Informal Politics of Integration: Christian Democratic and Transatlantic Networks in the Creation of ECSC core Europe

Abstract

The historiography of the origins of the European Union (EU) has two main weaknesses. It is too state-centric and fails to conceptualise the embedded nature of ideas and their role in the creation and evolution of an integrated 'core Europe' after World War II. With the opening up of the archives of national governments and supranational institutions, research on the contemporary history of the EU has steadily moved on into the 1970s. We argue, however, that it is crucial to revisit the early postwar period to develop a more sophisticated notion and historical narrative of the formation of the supranational core Europe of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of six founding member-states. Sectoral integration in coal and steel did not lead directly to horizontal integration in the customs union of the European Economic Community (EEC). It created important path dependencies concerning some structural characteristics and policy solutions, however, especially the (self-) exclusion of Britain, the functional use of economic integration with long-term political as well as economic objectives, the introduction of the supranational principle and antitrust competition legislation. Historians have predominately conceived of the formation of the ECSC as the result of interstate bargaining of 'national interests' by governments as cohesive, purposeful actors.1 Diplomatic historical accounts have been shaped by underlying 'realist' assumptions about the definition of such interests by autonomous foreign and European policy-making elites. In the case of France, such national interests included the control of Germany through integration and securing a dominant political leadership role for France, and in the case of Germany, regaining national sovereignty and achieving the integration of the newly created Federal Republic of Germany in Western Europe and the Atlantic Alliance on the basis of equality. The notion of American 'influence' in the historiography of transatlantic relations after 1945 similarly derives from the assumption of European state actors' interests in the involvement of the United States as 'ultimate arbiter'2 in Western European politics.3 In this perspective, the United States primarily had powerful political, economic and military resources to secure for itself a dominant position in the 1. As an introduction to EU historiography see W. KAISER,

Europeanism: A Historical View

“…20 But beyond this solidly Western-European 'core', there has been greater dissensus over the eligibility of countries from other more 'peripheral' regions for inclusion, and the conditions that would have to be met for this to happen: in descending order of eligibility, Scandinavia, Iberia, Eastern/Southeastern Europe, Britain, Turkey, and Russia. 21 Historically, Europeanisms have exhibited many competing tendencies to 'naturalise' the borders of 'Europe' in completely different ways. 22 Some were more restrictive, drawing the borders of 'true Europe' narrowly, as with the rival projects of Mitteleuropa ('Central Europe') versus the Franco-British Union, or the later Nazi transmogrification of 'Western' European solidarity into a campaign against perceived 'Eastern' territorial enemies 'without' and racial and ideological enemies 'within'.…”

Bringing History Back In To the Study of Transnational Networks in European Integration

“…For a long time diplomatic and economic historians conceived of western European integration after 1945 as not much more than a process of multi-lateral bargaining of ‘national interests’ (Kaiser 2006; Gilbert 2008). More recently, however, a new generation of contemporary historians have re-conceptualised early European integration as the slow formation of an incipient ‘trans- and supranational polity’ (Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen 2009) and some have explicitly utilized the network approach as a heuristic device (Kaiser and Leucht 2008), for example for reconstructing the crucial role of Christian democratic party networks in ‘core Europe’ integration (Kaiser 2007) or the impact of transatlantic expert networks on the anti-trust and institutional provisions of the treaty that created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951–52 (Leucht 2008; 2006). Other scholars have analysed important dimensions of supranational politics and policy-making which are highly relevant to understanding the role of network-type relations for ECSC/EEC politics, such as the role of supranational institutions like the Commission (Ludlow 2006) or of interest groups (Knudsen 2009a) in shaping new supranational policies.…”