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Peace and prosperity in Europe: anyone who remembers the zero hour of 1945 and all that went before it feels grateful every day for these achievements. We also know who and what can take credit for the flourishing landscapes which have replaced trenches and ruins. Above all, it is the people of Europe who have learnt the lesson of history and worked vigorously to create a better world. But then there was also the USA, safeguarding and promoting the new opportunities of the postwar era. NATO and the Marshall Plan are code words for the commitment for which we Europeans are obliged to be eternally grateful. Both the actions of the people and the USA's assistance have now been strengthened and made lasting by the process of European unification, itself one of the remarkable achievements of recent decades. And yet precisely this process has made headway only falteringly, subject to detours and prone to occasional accidents. Churchill's splendid vision of 1945 fell on ground on which, to be sure, some flowers bloomed but where no-one had the courage – or found the right conditions – to pave the way to this royal road. There has never been political union in Europe. Should there be? This is my question here. If we do not believe in a world spirit – a spirit which was expressed in Churchill's speeches in Strasbourg and Zurich and which, inevitably if not always recognisably, clears the way for a United States of Europe – then we must ask why we should aspire to the ‘ever closer union’ of Europe as set out in the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (EEC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include ten new states prompted an immediate debate centring on such questions as migration, border controls, labour regulation, the common agricultural policy, the costs of regional subsidies and defence. Such debates are as important as they are inevitable. But enlargement also raised issues that go beyond the agenda of economic, monetary and political integration, issues that concern the limits and integrity of European culture as such. While the accession of Finland, Sweden and Austria during the 1990s increased the size of the EU, membership for the new states which joined in 2004 and for those seeking membership in the future raises questions more profound and far-reaching than those concerning the feasibility of the EU's current decision-making procedures. For most of those new states, membership of the EU is at the same time part of a ‘return to Europe’ in a broader sense. The fact that some of these states have Slavic populations, that some have immature democratic polities, or large peasant populations, or populations which have for centuries been within the orbit of orthodox Christianity or Islam, raises questions about Europe's internal cultural identity. Such questions have become more sharply focused as a result of the larger geo-political and cultural realignments of which Europe is a part. To be sure, there is no logical reason why debate about European culture and identity should be dependent upon shifts in geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Envoi is a pretty word that comes from medieval French. It describes a postscript attached as the final stanza of a ballad and includes both a dedication and a commendation. This envoi is dedicated to those who have built Europe. It also commends them in the sense of thanking. A commendation must also recommend. To participants in the historical drama it recommends that they view their own work in light of the grand project to which they and their successors have contributed or will contribute. This envoi also recommends their work as a subject to those whom it commends to undertake the pleasant task of writing the future history of European integration. This is the first book to deal with the matter comprehensively and over its entire fifty-year history. The author hopes to encourage others to write better accounts in the future by challenging those written in the past and presenting a new version of the story. The process of European integration is a suitable subject for the social scientist but really belongs to the historian. Although a force shaping the world of today, it has become part of the past – has been woven into the fabric of civilization, and rewoven it aswell. European integration is an epiphenomenon of broad and lasting change and thus cannot be understood in isolation. The nature of its impact also varies from time to time and place to place and can be either good or bad depending upon circumstance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Re-launching of Europe” is the phrase coined to capture the spirit of the lengthy round of diplomacy that began at Messina, Sicily, on 1 June 1955. It opened less than a year after the EDC fiasco and concluded, after the initialing of the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957, with the establishment of the machinery for a future customs union – the European Economic Community, or Common Market – on 1 January 1958. The term “re-launching,” or “re-launch” as it is sometimes translated from the French rélance, is no misnomer: The first ship to embark, with Schuman Plan on its prow, had gone aground and so a second one of improved design, the Messina, set out five years later, heading off in another direction – toward market liberalization. No one knew how to find the destination, whether the vessel in question would be sturdy enough to get there, or whether a still stouter tub, following a somewhat better tack, might arrive first. The fog of uncertainty would not soon lift. Europe was becoming liberal, more or less, but the course was not set. Doubt would remain the rule even after 1960, when a competitive yet cooperative European Free Trade Association (EFTA) came into being as a potential rival, co-partner, or merger candidate of the EEC. Outcomes would be determined by economic trends, the continuation of the boom under way; by high politics, the European states' relationships with each other and with the United States; and by the personalities and policies of officeholders in Washington, Paris, London, Bonn, and Brussels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Monnet has a strong claim to be called the Father of Europe. Monnet deserves almost single-handed credit for creating in 1951 the first of Europe's epochal institutions for integration, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). He was also the power behind the grandiose but ill-fated European Defense Community (EDC), a scheme for an integrated armed force composed of multinational units and tied into the NATO command structure that was rejected by France in the summer of 1954. Jean Monnet was, in addition, the moving force behind EURATOM (European Atomic Energy Commission) – a proposal for a continental nuclear power industry – which he put forth in conjunction with the “re-launching” of Europe in 1955. Unlike EDC, EURATOM would not be dead on arrival; instead, along with the ECSC, it would develop into an organ (though only an appendage) of the European Economic Community (EEC). As president from 1954 to 1975 of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, a lobby for the integration cause, Monnet would be an inexhaustible font of unification and federation initiatives. Yet after the mid-1950s he was reduced to the status of an outsider and could influence the integration process only indirectly through allies in Washington, Bonn, Brussels, and other capitals. Thereafter, many initiatives associated with Monnet stemmed from self-anointed disciples – “monnetists” – acting (sometimes without specific authorization) on his behalf in a manner thought to be consistent with his “spirit.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the war ended, surviving members of Germany's former trades union leaders set about re-establishing collective interest representation for the workers. Alongside uncertainties about future Allied policy or the employers' position, many unionists were worried about what the response of the Hitler Youth (HJ) generation would be. After all, no German aged 26 or less in 1945 could have had any experience of a trades union. Indeed, those born at the end of World War 1 and who thus entered the labour market during the slump, frequently went from unemployment to Reich Labour Service to military service to wartime call up without ever being part of a normal industrial workforce at all.Youngsters that did manage to gain some industrial experience knew only the emasculated Councils of Trust and the German Labour Front. If they managed to assert their interests in the boom conditions of the late 1930s and early 1940s they did so only on an individual, not an organised collective basis. In addition, the young generation knew nothing of Weimar's subculture of workers' political and cultural organisations, banned since 1933. Terror had made it in many cases too dangerous for parents to communicate an anti-Nazi view to their children even in private. Particularly worrying for older labour leaders in 1945 were the many signs that the Nazis had been at least partially successful in creating out of young Germans a generation of willing followers. In the HJ, in national service and in wartime military service the Nazis drilled youngsters from all social backgrounds to accept the discipline of hierarchical organisations. At the same time, the Nazis' propaganda and social policy enjoyed considerable resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most formidable of the many great challenges facing statesmen of the West after V-E Day was to tie Germany into Europe and Europe into Germany, both economically and politically. Most of them knew from the outset that this must take place as part of a larger recovery process that would eventually restore a Europe wrecked by two world wars to economic conditions like those that had obtained in the nineteenth century – with open borders, convertible currencies, competition, and the free interchange of ideas, a place where re-knit commercial and financial ties between nations would create essential networks of prosperity and so prevent war. This was the aim of all liberals, including men like John Maynard Keynes, who (at least for the medium term) thought state intervention necessary in order to restore the social and economic conditions under which market recovery could take hold. There was, as he understood, a disjunction between means and ends. Sound ideas and effective action did not often go hand in hand in the ravaged Europe of 1945. Hope that self-sustaining growth could be set in motion through the market would remain only a dream until governments had been stabilized, institutions rebuilt, and laws enforced. Cooperation was called for between industry and commerce on the one hand and government on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]