Posted by Hans Müller on February 27, 2022 at 14:30 p.m

I wrote this article on February 9th, 2013 in the course of my work as a working group leader for the history of the EUROPA-UNION Heilbronn.

In the current times of European crisis, it is difficult to write hopefully about the European integration process. Enthusiasm for Europe – if there ever was such a thing among the general public – has bottomed out. Euroscepticism is “in”. The "Yes, but..." of the Eurosceptics is applauded.
In his 2012 book What if Europe fails (1), the Dutch publicist Geert Mak warns of the great danger that the entire European project, this precious legacy of previous generations of Europeans, will slip out of our hands unnoticed. He warns against a tendency to permanence - one could also say indifference - because: "The more profound the consequences of new developments are for our everyday life, the more we tend to avert our gaze." (2)

Far-sighted thought leaders

When the Heilbronn district association of the Europa-Union was formally founded in May 1953, the Second World War was only eight years old. European slaughter had plunged not only defeated Germany into dire straits, but also the victors, such as France and Great Britain. Millions of war dead, injured and murdered - material and immaterial damage of all kinds - were to be lamented. No wonder farsighted men and women thought early on how the continent could be spared another catastrophe like this. The coexistence of people and powers in Europe had to be placed on a new basis in order to avoid another war.

The Austrian writer and politician Nikolaus Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 – 1972) is one of the first thinkers to overcome nationalism in Europe. As early as the 20s, under the impression of the horrors of the First World War, he published the Paneuropa -Union founded. The French politician and Prime Minister for a time, Aristide Briand (1862 – 1932), should also be mentioned.

As early as 1925, the German Social Democrats called for the formation of a United States of Europe in their Heidelberg Program (3). In 1939, in Norwegian exile, Willy Brandt published a newspaper article with the headline The Dream of Europe's United States (4), and in the spring of 1944 Brandt, together with the Austrian Bruno Kreisky, began to sketch the draft for a kind of European Union without knowing at the time that the Frenchman Jean Monnet - one of the later great masterminds and drivers of the European integration process -- also dealt with such questions in Algiers (5).

In his Zurich speech of September 19, 1946, which has become famous, Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) named the partnership between France and Germany as the necessary first step in the reestablishment of the European family. Churchill spoke of a remedy that could make all of Europe free and happy within a few years: "This remedy consists in the renewal of the European family of nations... We must build a kind of United States of Europe." (6)

A few days after Churchill's speech, on September 21, 1946, representatives from fourteen European countries and the USA adopted twelve theses in Hertenstein, Switzerland, which have become known as the Hertenstein Program. The 1st thesis reads: "A European community built on a federal basis is a necessary and essential part of any real world union." Thesis 4 anchors what is still controversially discussed today, more than 65 years after Hertenstein, when it comes to implementation ; "The members of the European Union transfer part of their economic, political and military sovereign rights to the federation they have formed." (7)

The driving forces behind European integration include the Council of Europe, which was founded by ten states in 1949 and which, in its statutes of May 5, 1949, set itself the task of “creating closer ties between its members to protect and promote the ideals and principles that are their common heritage The most important result of the work of the Council of Europe is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was adopted in 1950 and is now binding for the 47 member states, and compliance with which is monitored by the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg. With the Lisbon Treaty, the European Union also joined the Convention.

The European Recovery Program (ERP) – better known as the Marshall Plan – is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the further development of Europe that the American Secretary of State George C. Marshall presented on June 5, 1947 in a speech to students at Harvard University. “The Marshall Plan was an economic program, but the crisis it averted was political,” writes Tony Judt in his history of Europe (8). “The real benefit of the Marshall Plan was psychological. One could almost say that he gave Europeans a more positive self-image. They gained the strength to say goodbye once and for all to chauvinism and authoritarian solutions. A common economic policy now seemed normal..." (9), because the Marshall Plan forced Europeans to plan together and estimate their investment needs. “They had to negotiate not only with the United States, but also with the other European states, since the aim was to establish multilateral economic relations as quickly as possible (10). From this point of view, the Marshall Plan and the supranational institutions created by it, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation in Europe (OEEC) and the European Payments Union, became the ideal training and experience field for the later work of politicians and administrators in the European institutions.

The start of the new Europe

After this history and after this previous European experience, it was not surprising that it took just under a year until the Schuman Plan worked out by Jean Monnet was signed on April 18, 1951 by the six founding states of the Montanunion. Jean Monnet (1888 - 1979) - later called "Father of Europe" - was the first President of the newly created High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) from 1952 - 1954. "The motives of the six states in signing this treaty may have varied, but the result was historically significant. The fact that former enemies found such a community a few years after the end of the war is unprecedented in world history" (11).

In retrospect, it has to be accepted that this European dynamism did not continue unabated. Above all, the fact that the plan for a European Defense Community (EDC) proposed by France in 1950 failed four years later in the French National Assembly was a setback in the European integration process. Two men - again Jean Monnet and the Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak (1899 - 1972) started the wheel of development again. On March 25, 1957, the treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) were solemnly signed in Rome.

The formal founding of a district association of the Europa-Union in Heilbronn on May 9, 1953 was not an event of world-historical significance. But one can assume that the European spirit was also present in the founders of Heilbronn. On March 23, 1953, the state chairman of the Europa-Union, the Lord Mayor of Esslingen
dr Dieter Roser asked his Heilbronn colleague Paul Meyle for support so that "the European Union could finally do work in Heilbronn that was appropriate to the size and importance of this city". And that work is still being done.

bibliography

(1) Mak, Geert: "What if Europe fails"; Munich 2012
(2) Mak, Geert, loc.cit. p. 8
(3) Dowe, Dieter and Klotzbach, Kurt: “Programmatic documents of the German
Social Democracy”, Bonn 1990, p. 220
(4) Lorenz, Einhart: "The dream of Europe's United States -
European ideas of the young Willy Brandt 1940 - 1946"
In: "We are on the right track - Willy Brandt and European unification",
Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. Bonn 2010, p. 43
(5) Mak, Geert, loc.cit. p. 19
(6) The text of the speech was repeatedly published on the Internet; eg from the
European Union Vorarlberg; created in 2006, updated in 2009
(7) Hertensteiner program; See Wikipedia, as of November 16.11.2011, XNUMX
(8) Judt, Tony: "History of Europe from 1945 to the Present";
Buchergilde Gutenberg 2005, p. 121
(9) Judt, Tony, loc.cit., p. 121
(10) Judt, Tony, loc.cit. p. 116
(11) Mai, Manfred: "European history - told by Manfred Mai"; Book Guild
Gutenberg 2007; p. 177