Looking beyond Self-Interest: The European Union

It is plausible that the European Union would not have been such a successful institution were it not for the early leadership of the European Coal and Steel Community by Alcide De Gasperi from Trentino, Konrad Adenauer from Rhineland and Robert Schuman from Lorraine. In Judt’s view, these men were not worried about the merging of national sovereignty because they “[hailed] from the fringes of their own countries, where identities had long been multiple and boundaries fungible” (Judt 157). Their concepts of nationality and loyalty were much more malleable, all having lived in territories that were at one time parts of either the Austro-Hungarian or German Empires. The Christian Democratic Party had strong roots in many of the original six member states of the ECSC, the effect of which was the establishment of a platform concerned with social cohesion and collective responsibility. Though it would have been very easy to ostracize Germany after the war, these statesmen’s common Germanic background and involvement in Christian associations helped keep their eyes toward the long term economic and political security of Europe. Rather than being swept up in the nationalistic tendencies that characterized the previous period, Schuman especially was able to look past war-time hatreds and identified the fact that it was in France’s (and Europe’s) interest to incorporate the West German state, in order to mobilize its abundance of coal. Here, steel and coal act as centripetal forces strong enough to overpower the centrifugal forces of ethnicity and nationality. Europe was so completely destroyed by the Second World War, in both economic and civilian terms, that these states tempered their self-interests and acceded to union with Germany. This is why the current dominance of the EU by the UK, France, and Germany is ominous for the other member states and the original purpose of the EU. The criticism is that the EU is already hardly a model for democratic institutions, but it becomes less democratic as the interests of these three nations take precedence over the interests of smaller nations like Poland or Austria. The effect will be that fewer European citizens will participate in elections, feeling that the future course of their countries is out of their control.