How the Monnet Myth is subverting Schuman’s Peace Plan
Disinformation has disoriented Europe's history. It now threatens its future.
On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman shocked the world. He announced the French government proposal for a hitherto unknown legal concept, a European Community. It would make war between France and Germany ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible’. It had the potential to unify the Continent in peace and bring prosperity to all Europeans.
Russia and Ukraine too. Plus all the countries east and south to the Iberian peninsula. This grand design was specifically discussed 75 years ago, when Schuman gave his press conference.
Schuman said the proposal was open to all European countries. A journalist asked: ‘And Russia too?’
‘But of course,’ Schuman answered. Schuman was convinced that the USSR would collapse before the turn of the century. In fact the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe occupied by the Soviet Union threw off communist tutelage first and joined the European Communities. Russia did the same and joined the Council of Europe and adhered to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. But when it asked for membership to the Communities, it was rejected.
Impaired Vision
How many times have you heard European leaders discussing this continental-wide peace and prosperity? That failure may be due to many things. One is that Europeans lacked vision. Another is that they were victims of a false history.
Schuman said the process had to begin with just two countries as a start. It was a step by step process. It succeeded in reconciling France and Germany and four other States in a new constitutional arrangement called the European Community. This is a legal configuration that Monnet never named earlier.
But Schuman introduced the legal concept in the years before his speech. He spoke about it at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and 1949. The term appears nowhere in the draft that Monnet allegedly wrote. He did not begin to use the term till weeks after Schuman gave his speech.
Longest peace, ever
What happened after the speech is something so remarkable hardly anyone outside of Schuman himself would have believed it possible. Lasting peace. The plan has brought 80 years of peace to Western Europe, the longest peace in more than two thousand years.
Check the chronology of wars in Western Europe. Peace never lasted scarcely more than fifty years before and rarely more than a decade or two.
The best period was the nineteenth century. Even if we set aside the Italian unification wars, peace held only more or less together from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 until the Franco Prussian war in 1870. In other centuries war was sometimes continually being fought somewhere in the area of the six States.
Who was the peace innovator? A few days later Schuman was in London for meetings on foreign affairs with his European and American colleagues. British archives record that he told the UK Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin that this plan for the reconfiguration of strategic industries needed to be launched as a ‘psychological shock’ but was based on studies made years earlier before the war.
Ideas Man?
Jean Monnet was first assumed to be the inspirer, ‘the ideas man’ as he apparently wrote Schuman’s speech. This stands out as extremely odd as it is the only known speech of Schuman that he did not write entirely himself.
Even the idea that Monnet wrote it is not true. Nor is the further extension of the claims. His journalist friends then said that because he and his team had been responsible for the speech that Schuman gave, he was responsible for peace between France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries and then other States.
It may be true that he wrote part of Schuman’s speech. But is writing a speech all it takes to create permanent peace between so many countries and their complicated histories? Such a peace in Europe had escaped the greatest minds of emperors, kings, presidents, generals, politicians, philosophers and popes for two thousand years.
So where did his ideas come from? Monnet’s Mémoires say he began thinking about Europe’s future only in spring 1950 when he went on vacation in Switzerland (p342). He was then an official, without ministerial rank, directing the French National Plan.
Monnet makes no mention of plans dating before the World War, nor of any studies. After Schuman died in 1963 the popularly accepted history of the Community changed. The Memoirs were published in 1976. Before the Memoirs were written, Monnet confirmed who was the geopolitical innovator when he wrote: ‘It was M. Schuman who gave the political dimension to the proposal.’
Monnet’s Mémoires were written largely by his friends, journalists and later collaborators. They contradict much of the archival material now available. The reason is that something had to fill a vacuum of information. Schuman usually worked anonymously because he concentrated on the result. Monnet is quoted earlier as saying the Schuman wanted to obliterate his own contribution. So his friends made claims for Monnet then that look more than a little ridiculous nowadays.
Unfortunately the claims distract from the meticulous work of Schuman whose vision was how to bring peace to the whole continent including Ukraine and Russia.
The implementation of the European Community required vast preparatory work. This included the modification of the constitutions of at least two nations before the Proposal of 9 May could be made.
Only Schuman was in a position to make these innovations and at the same time coordinate western policy to change the entire context of post-war Germany policy with his American and British colleagues.
The Originator
What part did Schuman play and what did Monnet and others contribute?
Let’s look at their backgrounds.
Robert Schuman was born of a patriotic French father who fought in the Franco-Prussian war and the siege of Thionville. Once his native Lorraine was occupied, he left for Luxembourg and Robert was born there. Then motivated by an idea to create a ‘Community of Coal, Iron and Steel’ Robert took the extraordinary step of entering German universities for the sort of legal education that was necessary.
In 1919 after German-occupied Alsace and Schuman’s Lorraine were returned to France, Schuman was elected Député for Thionville, France’s industrial ‘City of Steel’. He encountered political attacks and boycotts by the establishment and the Steel Cartel. Steel barons had major interests in the banks and the press. Although recognised as talented and popular, Schuman was denied ministerial office until the world war broke out. A member of his team in 1950 said ‘He remained a man of extreme secrecy.’
After WW2 he rose rapidly through the ranks becoming minister of finance, twice prime minister and foreign minister. Beyond dispute is Schuman’s political and diplomatic skill. It was of the highest order. Schuman helped create the Council of Europe and NATO.
Peace in Europe was his motivation from early youth. It was about an organisation of Europe that most people would have said was impossible. The most revolutionary idea of modern time was presented to national governments and agreed almost immediately. A totally new constitutional configuration was then negotiated in less than a year. Six national parliamentary systems passed it rapidly into force.
Quite extraordinarily, a revolution was treated as down-to-earth common sense. But it cut against the political grain of many centuries of nationalism and political interests of armament firms and French and German cartels.
Schuman brought Monnet into his plan unobtrusively through his private staffers. Intriguingly, Schuman did not inform any Foreign Ministry officials about any of it. Why? The directors-general wanted no concessions to the Germans. Schuman made one exception – the ministry’s secretary general was, for form, told just before the announcement was made.
Is it any surprise that even today the peace dynamics of its conception and birth are little understood?
Changing Constitutions
It was a highly complex operation. In some smaller States, like Belgium, the Community structure required a change to the constitution. Constitutions were generally written to defend sovereignty. But remarkably the two key States of France and Germany had special clauses that allowed a supranational Community to be created.
If France and Germany had failed to have these articles in their constitutions the negotiations for the Community and hence modern-day Europe would have failed miserably at the outset of negotiations. How could one man change constitutions in a totally new direction — in two countries at the same time? That person was certainly not Monnet.
Modifying Sovereignty
How was this achieved? After WW2 when Schuman re-entered the National Assembly, he chose to be on the Constitutional Committee. The 1946 Constitution proclaims a new concept:
Subject to reciprocity, France shall consent to the limitations upon its sovereignty necessary to the organization and preservation of peace.
In the period that led to Germany setting up the Bonn Republic from three Allied occupation zones, Schuman was prime minister and then foreign minister. The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) has a similar very innovative article:
Article 24
((1) The Federation may, by legislation, transfer sovereign powers to international institutions.
(2) In order to preserve peace, the Federation may join a system of mutual collective security; in doing so it will consent to those limitations of its sovereign powers which will bring about and secure a peaceful and lasting order in Europe and among the nations of the world.
Schuman was no stranger to German constitutional law. In 1910 at the university of Strasburg, Schuman had gained his doctorate in law with the highest distinction. It analyzed articles of the German Constitution of 1871.
Before the Mémoires
Monnet wrote little. He was the son of a Cognac merchant. He stopped his schooling at 16 years at the Brevet level, a couple of years before the Baccalauréat. He had never gone to university and gained a reputation through his international commercial experience.
Monnet’s Mémoires appeared in 1976 with the help of publicists such as his historian and journalist friends. It is a compilation of different texts that were with difficulty assembled from several of these friends, as I learned from one of them at the time that the book was being prepared.
Later an American academic produced a book: ‘Who wrote the Monnet Memoirs?’ Little research was made about Schuman’s career, ideas or his contribution before 1950. Lorraine, many times occupied and re-occupied, is quite different from Cognac or Paris.
Like many books based on it later, the Memoirs assumes Monnet and his speech text encapsulated Schuman’s action and all his thought. The alternative is much more probable. The very experienced politician Schuman used Monnet and his relationship to the prime minister to outwit his political adversaries in the ministry. That way the prime minister took direct charge for Cabinet discussions. The hostile foreign ministry bureaucrats were left in the dark.
The compilers of the Memoirs failed to consider this. They do not even integrate Monnet’s own earlier published interviews about Schuman or cite Schuman’s writings. The Memoirs text contradicts in several key areas what Monnet was actually recorded as saying before 1976.
Some clear appreciation of Schuman’s stature and work is quoted in Monnet’s own words in publications earlier than the Memoirs. This appreciation of Schuman’s preparatory work in decades previously is omitted.
Schuman, said Monnet, had a ‘lucid vision for the future of the countries of Europe.’ Schuman ‘had long reflected on the means to reconcile definitively France and Germany in combining their energies with the aim of integrating them in a united Europe in the service of peace and mankind.’
Monnet said: ‘It is a matter of great fortune for Europe that a man possessing such rare qualities was in place to open the route for a peaceful revolution.’
Schuman was twice prime minister and exercised another very subtle political skill. Monnet ran an agency that was directly attached to Prime Minister Georges Bidault. By engaging Monnet, Schuman avoided having to submit the proposal to an inter-ministerial committee of nationalistic officials who had already sabotaged his previous attempts at European reconciliation. The proposal was therefore introduced directly for Cabinet discussions by Bidault and discussed on two separate sessions without this interference.
Outsmarting the Opposition
The Monnet Mémoires is thin on such details but gives the chronology of Monnet’s involvement. It began in April 1950, when he returned from a walking vacation in Switzerland.
First mention after his return in one account is that Schuman telephoned him and asked him to prepare a paper. This is in itself unusual. It is omitted in the Memoirs. Schuman had the entire foreign ministry at his disposal yet called Monnet who was not part of his service. Monnet only had a small team. This agency was responsible to the prime minister directly. Yet Schuman does not seem to have informed Prime Minister Georges Bidault as far as Monnet records. Then came a blitz of engagement with the Schuman trusted cabinet staff (but not foreign ministry officials).
Bernard Clappier, Schuman’s Directeur de Cabinet, dined with Monnet and again suggested writing down some ideas. This was followed by the visit of Professeur Paul Reuter, Schuman’s trusted jurisconsult and fellow Lorrainer. Reuter was acting as a watchman and guardian in the ministry to check any legal texts. Bidault, formerly the head of the Resistance in France, had connived against Schuman. He acted with foreign ministry officials who were against any concessions with the Germans to slip legal texts on sensitive Franco-German topics past Schuman without getting his approval.
Professor Reuter suddenly appeared in Monnet’s offices. He had a long discussion on Germany with Monnet in private that extended over several days. Reuter described it as a Socratic Maieutic, a teaching process where a professor educates a student to think clearly by asking a series of provocative questions. Monnet admitted he knew little about Germany, spoke no German and had no contact with any of the leaders.
Monnet then asked Reuter to draft their discussions into a short article such as one might see in a newspaper. Reuter’s notebooks and the drafts still exist. They show the process of editing. Most corrections are in Reuter’s hand. The many drafts that were subsequently prepared show little in Monnet’s blue ballpoint script.
Reuter seems to have drafted most of the texts, while Monnet made very few corrections. Not all his corrections were helpful, as Monnet later admits. This in itself indicates that Reuter knew more precisely where the text should go than Monnet knew where he was being led. Why was this necessary? It was probably not even safe to keep typescripts in the foreign ministry where both directors general were hostile to Schuman’s policy of reconciliation.
The Mémoires record Reuter was at the origin of key concepts and his help ‘inestimable’. Reuter supervised the numerous drafts. Schuman’s hand is apparent in editing of the later ones.
In guarding his peace plans secret while engaging key figures, Schuman diminished his own role. He was an unusual political engineer and one with few personal enemies.
Schuman revealed the full dimensions of his plan in his introduction to the proposal on 9 May 1950. Unlike the proposal itself there is absolutely no doubt that Schuman wrote every word of it. The document is of major importance as it declares that out of this technical Community of coal and steel an entity called Europe transcending the nation would be born. But the full text of the proposal with this introduction is one that the present European Union has refused several times to publish.
Why?