How Brussels blindness led a Continent to war with Russia
Politicians systematically rejected Schuman's Vision for a democratic, peaceful Europe
In June 1990, forty years after the Schuman Declaration, the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers made a surprising announcement. His proposal laid out the basis for the peace and unity of Europe from the Atlantic to even beyond the Urals.
And surprisingly the proposal had immediate and enthusiastic approval from Brussels to the Kremlin.
Then European leaders, behind closed doors, immediately put the world-changing proposal into the dustbin of history!
We are now all suffering the consequences.
A Continent whole at last?
Right after WW2 when French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman initiated Europe’s peace process and the creation of the European Community, he declared that Russia must be part of Europe’s democratic future. His long-meditated and revolutionary supranational Proposal became French government policy.
When, on 9 May 1950, he made it clear that the European Community was open to all European countries, a journalist asked:
Can Russia join?
Schuman replied: But of course! (Mais oui!)
The sole condition for joining was embodied later in the document of freedoms labeled Declaration commune or Declaration of Interdependence. Schuman called it the great Charter of the Community, recalling the British Magna Carta. All States had to be members of the Council of Europe and its Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Europe’s Magna Carta
The birth-document of the European Community is the Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 April 1951, by the foreign ministers as plenipotentiaries of the Six founding States (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux).
The Charter was signed and sealed at the same time as the Community’s Treaty of Paris and was part of it. The agreement stipulated that all European Community peoples and States must adhere to the freedoms of the Convention of Human Rights of the Council of Europe.
What the Communist leaders of the USSR refused to contemplate — open criticism of the Communist ideology and power structure — became possible only decades later. When the USSR broke up in 1991, Russia, Ukraine and other states joined the Council of Europe and agreed to abide by this Convention.
This was the crucial moment to act to roll out democracy in the newly liberated countries and help peoples recently under Communist domination.
But what happened? Why did Russia and Ukraine never become part of that vision of a democratic Europe? What turned sour in Brussels?
First mistake
The European leaders starting with Jean Monnet buried the Great Charter of the Community. Why? Monnet did not have a hand in it, nor show a grasp of its supranational principles of constitutional law.
His High Authority published an official handbook with all the other documents in the Treaty of Paris: protocols, privileges for officials, exchanges of diplomatic letters, and transitory arrangements. But not the key document: the Great Charter of the Community. It would have allowed officials and public to complain about his internal management short-comings right up to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights.
Monnet was first President of the High Authority (later called Commission). It has the duty to be Guardian of the Treaties. As such, the failure to publish this key document is a lapse or a disdain of responsibility. Archives may still show Monnet’s orders to the printers and should clarify this.
It was not, however, the only publishing short-coming of Monnet that cut Schuman’s supranational constitutionalism out of the picture.
Monnet interred the Charter in the archives of the French Foreign Ministry to be forgotten (it was hoped). If published, it would have subjected all aspects of the Community, its institutions and developments to appeal to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The democratic Charter held no charm for the single-minded Jean Monnet. Even less for the figure who agitated crowds to seize power against France’s Fourth Republic, the autocratic General Charles de Gaulle.
And, horror of horrors, it mentioned Schuman’s new constitutional innovation that was the salvation of Europe and peace. It was like blasphemy to the nationalist aspiration of de Gaulle who wanted to rule from the Atlantic to the Urals like a new Charlemagne. That word he hated? Supranational. What does it mean? A Community based on free choice and democratic control of leaders, said Schuman.
On 18 April 1951 the Charter, was published in all newspapers. Schuman discusses it in Paul Reuter’s legal textbook and elsewhere. It is included in other legal texts, such as Prof Walter Hallstein’s. He was a a strong opponent of de Gaulle’s autocracy.
The Charter did not surface again until it was re-published by the Schuman Project on 8 November 2012, after requesting it from French Europe minister Bernard Cazeneuve. It was still filed there in the Quai d’Orsay archives all the time!
It has the form and legal force of a treaty with designated national plenipotentiaries and their signatures agreeing to specific actions to be taken for popular ratification.
…… It includes:
In signing the treaty founding the European Community for Coal and Steel Community, a community of 160 million Europeans, the contracting parties give proof of their determination to call into life the first supranational institution, and consequently create the true foundation for an organized Europe.
This Europe is open to all European countries that are able to choose freely for themselves. We sincerely hope that other countries will join us in our common endeavour.
…… and is duly signed with legal force.
Brussels refuses
The European Commission still refuses to publish the 3 1/2 page Charter. It also refuses to publish the full text of the Schuman Declaration — in its first page Schuman describes the geo-strategic purpose and goals of the European Community. Why? Monnet had no part in this either. In it Schuman describes his vision of what a supranational Community means for the world.
The original European Community set Europe on 30 glorious years of peace and economic growth, until stunted by the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and the further quadrupled oil price hike of 1979.
These events highlighted the urgent need to expand the original Communities based on the Energy vector, such as Coal and Steel, EEC (Customs Union) and Euratom (nuclear energy). A new Community was needed to cover booming oil and gas commerce and geopolitical blackmail. It was obvious that Europe’s security depended on energy resources and their democratic and stable origin.
How did our leaders miss the rendezvous with destiny and not set a further 30 glorious years into the 2020s?
Second failure
How did the European leaders move from burying the key constitutional documents of Europe’s peace and turn its policy to de facto war?
Self-imposed blindness.
Our Europe is now at war. The economy is in dire straits. Energy and food are in short supply. Seemingly there is no hope of stopping an endless, escalating war in Ukraine. European politicians are pouring arms and tax-payers’ money into Ukraine, while the taxpayers themselves suffer dire consequences.
Was this new, hot and possibly nuclear war the reason why eastern countries wished to join the Communities after suffering the hardships of the Cold War? No, they saw it a moment of peace. In 1989 the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were gaining their independence from the Soviet bloc. The Berlin wall had been broken open.
But what peace awaited the world further east? Russia, Belarus and Ukraine?
Mikhail Gorbachev was showing he was open to more realistic and radical policies. As the fortieth anniversary of the Schuman Proposal of 9 May 1950 approached, some writers asked:
“Where are the Western statesmen who can create a new Community of common interest, based on the Schuman/Monnet method and not on military power, to ensure our own freedoms and really help Russian and other East European peoples gain theirs?”
Lubbers’s Proposal
Then, a few months later, at the 1990 Dublin European Summit, Prime Minister Lubbers made his surprising declaration:
“Just as the Coal and Steel Community after the second world war became the symbol and instrument of ‘no more war’ (particularly between France and Germany), the creation of an Energy Community for Europe could make an important contribution towards preventing new walls from dividing our continent in the future.
“It seems best to focus on European countries, with the European Community or its Member States, taking this initiative. This should result in the European Community, partly within the context of its central European policy, inviting both the Comecon countries and other European countries … to join the Energy Community. There is scope for CSCE involvement...
The area targeted will mainly comprise Central and Eastern Europe and, more especially, the Soviet Union, but also the EFTA countries.”
(Comecon was established in 1949 as the Soviet-style response to the Marshall Plan. It originally comprised USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. It was dissolved in 1991. The CIS, Commonwealth of Independent States, replaced some of this collaboration after the collapse of the USSR.)
Energy dependence could become a democratising political vector on which a supranational Community could be built to reinforce freedom under law. Like the Coal and Steel Community, EEC or Euratom, it could establish relationships of trust and the rule of law by adherence to Human Rights and five democratic Community institutions.
Before 1990-1 the Cold War context was different. So was possible political leverage. Soviet Russian gas had already fired up European industry and warmed Europeans’ homes. The Soviet Union constructed a 5900 km pipeline from the Urengoi fields in Siberia to supply the needs. Moscow thought it could infiltrate communism.
Trans-Atlantic Dispute
But then a major dispute arose. Not between the USSR and Western Europe but between Europe and the USA. The US Congress presented evidence that the Soviet gas line project represented unacceptable dangers to the energy security of Western Europe. President Ronald Reagan concurred. He announced an embargo on advanced pipeline technology. But Europeans – including UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – disagreed. It was their most serious rift.
By the 1990s, however, gas imports had rebounded from around 20 % of the market to a projected half of the ever-increasing gas import dependency. Germany took 45%. Berlin and Bavaria were projected to be 90% dependent on CIS gas.
Gas and oil represented a dangerous political leverage while Russia remained the fountainhead of communist world revolution. When Communism failed, as Schuman predicted, energy could spearhead a means to help Russia, Ukraine and Belarus establish human rights and an open society to build real democratic, common institutions.
The Energy Community with a fair-minded, energy single market therefore presented a powerful stabilized political framework around which both sides would gain. The Community offered means of real democratisation of Russia and Ukraine. It would render these countries more stable and reduce corruption under common European energy law. West Europe would have a reliable supplier of energy. The intermediate Central and Eastern countries, not to mention Norway and Switzerland, would also feel reassured about the permanence of real European democracy.
It is not clear whether American diplomats ever considered or remembered what Schuman said about Russia.
It is not clear if they read the treaty that said the Community was open to all free European countries.
It is also not clear if they made a calculation whether the Lubbers proposal could be implemented in the same form and force as the original European Coal and Steel Community.
The USA and Canada however would understand the multiplied power of a Europe that had a strong democracy, lived in peace with itself, and helped countries as far as Russia integrate with West Europe. Europe reunited with all the countries of central and eastern Europe would be have been far stronger power in the world than USA. NATO, as an arm of US military, would no longer have a post-Soviet enemy.
Schuman’s vision, if carried out, would have helped the whole world live in peace and prosperity that it had never known before.
Third failure
Supranationality became a forbidden topic. Before even the North Americans could react to the Lubbers proposal, the Europeans committed what must be considered, on reflection, as an act of self-destruction. They emasculated the Proposal.
PM Lubbers proposal got immediate public acceptance. At the 1990 Dublin Summit, however, the proposal was little mentioned in the Communiqué. It covered the hot but subsidiary topics of People’s Europe, German re-unification, monetary and political union, Single Market, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and preparation for the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe). The context was still tense. The Baltic States were also agitating for their independence from the USSR at the time.
Meeting behind its closed doors, the Council, composed of national politicians, prime ministers and presidents, emasculated the guts of the idea. It cut out all thoughts of supranationality, Schuman’s proven saving principle of post-war peace.
The Energy Community had already been demoted to a ‘Network’ by the Council secretariat. Worse was to follow. As distinct from classical diplomacy the creation of a Community requires a sustained vision and a fair, long-term goal. It needs to be restricted to those countries directly involved in the core concept of European governance for peace. The only just form of governance that could work while not affecting the constitutions of national States was the supranational.
The mule revealed
Instead, what emerged was a European Energy Charter. USA, Canada and a whole host of other countries piled in to join in a free-for-all energy market. These other members had no interest to set up any form of democratic governance like the five institutions of the European Community. Even less did they wish to have the Court of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms interfere with their business.
The charter was purely an international agreement that set its own rules. That transmogrified into an Energy Charter Treaty in 1994. It turned out somewhat like the ‘mule’ that Schuman called another international organisation. It was useful for some work but infertile. It arbitrated its own energy questions.
It had no responsibility to Human Rights of the Council of Europe’s Convention or could give help to build democratic governance.
The infertility was recently made more apparent. It is fundamentally in opposition to any sensible idea of peace. It is incompatible with European unity.
In September 2021 the European Court of Justice sounded a death knell: the ECT cannot be used in legal disputes between EU Member States because it interferes with and undermines EU law.
This highlights the three configurations that a State can find itself in:
a confederation or international organization (like NATO or OECD),
a super-State or federation (like USA or Canada) and
Schuman’s supranational Community where only one institution – the European Commission or High Authority – has federal powers. It binds nation States together within a slowly developing democratic frame. The Energy Charter Treaty failed because it lacked this supranational element.
Far from creating a supranational political vector to unite all of Europe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the European Energy Charter Treaty was unable to prevent war breaking out between Ukraine and Russia and involving the EU in the dirty business of war.
The leaders assembled in Dublin in June 1990 failed to understand the lessons of history. The European leaders today, led by US leaders with fingers deep in Ukrainian corruption, even more so.
Rule by force brings no lasting peace.
Schuman: “The error {of the past} was to believe that the winners could consolidate their victory and peace by relying solely on their own power and the weakness of the vanquished. We can enumerate how many times such hope has been dashed.
Peace cannot be lastingly established on ruins; it must be built on a healthy and living basis.”
Is the way still open for a real Community for all Europe?