Introduction:
The
prolific 17th
century European polyglot, philosopher, and mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz once said that "ambition is not less effective than
love" in achieving political ends beneficial to all (Roldan
2011). In particular, what he meant by this was that were a sovereign
to decide to invest himself in the project of uniting the European
continent, it would matter not whether this sovereign did it with the
altruistic objective of establishing “perpetual peace,” or if he
pushed such advocacy on the self-interested premise of causing the
collapse of the House of Hapsburg for his own relative gain. So long
as the effort worked to the ultimate political and material benefit
of the vast majority, it was something to be supported in good
conscience regardless of the hegemonic agency's ulterior motives.
Leibniz's point was greater than that, though; he was attempting to
illustrate through example a position of political realism in his
critique of a popular treatise advocating 'perpetual peace' in
Europe. Written in 1713 by Charles-Irénée Castel, better known
simply by his religious title of the abbé de Saint-Pierre, the
treatise advocated for the formation of a confederal union not only
of Europe, but ultimately the entire world in idealistic eventuality
(Roldan 2011). Leibniz, though he deeply admired Castel's work in its
attempt and good intentions, asserted that the monk had not solved
the perennial issue of how to make monarchs “want perpetual peace,”
even if he believed that were such a hypothetical objective achieved,
said perpetual peace was conceivably possible. The problem was not
logistics or a lack of aggregate human ability to stop war, but the
vicissitudes of human nature itself; and though we now live in an era
where a form of European political unity has been achieved (whether
meaningfully or nominally is a matter of strong debate), these very
same critical observations ring just as true in form as they did at
their time of conception three centuries ago. This essay will briefly
summarize, investigate, and analyze the history of the concept of
European unity and will present the ways in which such an
investigation can give us a deeper understanding of the issues facing
the contemporary European Union by posing
and answering—to the greatest extent possible—what could be
described as either one question in two parts, or two questions in
one. First: what was the proposed anatomy of—and the ultimate cause
of failure for—attempts at European unity proposed prior to the
20th
century? And two: based on the demonstrable presupposition that such
unifying projects were conceived of and organized in opposition to a
larger perceived external threat and lacking such a similar cohesive
opposition narrative as the Soviet Cold War threat with which the
modern European project legitimized much of its
supranational-integrationist character, what kind of future can be
reasonably expected for the EU based on the patterns observed in a
broader evaluation of the history of such a union in both concept and
attempt? As well, all of this will be contextualized within the
complexity of our present era, a direct result of the fracturing of
these internal and external unifying grand narrative structures and
contrasts across the world as a result of globalization and
asymmetrical warfare with hostile non-state actors such as ISIS and
al Qaeda.
'European Unity' Then and Now:
As of November 2017, the time of this writing, it seems
clear to both political observers and scholars of political science
that the primary source of dissonance in the Union exists in a clash
between localized identities and cosmopolitan neoliberal capitalism
(Pan 2016). The Brexit referendum of June 2016 is a clear
demonstration of this as one of the greatest points of domestic
controversy in the United Kingdom at the time was the prolific hiring
of workers from Central and Eastern Europe for menial employment at
low wages throughout the country. This was a result of an essential
component of the EU Single Market facilitating the free movement of labor and capital throughout the Eurozone. The fact that such a
concern for lost jobs focused on the continued presence of other
Europeans simultaneous to the destabilizing influx of refugees and
migrants from the war-zones of Libya, Iraq, and Syria speaks volumes
on the resurfacing showdown between compartmentalized nationalism(s) and European integrationism throughout the
continent. In one respect, it seems logical that long and strongly
established nationalist sentiments would maintain a problematic
magnetism as compared to the attempts to cultivate a larger, though
ethereal, form of European collective identity. On another level,
however, there indeed has been a potent sense of shifting common
European identity for just over half a millennia which, up to and
including the inauguration of the European Union itself with the
signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1952, has found greater stimulus and
dissemination with the publication of formal and informal proposals
for a European political union, sometimes in the form of a massive
continental superstate, and other times through the looser
intergovernmental framework of institutions established to facilitate
perpetual multilateral dialogue and coordination. Such proposed
multilateralism was an anomalous novelty until it saw practice
through meaningful implementation in the 20th
century amidst the aftermath of the immense industrial slaughters and
destruction of World War's One and Two. However, collective
identities are not forged with any meaningful longevity merely from
proposition or disseminated discourse and debate alone, but from the
composition, mythologies and institutional arrangements of concrete
political entities such as states, confederations, and empires. In
this respect, the echo of European unity was established in
territorial precedent during the zenith years of the Roman Empire,
though at this time there was no such concept—and thus no such
thing—as “Europe” as we would understand it today. The story of
the contemporary concept of Europe as we know it begins with the
Christian religiously-centred geographical abstraction of
Christianitas, which
gained popular use for the first time in Late Antiquity with the
ever-growing number of devotees to the new faith who scattered
themselves across the Roman Empire—first, to flee persecution from
Roman authorities, and not long after to evangelize so-called
'pagans' (Pasture 2015). This concept of Christianitas
soon became supplanted by the near-equivalent and more ubiquitously
recognizable term Christendom as
the years of Late Antiquity faded into what would come to be known as
the early medieval period (Pasture 2015). It is here that our survey
investigation and analysis begins.
A Brief
History of 'Europe' in Concept and Etymology:
Although the ancient Greeks coined the
term “Europa” long prior even to the establishment of early Rome,
it was not an abstraction of geography, but rather the name of one of
their Phoenician deities. A princess god who, aside from a shared
terminological etymology with “Europe,” had no relation to or
influence on the future concept or its associated cultural and
political practices (Pasture 2015). During their time, the Greeks
actually feared and despised the greater European landmass and its
inhabitants, preferring instead to cultivate a set of tentative
connections in and knowledge of the civilizations to the east of
their island-dotted peninsula. Historical records indicate that the
term “Europe” was first used in reference to the continent (or
segments of it) by Pope Gregory I in the 6th
century not, as one may assume, in self-reference, but rather in
reference to invading tribes from the northern Germanic territories.
The term is then first used in external reference by those who we
would traditionally consider culturally 'non-European' in the middle
of the 8th century
as evidenced from the work of an otherwise unknown Mozarab chronicler
living in Umayyad Spain (Pasture 2015). In his writings, he
identified Christian forces under the command of the Frankish King
Charles Martel as “European,” thus implying that the Umayyad's
were not. This demonstrates both the cultural centrality and the
geographic ambiguity of Europe in concept throughout this and
subsequent centuries, up to and including the present European Union.
It is also a potent example of how external threats played a central
role in the process of forming a European identity via contrast,
regardless of whether such terminology was utilized by those external
or internal to its amorphous and constantly shifting purview of
definition. However, to provide a full synopsis of Europe as a basic
cultural and geographical concept is beyond the scope of this paper.
Having examined the relative linguistic and etymological origins of
such, we will now turn to investigate the origins and first recorded
instances of proposals for a political union of Europe (eg:
Christendom), starting
with the Hussite George of Poděbrady who was King of Bohemia in the
15th century from
the year of his coronation in 1458 until his death in 1471.
The Project for Perpetual Peace:
George of Poděbrady, as sovereign of
Bohemia, penned a formal diplomatic document known in English as the
“Treaty on the Establishment of Peace
throughout Christendom” sometime during or
just prior to the year 1464 (Šimůnek 2010). Predicated on the
aforementioned religious-territorial idea of Christendom,
which at the time would have consisted geographically of roughly most
of Europe west of the modern Russian Federation (with some notable
exceptions), the Treaty sought to establish a permanent political
union of equal but independent Christian/European states, both terms
being at this time fluidly interchangeable (Šimůnek 2010, Pasture
2015). It differed quite radically from the conventional instruments
of medieval diplomacy in that its proposal took the obtuse form of a
multilateral agreement at a time when bilateral arrangements between
realms were largely—if not entirely—the exclusive norm and
practice. It is in respect to this attempted multilateralism that
historians as well as political scholars of modern Europe assert King
George's Treaty proposal to be the first clear precedent to the
contemporary European Union in 'deep' history.1
George was also a part of the pre-Protestant Christian reformers
known as the Hussite's and was thus considered a heretic by the Holy
See in Rome. His strategic calculus in penning his proposal for a
Christian union was in part influenced by his desire to offset the
overwhelming coercive power of the Catholic Church (Šimůnek 2010)
and can thus additionally be seen as an antecedent component to the
Protestant Reformation of the 16th
century. Although serious formal discussions to realize this vision
of political unity did indeed take place between 1462 and 1464, these
efforts stalled and ultimately fell apart entirely as vitriolic
accusations of heresy were flung back and forth and wars of words
often escalated into physical military confrontations between states
and sectarian actors (Šimůnek 2010). King George of Poděbrady died
in 1471 having failed in his efforts to bring together the realms of
Christendom in a political union on the justification of uniting against the
Turkish threat to the east (Šimůnek 2010). Although a single
sovereign had at least nominally taken up the cause of a relative
form of 'perpetual peace,' the seminal impediment observed by Leibniz
as to how to make monarchs “want perpetual peace” on a scale
significant enough to truly manifest meaningful or even somewhat
tangible results had not been overcome. Regardless, an important
historical precedent had now been set which would be largely
overlooked for centuries as new proposals for European unity began to
appear independently of the example set by King George. One such
proposal was the treatise mentioned in the introduction to this paper
written by Charles-Irénée Castel, the abbé de Saint-Pierre, in
1713. Titled the “Projet pour rendre la paix
perpétuelle en Europe” (which literally
translates as the “Project to make peace perpetual in Europe”),
Castel's treatise was inspired by and based on an even earlier
proposal made by William Penn, the notorious English Quaker and
colonial founder of the modern day American state of Pennsylvania, in
1693. Penn wrote that to secure peace and justice, the powers of
Europe had to organize an international meeting place at which a
European Parliament, assembly of Estates, or Imperial Diet could
congregate on a constantly ongoing multilateral basis to coordinate
certain matters of policy as well as arbitrate disputes between
members of equal standing (Pasture 2015). In his proposal for a
European Parliament, Penn even went so far as to elaborate on the the
amount of seats any particular member state should reasonably hold,
basing his numbers on population and existing geopolitical power
differentials. The exact details utilized to illustrate his argument
were only hypothetical in his writing seeing as there is no
historical evidence to suggest he was privy to official information
on European demography. In substance, his proposed European
Parliament was not only much before its time, it was also so
uncannily similar to the mandate and structure of the modern European
Parliament of the 21st
century as to seem almost accidentally prophetic. His proposal was
also unprecedented in its injunction to enrol the non-Christian
powers of the Muscovites and Turks into this supranational union as
fully equal partners, thus uniquely marking the phenomenon of war
itself as the primary external threat against which all
should congregate in solidarity to defeat or, at the very least,
restrain (Pasture 2015). In a continent still physically at war with
itself over matters of religious conscience, however, Penn's was an
extremely outlandish proposal. Though it was studied sincerely by
scholars of subsequent decades and extracted of its most seminal
insights, the broadness of his vision was not something that would
convince a critical mass of already bickering and prejudicial
sovereigns to take up the project of perpetual peace as it was based
not on any sense of political realism, but instead on an extreme
idealism. In other words, it was based on love and did not appeal to
any executive ambition with which it could have perhaps garnered some
relative leverage in the political discourse taking place within the
corridors of power. Castel's work essentially repeated this naive
faux pas as he, like Penn, was working not from a place of political
sobriety, but religiously-inspired idealism. In both cases, the
intentions were laudable, but Leibniz's central point still stood. In
the century and a half following the publication of Castel's work,
two of history's great philosophical powerhouses, Immanuel Kant and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, would also articulately insert themselves into
the debate and subsequent discourse on this “Project for Perpetual
Peace.” Having elaborated in detail on the primary precedents under
inspection in this writing, however, we will unfortunately be largely
overlooking the contributions of these two men as limitations on
length restrict them both to beyond the scope of this paper. Having
established the key precedents to the modern project of European
unity, we will now briefly touch upon the events of the mid-20th
century directly leading into the 1952 signing of the Treaty of Rome
before concluding with a predictive analysis as to what all of the
above can tell us about the geopolitical future of the continent as
we edge closer to the dawn of the 2020's.
Churchill,
the United States of Europe,
and a
Closing Word on Europe's Today and Tomorrow:
Winston Churchill, known best for his tenure as British
Prime Minister during the chaotic period of the Second World War, had in
years prior already been exposed to the cause of politically uniting
Europe through the public relations campaigns and explicit overtures
of such prominent organizations as the International Paneuropean
Union created and lead by the famous Austrian-Japanese philosopher
and politician Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (Packwood 2016).
In fact, Churchill had been pondering European unity in some form or
another since as early as 1904, as evidenced in papers on the topic
which were in his possession at the time. His advocacy for a
proverbial 'United States of Europe' began officially, however, on
February 15th,
1930 with the publication of an eponymously titled article in the
Saturday Evening Post where
he described the overwhelming need to preserve what he identified as
'the best of European civilization' by abolishing “the tangled
growth and network of tariff barriers designed to restrict trade and
production to particular areas,” thus consequently returning to
“the old foundations of Europe” in which unity was contiguously
imposed and maintained by such venerated authorities as the Roman
Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the “catholicity” of European
Christendom, and
Napoleon Bonaparte (Packwood 2016). Finally, it seemed like there was
a chance of convincing a critical mass of sovereigns (or, rather, the
political equivalents of their time) to endorse a concrete form of
continental political unity. The destruction of (particularly
western) Europe as a result of World War Two prompted a radical
intervention from the United States in the form of the Marshall Plan
(Pasture 2015). Its mandate was to bankroll as well as provide
physical assistance in the reconstruction of the continent, but it
came with a catch. In return for this unprecedented international
assistance, Europe had to
agree to re-organize
itself along the lines of a bonafide United States of Europe. Though
part of this was motivated by an altruistic will to assist devastated
allies and alleviate the suffering of fellow human beings, another
motivation—just as important—was to guarantee against the threat
of further Soviet communist expansion, whether in the form of
directly annexed territory or the exertion of indirect geopolitical
influence. Churchill's official position on the matter notably
changed following the agreement to and implementation of the Marshall Plan. Once a great supporter of the United
Kingdom being “with Europe” but “not of it,” he suddenly came
out in relative support of Britain's incorporation into this united
European polity (Packwood 2016). Thus, through the force of
collective economic compromise in the wake of the most devastating
war in human history, the new unipolar American global superpower
bargained a critical mass of these colloquial European sovereigns
into finally endorsing political union. Leibniz's objection to the
abbé de Saint-Pierre had finally been overcome by the force of
history and the quirks of an ascendant world order, the likes of
which the world had never known before. However, history is the story
of precedents which are set and later used to guide future efforts,
but too often we are dragged into new situations and world order's
that have no precedent or existing playbook and which we must
awkwardly stumble through blindly in order to truly receive their
lessons for posterity. The 21st
century is one such era, and at this point, we can only hope we as a
race will make it through this catastrophic bottleneck to pass on
what we have learned to future generations through the precedents we
have—and have yet—to set. The grand unifying narratives of old
have, for the most part, faded entirely or fragmented into the
compartmentalized echo-chambers of partisan identity politics. For
once, there is no clear enemy or conventional threat with defined
borders and a standing army with which to identify collectively in
opposition against. The new 'enemies' are jihadist sleeper-cells and
lone wolves who legally pass as civilians until their deed is clearly
already in process and it is too late to prevent their assault, as
well as the shadowy 'political elite' in Brussels and the many cabals
of elected representatives throughout the member states of the
European Union who seem to be 'collaborating' with them; a worldview
demonstrably acted upon in the slim victory of the 'Leave' campaign
in the UK's Brexit referendum. The state is no longer a standard
basis of identity, but an obtuse vessel in a world order defined
primarily by relational asymmetry between individuals, groups,
organizations, and, yes, even nations themselves on a
nearly-unrestricted scale spanning the length and width of the entire
globe. Previous attempts at and proposals for European unity
throughout history failed because everyone knew far too well who they were and who they were not;
hence a Catholic knew without a doubt that living in peace with a
Lutheran was unthinkable as it was a matter of religious conscience
and risked one losing access to eternal life in the Heavenly Kingdom.
The current enterprise at European unity, if it does not collapse
entirely under the weight of old ghosts and bad habits that refuse to
die, will remain in at least relative precariousness—embroiled in
political spats and potentially even outright geopolitical
upheaval—until the end of humanity, and thus the end of large
groups with which a spectrum of conflicting viewpoints much be
reconciled with and compromised between. Old habits truly do die
hard, as evidenced in our desire for that Biblical Shining City on a
Hill, or for our desire to see an end to conflict in and of itself
when conflict is an inevitable fact of life insofar as we have ever
known or observed it. In conclusion, although length restricted him
from incorporation through meaningful analysis in this paper, it
seems that the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from his “A
Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe”
are just as true now as they were in 1782:
“The present balance of Europe is just
firm enough to remain in perpetual oscillation without losing itself
altogether; and, if our troubles cannot increase, still less can we
put an end to them, seeing that any sweeping revolution is henceforth
an impossibility” (Rousseau 1782).
1'Deep history' here meaning that it is beyond the usual purview of European Union history as investigated and reviewed within the limited confines of the 20th/21st centuries and their many seminal moments. Essentially, it is the investigation of precedents to European unity prior to 1900 CE, whereas anything after this threshold would be considered 'recent' history for the sake of this paper.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN ESSAY WRITTEN FOR A CLASS ON EUROPEAN UNION & INTEGRATION AT A POST-SECONDARY LEVEL.
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