League of Nations

Photo by Everett Collection

At the close of the First World War, alongside the peace treaties such as the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations is created. In some ways, this looks like the international organisation that people have been strongly advocating for: an organisation of member States, not quite a sovereign State of its own, committed to trying to preserve an international peace through regular meetings, councils, voting procedures and so on.

The League of Nations is envisaged as a genuinely international body that isn’t limited to Europe, but, significantly, the American Senate blocks American participation. So, although some Latin American countries and other non-European countries are members of the League of Nations, the major powers are European.

When we study the League of Nations, we’re mostly interested in its ultimate failure to preserve the peace in Europe. From one point of view, the League of Nations is a failed European union, but it goes beyond Europe, too.

Interwar visions of European unity

The other new elements in the interwar period are on the left and the right. On the one hand, Lenin’s Bolsheviks take power in Russia in 1917 and the Russian Empire is transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They have an argument about how the USSR might relate to a United States of Europe or not, with the vision of exporting the Russian Revolution to Western Europe. This is the Bolshevik hope that Russia is the weakest link in the imperialist chain, and a revolution in Russia will be the trigger for a series of revolutions further West, in Germany, France, Britain and so on. These Marxists imagine fraternal socialist governments federating together in some kind of European order.

On the other hand, there’s another discourse of European union from anti-communists. Right-wing Catholics, such as the German lawyer Carl Schmitt, resurrect these ideas of a European union of Christian powers that will be explicitly anti-Bolshevik. In this view, Europe will unify against the Bolshevik threat, perhaps with the pope occupying a privileged position of spiritual power.

Catholic interest in Europeanisation

Other, less right-wing, Catholic forces are also interested in a process of Europeanisation. For example, in Weimar Germany, Catholics are a minority, and they worry about how they will be able to control politics with a majority Lutheran population. Some Catholic intellectuals are interested in the idea of working towards a European confederation in which some powers will be devolved to German federal territories, and other powers will evolve to supranational institutions. They see this Europeanised Germany as the framework within which Catholics will flourish best.

That’s significant because after the Second World War, it’s Christian Democrats – the main political organ of German Catholics – who play such an important role in creating the European Economic Community. The politicians who are engaged in those discussions are the ones who, when they were younger, were reading this interwar material about how Europe might come to the aid of German Catholics.

Pan-Europa Movement

These are arguments about European union with a Catholic dimension or as a bulwark against Soviet communism. We also see that in the speculations of the Pan-Europa Movement, which imagine a European power bloc emerging as a counterweight to both the British Empire on the one hand and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the other hand. Pan-Europa still included a great deal of Africa and all of French Indochina; all the colonies were folded into Pan-Europa. This isn’t a vision of a post-imperial Europe at all.

We’re probably most familiar with these ideas of the large-scale international redrawing of the map via the transnational States that George Orwell imagines in 1984: Oceania, Eastasia, Eurasia. But Orwell is riffing on this interwar discourse that involved ideas of Pan-America, Pan-Europa and so on. Towards the middle of the 20th century, these are all different ways in which international geopolitics is being reimagined, with the basic units of international politics becoming much larger than in the past.

Rise of fascist powers

Photo by Everett Collection

The other new development in interwar Europe is the triumph of the fascist powers – Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain and, as we move towards the Second World War, the failure of democratic regimes in parts of Central Europe.

They sometimes also have a discourse of European cooperation. Ultimately, the Nazis try to conquer Europe; once again, that looks like the old project of universal monarchy or conquest. There is a discourse in the upper levels of the Nazi regime about how to achieve forms of European economic coordination, although as with Napoleon in the 19th century, there’s a tension between a rhetoric of European cooperation and the imperatives of keeping the Nazi war machine going, which means plundering the territories that are under Nazi domination.

Continuity with the past

These are some of the new elements of interwar politics: Pan-Europa visions of Europe explicitly understood as anti-Bolshevism; visions of Europe that are associated with the rise of fascism. Yet, alongside that, we see recognisable versions of the older arguments continuing. Liberals are invested in the League of Nations and the idea of it being the centrepiece of a pacific international order of democratic constitutional powers.

There are versions of socialist internationalism that we’re familiar with from the past. The kind of people who were associates of Richard Cobden and the Quakers in the 19th century, interested in international tribunals and international arbitration, are those who run the League of Nations Societies in different parts of England. They have a very recognisable continuity with the past.

A proposal of unity

Aristide Briand, a leading French politician, proposes a form of unity between France and Germany around the turn of the 1930s. That’s sometimes seen as the first serious proposal to come from the heart of a major European governmental power, perhaps since Henri IV in the 16th century or early 17th century. Briand was interested in promoting Franco-German cooperation. It was not especially clear how serious that proposal was, and it falls apart pretty quickly.

Gustav Stresemann, the German politician who’s on the receiving end of this French initiative, falls from power, dies and ends up in disgrace in the German public sphere. The Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great Depression in Europe transforms the diplomatic situation and makes the Briand initiative fade from view. Then, European politics becomes preoccupied by the permanent political crisis in Germany that culminates in the emergence of the National Socialist government in 1933.

That is an interesting moment, when Europeanism briefly becomes a real thing in European international power politics, and not just a set of schemes that intellectuals occasionally consider.

Christian democracy and the EEC

Out of the six European countries that come together to form the European Economic Community – the Benelux countries, West Germany, France and Italy – it’s significant that five of those countries have governments that are dominated by Christian democratic political parties.

So, Christian democracy in the post-war period isn’t just Catholic. Certainly in West Germany, it’s very important that Christian democracy combines both Catholics and Protestants. Christian democracy is obviously not under the control of the Vatican, as so many anti-Catholics say.

Five of the six countries are dominated by Christian democratic politicians. These are people who are on the same ideological wavelength. During the Second World War, when many of them were in exile from Nazis, they were meeting in Geneva and elsewhere; they were in correspondence with one another; they were talking about what the future of a post-Nazi Europe might look like. That is important.

France and European Empire

Photo by Diego Barbieri

However, France isn’t a country dominated by a Christian-democratic government. Republicans are governing in France, in the Fourth Republic. There is a small Christian democratic party towards the end of the 1940s, but it doesn’t become nearly as powerful as Christian democracy does in Germany. So, we may ask why it is that in the 1950s, when the project of Europeanisation gels, Christian democracy seems to be politically in the driving seat. The Christian democrats were able to win enough support from within the French administrative State to make a common international effort succeed.

One of the things we can think about is European Empire. We often tell these stories about how the European Empires fall apart, and then the European powers come together to build the European Economic Community. From another point of view, Europeanisation in the 1950s is a way of trying to keep the European imperial project going. There are people in France who like the idea of Europeanisation because they think that French control of Northwest Africa can only be secured if the French can continue to invest capital in infrastructure projects, and therefore win the consent of the colonised population. Europeanisation, the creation of economic integration in Western Europe, is seen as the way in which Dutch or West German capital can be directed towards French-backed development projects in French Northwest Africa.

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The hidden story of the EU

Gusejnova, D. (2012). Noble Continent? German-Speaking Nobles as Theorists of European Identity in the Interwar Period. In Hewitson, M., & D’Auria, M. (Eds.), Europe in Crisis. Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (pp. 111–133). Berghahn Books.

Kaiser, W. (2007). Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union. Cambridge University Press.

Hansen, P., & Jonsson, S. (2014). Eurafrica: The Untold Story of European Integration and Colonialism. Bloomsbury.

Failed arguments for a European Union: 1919-1939