Dr. Carl Caldwell is the Samuel G. McCann Professor of History at Rice University. He currently serves as the Department Chair of the Rice History Department.
Frederick Drummond: What insights would you like to share with Rice students about Europe today and how it has gotten here?
Professor Caldwell: Thanks, Frederick!
It’s important to keep in mind that the European Union is only one, recent part of the bigger project of creating a European Community. The goals of that project have changed over time. The idea of a unified Europe appeared, certainly, before 1945, but was still vague. The project came into focus in the late 1940s and early 1950s, facing a set of challenges particular to that time--most important the problem that recurring war in Western Europe had caused so much destruction.
What problems did Europe face after World War II? Most obvious was the immense amount of destruction. The further east you go, the worse the level of destruction was--but all of the warring countries suffered. An immense amount of work had to be done simply to reconstruct the industrial base. And the process of economic reconstruction in Western Europe would necessarily rely on a few areas that dominated in mining coal and iron, producing steel, etc.--northern France, Belgium, the Rhine Valley in Germany. In other words, the economic reconstruction of Western Europe also implied that the states that were just a few years before at war with each other would have to cooperate to distribute basic goods in the interest of a general economic reconstruction--as well, of course, in the interest of avoiding war.
So whatever the economic needs, there was a dramatic need for a change in political thinking. Many of the rightwing nationalists from before 1933 had favored war to resolve European problems; Hitler was not alone among conservatives yearning for rearmament and conflict. After 1945, the new Christian Democrats, who would soon come to occupy a hegemonic role in Italy, France, Germany, and Holland, demanded a different kind of approach to the post war period. They called for cooperation. Not just to make capitalism function better, as is sometimes argued. They wanted to avoid war.
One other context is important for understanding the origins of the European Community project: the Cold War. With the Cold War, the conservative leadership (and not only the conservatives!) of Western Europe began asking about how to form an effective anti-communist alliance, and not just on the level of military preparedness. “Anti-communism” is too sterile a term for understanding the sympathies that went into the organization of Western Europe against the Soviet Union at this time. Certainly there were deep anti-Communist traditions across Europe, not all rational. Certainly fascist ideology had played a role in turning people against the Soviet Union. But the direct experience of the Red Army during and after the war was hardly positive, which explains why the West German Social Democrats were so much a part of the anti-Communist position. Eastern Germany experienced this new dictatorship following 1945 directly. Things were different in places like France and Italy, where the Communist Party had played a larger role in the resistance--and the Soviets had not occupied the country. But even here, the forces that led the process toward European integration were motivated also in part by a desire to form a cooperative, unified, prosperous Western Europe--in opposition to the Soviet model of a planned economy and party dictatorship.
Those are the concrete problems facing the political leadership after about 1947: economic reconstruction, avoidance of renewed war, and the Cold War. They took more concrete form over the years that follows. The aim of a European Community was not simply to make a community--to give up some sovereignty-- but also to reassert sovereignty for medium sized states under the new reality of the Cold War and the division of the world between a U.S. and a Soviet/Russian empire. When we describe the origins of the European Community, we are certainly talking about avoiding war and stabilizing capitalism, but we are also talking about giving up some sovereignty, like over iron and steel, in order to retain other elements of national sovereignty. The early advocates of the European Community were trying to save the nation-state. The problem of how both to work together and to retain sovereignty would remain part of the project throughout--and will help us to explain where we are today, seventy years later, after Brexit.
Frederick: A lot of the European Union does try to focus on this transnational aspect of countries working together, but, in reality, you say that initially the European Community was formed to save the nation-state and you say the Christian Democrats played a large role in this. So it was more of a political agreement between nations rather than some kind of get-together?
Professor Caldwell: Forming the European Economic Community (EEC) was about more than writing a treaty in international law. The nations were entering into long-term agreements, yes, but trying to create a real, lasting community at the same time. Starting at an economic level. Forming the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952 was a key moment. This was an agreement, very concrete, about coal and steel, so vital to postwar reconstruction, and about areas that had been under contention for two generations, from 1914-1945. France, Belgium, and Germany were involved, and soon the Benelux states and Italy were as well. The people who initiated the process, men like Jean Monnet and the Christian Democrat Robert Schuman from France, did not trust Germany. They also realized, in the context of the Cold War, that they are not going to be able to create a demilitarized Germany under international control. The ECSC was a different way to get at the same goal of binding Germany to a Western European order. But it was not just about international relations, it was about helping all the countries involved by regulating and controlling production. It was a way of making the corporations, which relied on these basic materials, more stable.
Now let’s jump ahead to the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Treaty of Rome aimed at creating an economic community in a broader sense--a customs union. A customs union doesn’t mean a political union, it is about the economy. A customs union ensures that countries have a large enough market area for individual firms, often still based in individual countries, to compete, in a world increasingly dominated by large corporations (whether socialist or capitalism) operating in a huge, unified market. In this first phase of economic union, the EEC countries were moving very slowly toward something like a community which would limit national sovereignty--at least in the economic sphere. It was a limited project, although there were already murmurs of a closer military and political union at the time. And it already called forth resistance--from the leadership of precisely the nation that had pushed hardest for community, the French. President de Gaulle, while broadening presidential powers within France, sought as well to protect and even expand the position of France in the world. His project had implications for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to the consternation of the United States--but also created problems for the European Community. He didn’t want the European project to go too far, to limit French national sovereignty. He was too much of a nationalist for that. Partly as a result of French recalcitrance, the European project slowed down a bit in the 1960s and 1970s; certainly there was cooperation at many levels, but not dramatic challenges to national power in the interest of the European Community. With the continued decline in the power of the nation-state in the 1980s and a new generation of French leadership, a number of decisions were taken that eventually led to restricted national power: laying the groundwork for dismantling passport controls within the Community (the Schengen zone), restricting the ability of national currencies to inflate or to deflate too much, etc. The next major change occurred, however, only with the shock of 1989: with the collapse of communism and the unification of Germany. Imagine the alarm bells in 1989 in France and Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium: what happened last time Germany was unified? Margaret Thatcher used to walk around with a little purse that had a map in it showing Germany within the borders of 1943. She distrusted German unification. That is the context for understanding the important new steps starting in 1992, with the Maastricht Treaty and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. The question was not just how to deepen the project of European Union, it was how to put fences around a newly united, powerful Germany. That is why the Maastricht Treaty, against the recommendations of many leading economists, made plans for unifying the many currencies across Europe.
Currency unification was therefore about more than just economic efficiency. It was about unifying the regulatory control over currency, through a single central bank, the European Central Bank (ECB). That meant unifying a whole lot of economic policy--and limited what individual states could do to manage their “own” economies. In the meantime, the implementation of the Schengen zone meant free motion of goods and people. Once people move freely, new questions appear: do citizens of one country have equal rights to a job in another? The aim was in part to create a unified, dynamic economic zone that could be competitive in the post-1990 world, dominated by huge markets like that of the United States; being competitive also means being able to attract a qualified workforce, which is easier in a large zone. Once one starts talking about the right to work across national borders, the issue of law follows quickly: not surprising that with Schengen and Maastricht, one sees an expansion of regulatory and legal activity at the European level, including the European Court of Justice, founded in 1952 to hear only very specific cases, but after 1992 taking on ever greater roles. And it is no surprise that the demands for more economic unification led to more calls for political unification, from a strengthened European Parliament to a formal European Constitution, proposed in 2004. That idea failed; national referenda in the Netherlands and France--core members of the European Union--quashed it, and in its place a much less powerful form of political union was adopted in 2007, in the Treaty of Lisbon. But even this was a lot, even this pushed far beyond the project of economic cooperation and national sovereignty of the 1950s.
It’s this kind of political union that pushed at the limits of what people in Europe and nations in Europe were going to accept. And that is one reason why the project of creating a European constitution failed long before Brexit succeeded. It was a warning sign.
Frederick: Since this was more of a strategic agreement between nations, what were the goals of the major nations in the European Union and how did that influence the ultimate economic and political goals of the institution?
Professor Caldwell: It is hard to answer that question in the abstract because goals change all the time--both national goals and the goals of different parties within nations. Take Britain, for example. The parties there actually have different ideas. The Liberal Democrats, in general, are for a greater union. The Labour Party has always been ambivalent about too much union with continental leaders who are much more wedded to economic liberalism than they are. Some Labour leaders did favor greater union, in the interest of peace, as internationalists. Other members believed that the more Union they had, the more regulatory controls were unified, the less control the nation would have over the economy; socialism on their model required a strong national economy and a strong nation-state. Tories fought tendencies on the far-right that asserted that the European Union would take Britain over destroying national sovereignty. The far right has been a constant presence in British politics. So, to pull it together, Labour can be pro or anti-Europe, the Conservatives can be pro or anti-Europe. And there are always forces on the wings of the major parties in Britain (and elsewhere!) pulling the party away from any greater European Community.
The general consensus in West Germany, after a brief period when the Social Democrats were opposed to European unity in the early 1950s, has been that Europe is a good thing. That certainly was the policy in West Germany. The pro-European position had everything to do with the Cold War, which had divided the country. But it also had a lot to do with economics. German industry found a ready market for its goods--produced with relatively cheaper labor in the postwar years. But German support for European unification was not only for selfish reasons. It reflected the experience of war and the experience of dictatorship. One of the ways for Germans to assert that they are not Nazis is to assert their support for an international community, for reconciliation with Europe. The anti-war stuff really matters in the German case. The French, as noted when I talked about de Gaulle a few minutes ago, were more ambivalent--but always one of the two major pillars of the European project, next to Germany. It was Francois Mitterand who helped to get the European project back on track, working with Helmut Kohl.
Both Thatcher and Mitterand still, though, distrusted a united Germany. In 1989-1990, they gradually came to see German unification as inevitable, but precisely for that reason something to control: they did not want this huge economic powerhouse to control Europe. That is why we have to have something like a currency unification. The French pushed currency unification. They wanted to limit Germany. They didn’t predict that the ultimate effect of binding Germany in Europe would have the opposite effect, namely of giving the German economy a larger say.
In short: the decisions about how to structure European Union after 1989 involved strategic decisions on an international level as well as decisions related to party politics (and recent history!) within individual countries.
Frederick: From what I understand of your discussions on the U.K. political parties, it almost sounds like an argument, in a microcosm, of the problems that started the European Economic Community. It seems now that many political parties in the U.K. saw the European Union then as a strict move away from a benefit to the U.K. and therefore sought to leave it on that basis. Could you talk a little bit more about how the U.K. came to see itself in that position?
Professor Caldwell: One of our History majors, David Ratnoff, did an honors thesis with me on Brexit so I am drawing on his work. There is a longer tradition here. The whole debate about staying in the European community or leaving the European Community has a long history that cuts across parties. This is a complicated question: how much union, what kinds of cooperation are good for Europe and for individual nations, what kinds of cooperation go too far? But that complicated debate became reduced to a simple either/or choice with the decision to hold a referendum, which is not a way of having a coherent debate. This set of relationships with Europe is way too complicated to be reduced to “yes” or “no.” As a result, the discussion became ever more governed by emotions.
Why did an anti-Europe movement succeed in Europe, and in particular in Britain? I think that we can talk about three reasons in particular.
First, we should not forget British nostalgia: nostalgia for empire, nostalgia for real power, nostalgia for a foreign policy that was relatively unconstrained and “sovereign.” In reality, Britain had become a second, maybe even third rate power. But the myth of national power dies slowly.
Second, one cannot underestimate the importance of the economic crisis of 2008 for Europe. The failure of the European Central Bank to respond to the crisis as it developed within the Eurozone probably contributed to the depth and length of the economic crises in areas like Greece, Spain, and Italy, according to a lot of good economists. Britain, which never joined the European Union and retained its separate currency and separate bank, had more flexibility to respond to these crises--and its central bank did so relatively effectively. The Euro crisis points up a major problem in the Eurozone: the ECB has essentially centralized currency control in a supranational body, but economic policy is still being made at the level of the nation-state; the sovereignty of the nation-state thus becomes limited at a time when there is not dynamic economic policy for the Eurozone. States can’t simply print money anymore. I actually agree with some commentators, who say: what happened in Spain, Italy, and especially Greece went much deeper than a policy error in the Eurozone; the combination of centralization of the currency and banking without political leadership could have negative consequences. But that’s a structural problem that can be instrumentalized by political leaders. What is easier than to blame a country’s failure on the ECB or “Europe”--and to rally voters against the “establishment”? Brexit was in part a reaction to the sense that the Eurozone itself had proven incompetent to manage its own affairs--and kept individual states from doing so. But instead of being a careful response to real challenges, it became an emotional, highly simplified question designed to answer complicated questions.
The third important source of British is immigration. Here, we have to get a little more complicated: there is not a single “immigration problem,” there are multiple “immigration problems,” from the issue Syrians in Germany to the place of north Africans in France and Italy to the place of Eastern Europeans in Britain; the British difficulty dealing with immigration of people of color from former colonies was furthermore a long standing and important part of British politics. British complaints about immigration shaped the Brexit debate, but they were not talking about Syrians, they were talking about the Poles. Poles were accused of taking lower paid jobs in Britain--often jobs that other people aren’t taking. It’s not necessarily the case that the immigration was hurting the British economy, but it could be presented as such. But why were the Poles permitted to take these jobs at all? Germany limited Polish workers’ access to its labor market. Britain took a different position within the European Union--and got its way, allowing Eastern Europeans into Britain with few restrictions. In other words, the anti-immigrant aspect of the Brexit vote, which blamed immigration on the bogeyman “Europe,” was really a decision by British politicians--that they then blamed on the abstraction “Europe”! As with the Greeks and the financial crisis, it was a lot easier to blame “Europe” than to admit that one’s own country’s leadership had made decisions that one disliked.
But politics isn’t always about reality or rationality. When the conservative leaders in Britain said that Europe was imposing immigration on Britain, they blamed this abstract thing called Europe and not themselves for opening up immigration. And immigration is always going to be a hot-button issue, especially with the massive migration across the world that we are experiencing right now. (You can bet that the COVID-19 crisis will add to this anti-immigration discussion.) All of these aspects come together: foreign policy and nostalgia for a strong Britain, concern over lack of national sovereignty over finances after 2008, and immigration. From there you get to a campaign to leave Europe.
Frederick: In some of these cases, we see previous decisions on the U.K. to promote their interests in the original economic union boomerang on them in later years with the European Union. Is that accurate?
Professor Caldwell: Yes, I think that you could push farther and find even more reasons. One of the things that a free trade zone does is to ensure that there are general standards about labor and environment, with a central organ, usually a court, to evaluate claims that standards are being violated. You can’t negotiate standards for every single product. Free trade zones say: here are the general standards. And when you start talking about general standards and general rules, that’s when you can start challenging national sovereignty in a different kind of way. One of the issues that was brought up by the British pro-Brexit groups was that they don’t want to be held to the same standards, on financial regulations in particular, but also environmental, as the rest of Europe. The attempt with Brexit is really to escape those regulations.
Frederick: With Britain eventually leaving the EU, where do you think the EU will go from here? Are there any historical remnants that we can look to as an example for what may happen next?
Professor Caldwell: Even in the worst of times, I was not an extreme alarmist about the future of Europe because it still provides way too many advantages for too many groups. Grexit, the Greek Crisis from 2012 to 2015, was probably a bigger source of concern to the European Union. That happened earlier than Brexit and that involved a state which was connected to the other states and on a border with Turkey and other states that were possibly thinking of coming into the EU. That crisis was averted. What was a tiny state like Greece really going to do? Ally with Russia or China? That would have been highly problematic for Greek politics! Go it alone? How? What real alternatives were there to being in Europe?
Britain is in a slightly different position, and maybe comparable to Norway. Norway is a major energy producer and it is connected to Britain. They have all these reserves of oil and they have money. They want independence so they are not part of the EU. But they want to sell to the EU. So what is the deal they have? The Norwegians agree to follow all the rules for the EU, but they have given up their right to set these rules, in order to have access to markets. If you are not part of a big unified market, how can you succeed in selling things like cell phones or succeed with major infrastructure products?
But back to Britain. It’s funny watching Boris Johnson. He won the election, indeed became a potential prime minister, only through irresponsible and shrill attacks on Europe. Now that he’s won, “Brexit” has won. So what does he do? Call for citizens to cease talking about Brexit. Now reality sinks in. To deal with Europe, to have access to its markets, Britain will have to agree to its rules--which means precisely giving up some “sovereignty” over labor, consumer safety, and environmental regulations. What about Ireland? Northern Ireland is part of Great Britain; Southern Ireland is independent and part of the European Union (though not the Schengen area). There is no wall between the two, which was part of the peace plan that ended the bloody Irish conflict. What should be done now? Build a wall between Northern and Southern Ireland? Monitor it with military forces? Why not just call for a return to civil war? Johnson’s solution: to fudge the answer and change the topic.
There are many other questions: over the fishing industry, over the oil industry, etc. An obvious answer: Britain might just follow the regulations of the EU without having a say over them.
The EU is not likely to go away, despite such predictions from both right and left. Brexit has frightened citizens who might have thought that splitting from Europe would be easy. In continental Europe itself after the radical Russian actions in Ukraine and the threats in Georgia and the other threats Putin has made, Europe has ceased to move apart. I think there is more unity than there ever was, even from peripheral countries like Spain and Portugal that had bad experiences with the European Central Bank and European institutions during the financial crisis. While I don’t expect we are going to see massive moves toward political unification, I do expect we are going to see more consolidation of the European project of economic, regulatory, and financial unification--despite distrust and disgruntlement.
