French Politics, Culture & Society

On 9 May 1950, in an elegant salon of the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, France’s Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed that France and Germany, plus any other democratic nation in Western Europe that wanted to join, establish a “community” to regulate and govern the coal and steel industries across national borders. France and Germany had been at, or preparing for, war for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, at huge costs to millions of citizens. Moreover, in 1950 iron and steel remained central to national economic success and war-making power. The Schuman Plan therefore clearly spoke to deeper issues.

The purpose of the article is to establish and assess the significance of the federal legacy of the Schuman Declaration (9 May 1950) in the evolution of postwar European integration. To this end it provides a sharp focus upon the political strategy of Jean Monnet and his active role in promoting the cause of a federal Europe. His approach to the building of Europe is outlined and its direct relationship to the Schuman Declaration, which he wrote, is explored. Monnet's conception of Europe is confirmed as federal and the author draws upon the theoretical concepts of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism in order to demonstrate precisely how Europe's first construction, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) created in 1951, was illustrative of a distinctly new and unprecedented form of European integration. The conclusion confirms this to be incremental federalization.

The EU has as its motto “United in Diversity.“ To what extent does reality reflect this federal ideal as inscribed in the European treaties? Although the Lisbon Treaty introduces reforms and legitimizes processes that reinforced the federal character of the European project, it remains difficult at this stage to define the EU as a social and political structure in which power rests on a fragile equilibrium between unity and diversity as well as on a struggle to maintain it. If unity has been reinforced through successive institutional reforms, there is still disequilibrium in favor of diversity.

The proposal of 9 May 1950 by Robert Schuman to put coal and steel industries under a common High Authority was a signal of reconciliation with the new Germany. General de Gaulle, in spite of his opposition to the federal perspective, decided to implement the Treaty of Rome (1957) establishing a common market between France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The French presidents and the German chancellors maintained a strong relationship despite differences of views about British application, NATO, trade and monetary policies, institutional development and, more recently, the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet empire.

This article addresses the impact of the Franco-German couple on European integration since the Schuman Declaration. Based on qualitative research von Oppeln reveals that constructive influence only took place in the 80s; otherwise it was rather ambivalent or even negative. Five analytical approaches are used to define the variations in the Franco-German couple's level of influence: the different political stakeholders, the institutions involved, the main ideas and visions about European politics, the policy preferences, and the general external conditions. Ultimately, the conciliation of the German and French interests remains an indispensable condition for the success of European politics, but it has also become more and more elusive because of external factors such as EU enlargement. To overcome the recent deadlock the Franco-German couple needs to commit to the EU, foster cooperation between the main stakeholders, and conciliate different views and policies.

This article proposes a simple formal model that can explain why and how European states engaged in the negotiation of federalist treaties in the fields of European defense and security. Using the non-cooperative model of multilateral bargaining derived from the Stahl-Rubinstein game, we show that the specific sequencing of treaty negotiations adopted by federalists explains why, against all odds, states preferred federalist-inspired treaties to intergovernmental treaties. We argue that federalists succeeded in convincing states to sign their treaties, rather than alternative treaties, by spreading the risk of rejection attached to various components of European security treaties into successive periods of negotiations, a process that they repeated in each new round of negotiation. In doing so, we show that Jean Monnet and his transnational network of European federalists had an influence on the process of EU integration because they segmented treaties into components with different probabilities of acceptance, and structured the different rounds of negotiations of these components by starting with the less risky ones, rather than because they convinced states to change their preferences and adopt federalist treaties instead of intergovernmental treaties.

The founders of European integration had to make momentous choices that have since deeply marked the EU. They decided to focus their efforts on market-building, hypothesizing that economic interdependency would lead in time to “spillover“ beyond the new Europe's original mandates, a decision that left many key dimensions of national sovereignty outside the mandate of integration. One of these dimensions was social policy, roughly defined as the welfare state and labor relations. This division between what the EU could and could not do has lasted, with limited exceptions, to the present. Market integration over time, however, indirectly shifted the ground under national social models, sometimes imposing adjustments that have worked against the legitimacy of Europeanization. More recently the EU, concerned about the need for social policy reform to confront globalization, has attempted to coordinate national social model change by “soft power“ methods. These methods, by and large, have not been effective. This essay will discuss the consequences of the founders' choices historically.

External geopolitical developments and the role of the United States have been particularly important in the creation and orientation of the European integration. This study appraises the outlook of transatlantic relations in the wake of Barack Obama's 2008 election and the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. It is argued that whereas these developments on both sides of the Atlantic could provide for a window of opportunity to shift bilateral relations into higher gear, success will eventually depend on Europe's internal capacity to approach the US with collective and united answers to the main contemporary international challenges.

This article studies the question of history during the dramatic moments recorded in Léon Werth's Déposition: Journal de guerre 1940-1944. Analyzed in reference to Nietzsche, Descartes, and Lévinas, Werth's journal approaches history in a manner timely for then and now. Probing his own knowledge of and relation to France's unsettling defeat and Occupation by Nazi Germany,Werth undertakes his own version of a Cogito that leads not to some linear chain of syllogisms, but instead to an acute sense of implication in and even responsibility for history. Werth's lucidity, engagement, and ethics constrast favorably with Nietzsche's elitist, exclusionary vitalism as well as with the rationalist solitude of the Descartes' Discours de la méthode. His probing reflexions on his relation to historical events offer significant parallels to the philosophical project of Emmanuel Lévinas.

“All history is contemporary history,” observed Benedetto Croce. Work on the French Revolution has often proven his insight.* In today’s globalizing climate, it is worth examining French revolutionary historians’ uneven embrace of the current historiographic trend toward transnational approaches. On one hand, scholarship has been comparatively slow to take this turn for several reasons, notably the persistent belief in the centrality of the nation. The revolutionaries themselves built claims of French exceptionalism into their construction of universalism, and historians have inherited the strong sense that the Revolution held particular power and played an integral role in constructing French national identity.

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