrow’s world.
This ‘world of tomorrow’ was – again – an undefined goal. Monnet was founded in 1955 Action Committee for a United States of Europe – a group advocating for a federal solution, being introduced before our eyes today.
Konrad Adenauer wrote in 1945 that this connection of the European economies was ‘the desired end goal of the union of Western European countries’, but he also warned that the future unification of Germany with the establishment of the capital in Berlin would restore the Prussian spirit and the concept of “German Europe”. Adenauer also did not answer the question of how creating a single economic space will maintain the multitude of political decision-making centers.
It’s time for a little quote from Robert Schuman. Perhaps he was the healthy root of the ‘Europe of nations’? This is how he convinced his colleagues in May 1950:
This plan produced the form or a transnational model for a European structure that was initially intended to be sector-specific, but as such could be extended to other areasin the near or distant past.
Now let someone say that this belief results in a “Europe of homelands”.
The most interesting thing, however, is to put hope in the thought of Alcide De Gasperi, who called himself “an Austrian on loan to Italy.” This journalistic self-definition refers to his early political career as a parliamentarian in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to which this Italian statesman often referred. Although De Gasperi actually spoke of the ‘Christian idea’, he added that
It is not my intention to introduce religious criteria or exclusivity in the assessment of our history.
In short, no religious, national or class issue can do that prove to be more important than the unification of the continent.
De Gasperi’s entire biography shows this he was building an expanded form of the Habsburg monarchy, ruled from headquarters by benevolent Christians, but at least allowing individual countries autonomy. Let it be an irony of fate that the British favorite of the Third Polish Republic – Norman Davies – has just published an extensive popular science work devoted to Galicia.
However, it is no longer a simple irony, but an intellectual pathology, that with so many departments and institutes of European studies in Poland we cannot reach for biographies or sources of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’, because no one is concerned with them. In terms of content, the debate about the Vistula on the EU resembles boxing, boys with amputated hands.
However, if conservatives want to reform the European Union, it is worth developing a broader formula and a more current proposal, because a return to the sources (“Europe of the homelands”), which do not exist, does not bode well . for success.
Source: wPolityce