Oxford News

Europe, torn by war, experiences 60-year impulse toward union

LONDON — In 1946, Winston Churchill, the former British prime minister, looked at Europe and saw a continent in ruins, a pile of rubble in which desperate people foraged.

Such devastation must not be allowed to happen again, he said. In a speech he called for some form of European cooperation "which could give a sense of shared patriotism and common citizenship" to the war-torn area.

"We must build," he said, "a United States of Europe."

In the decades since, Europe has moved toward that goal in fits and starts. But the overall effect has been a sustained urge toward greater union — one with both deeper integration and broader participation.

Three and a half years after Churchill's speech, the economy of West Germany — with substantial assistance from the United States — was recovering. The West German government wanted its steel mills to start producing again.

Neighboring countries viewed the prospect with hope — and fear. On the one hand, if the mills were restarted, they would provide a good market for French and Belgian coal. On the other hand, Germany's industrial capacity before had been turned into a war machine that devastated Europe.

In 1950, French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed that French coal production and West German steel production be placed under the control of a joint authority to assure mutual profits and multinational trust.

Schuman's proposal was attractive enough that other countries asked to join.

In 1951 in Paris, six nations — France, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — signed a treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

Since then, the members of the organization, which has taken on new names as its form has changed, have acted repeatedly to deepen their cooperation.

In 1958, the six countries established the European Economic Community — an effort to remove trade barriers and establish a "common market." A decade later, customs duties on industrial goods were abolished.

And in 1972, they decided to limit the fluctuation in the exchange rates between their currencies. In 1990, most members of the European Communities, as the organization was then called, agreed to end border checks on travelers.

The treaty on the European Union — which included plans for cooperation on foreign and security policy, as well as for a single currency — was signed in Maastricht, Netherlands, in 1991.

And on Jan. 1, 2002, in the most visible sign that the European countries were uniting into a federation resembling a super state, the euro replaced the currencies of 12 of the 15 members of the union. Only Denmark, Sweden and Britain, which, despite Churchill's role as a philosophical father to the union, opted to stay out.

As cooperation has deepened, membership has expanded. The original six grew to nine in 1973, with the addition of Britain, Ireland and Denmark. Greece joined in 1981; Spain and Portugal in 1986.

In 1995, the membership grew to 15. And in May 2004, 10 new countries, mostly former Soviet satellites, joined the union in its biggest expansion ever.

Now the union faces a significant bump in the road. A proposed constitution, which would, among other things, streamline procedures and establish a EU foreign minister, seems unlikely to be approved by all 25 members, as is necessary for it to come into force.

But T. R. Reid, a journalist and the author of "The United States of Europe," argues that progress will continue: Leaders, if they find themselves ahead of their publics, will retrench and try again in several years.

"There is a fundamental momentum that goes back to the end of World War II toward unity, and that tends to overcome all the setbacks," he said. "The basic momentum is toward ever closer union."