Functionalism and Federalism in the European Union

Second Quarter 2002

by Alice-Catherine Carls and Megan Naughton

On January 1, a new European currency, called the Euro, replaced national currencies in most of the 15 countries that currently belong to the European Union (EU). On March 1, 105 delegates from these and 13 other European countries opened a "constitutional convention" in Brussels to draw up a proposal for a more integrated, federal union. The task of the assembly is to design a new governing structure that can overcome the limits of the entangled web of treaties that loosely regulate the current member states of the EU The deadline for completing the proposal is June, 2003, and a vote on it will be taken at a summit meeting in 2004 when 10 new members are scheduled to join the EU. The article that follows explains some of the early steps that led to a European common market and eventually to this pivotal point in EU history.—Ed.

At the dawn of the new millennium, the Euro is not only the symbol of a greater Europe, but a measure of the progress from war to peace that has been made during the twentieth century. There have been many false starts, however, toward a union that still includes only some of Europe's states.

This year, EU countries are celebrating many anniversaries, none more fitting than the 60th anniversary of the first New York University European Seminar. Organized by Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the seminar fought to keep alive hope of a united Europe at a time when visions of the future were dwarfed by wartime diplomacy. Better than anyone, Coudenhove-Kalergi, known for his indefatigable pan-European campaigns on European soil during the interwar years, understood that the new Europe would have to arise from a cultural idea and political design. He could see that European integration would unfold not only from reaction to war but also pro-actively as the outcome of reassessed national and global priorities and reasoned goal-setting.

Indeed, the path towards a united Europe has been complex and often incongruous since the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. Spurred on by the ordeal of World War I, several twentieth-century leaders began to forge a new vision of Europe.The threat of war, a sense of mortality, the fragility of the Western heritage, diminishing European authority worldwide, and the need to counterbalance the perils of nationalism -- all of these together created a yearning for new structures devoid of the traits that had fostered dangerous, dysfunctional regimes. The 1920s witnessed a rich debate about the future of Europe among intellectuals. Politicians, church leaders, trade unionists, lobbyists, businessmen, and even Pope Pius XI, took a position. From Jacques Maritain to Julien Benda, from Ortega y Gasset to Denis de Rougemont, a yearning for social justice and renewal based on the preservation of humanistic values fostered a sense of the political and spiritual unity of Europe.

Functionalism and Federalism

Two ideas in particular emerged as possible solutions to the wars that had so long plagued Europe: (1) building cooperation among countries through the integration of one or more highly important economic function shared by all of them (functionalism); and (2) directly establishing a European political federation (federalism). Both functionalist and federalist models, therefore, came into play at the earliest stages of discussion.

The pan-European vision of Coudenhove-Kalergi was embraced by two French politicians, Louis Loucheur and Aristide Briand. Loucheur was a World War I munitions minister who had experienced first-hand the benefits of allied war-time cooperation. In 1919 he began to argue for a functionalist approach. At the Paris Peace Conference, Loucheur proposed the creation of an international steel cartel with the participation of France, Belgium and Luxembourg, eventually to be joined by England and Germany. At a League of Nations-sponsored conference in 1927, he developed this idea into a full-blown proposal for an economic league of nations complete with free trade and a customs union.

Briand, by contrast, took a federalist approach, which entails the more difficult task of building unity by means of a comprehensive political federation of states. In 1930, Briand advocated a European federal union within the League of Nations, a model that anticipated the gradual application of the federalist idea to economics, finances, labor, and inter-parliamentary relations. The search for a system capable of ensuring lasting peace, he was convinced, was inseparable from a regional political organization within a larger, global organization. That is why Briand described his approach as "regionalizing the League of Nations."

The power politics of the late 1930s doomed these efforts, once again forcing the division of Europe into traditional alliance systems. The dominant integrative "models" that emerged as a consequence were those of the Nazis and the Soviet communists, two systems that briefly joined forces between 1939 and 1941. However, exhaustion from the ordeal of another "total war" along with the near destruction of the state system in most occupied countries, renewed the sense of urgency about overcoming the root causes of such conflicts. During World War II, new groups formed to provide the decisive impetus toward a united Europe.

The strongest impetus toward European integration in western Europe came from political parties organized or reorganized under the banner of Christian Democracy. Liberal parties such as the Italian Lgnazio Silone and socialist parties such as the British Labour Party also rallied behind the idea of Europe. Leading anti-Nazi resisters from occupied countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, along with jailed politicians such as Altiero Spinelli and governments in exile, committed themselves to building a peaceful future. Leaders who grew up in border areas, especially Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi, not only knew firsthand the hardships of a divided Europe, but were devout Catholics who shared in the vision of a spiritually and culturally united Europe. In the United States, Coudenhove-Kalergi lobbied the media and U.S. senators, organized seminars, and wrote prolifically in support of a federal Europe.

Post-World War II Efforts

As the second World War drew to a close, however, concern for a united Europe had to take a back seat to wider plans for the reordering of the globe. Moreover, the division of Europe into two spheres of influence appeared inevitable after the Tehran Conference in 1943. Yet, despite the emerging Cold War, hopes for a united Europe did not die. Gradually, functionalist and federalist proposals resurfaced, many of them looking eerily similar to those of the interwar period, as though in the 1920s Europe had gone through a dress rehearsal for the late 1940s. The war had broadened the debate and given it an even greater sense of urgency, but the options were not really all that different. Just as in 1919, support for a united Europe in the mid-1940s emerged first in those countries most devastated by the war, bringing to the fore men such as Paul-Henry Spaak and Paul Van Zeeland of the low countries. The new fathers of Europe were those who had lived through the dress rehearsal, who were close to the ideals of Christian Democracy, and who knew all the subtleties and paradoxes of the debate about European unity.

As in 1919, so now there was an advocate of functionalism, a man who had played an important part in the Allied wartime cooperation and would be very instrumental in shaping the Marshall Plan. He was the Frenchman Jean Monnet. Always the pragmatist, Monnet often changed plans in order to adjust to new situations. Committed at the start to an Anglo-French European core, Monnet next played the American card and then supported a Franco-German European core as British leadership waned. But he faced obstacles. The Marshall Plan aimed at the outset simply to rebuild rather than to integrate national economies. Furthermore, the problem of figuring out how to contain Germany was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Korean War. Nonetheless, Monnet pushed ahead, pioneering the International Ruhr Authority in 1949. Concerned as much as Loucheur was in 1919 about France's economic reconstruction, Monnet then broadened his original concept to an international cartel, thus preparing the way for the first major functionalist institution of the new Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community (established in 1951).

At the same time, federalist visionaries were also hard at work. From the Draft Declaration of the European Resistance in 1944, to Winston Churchill's Zurich speech in 1946, to the Hague Congress in 1948, calls were heard for the formation of a United States of Europe. These efforts were supported by the European Union of Federalists, a party conceived in 1941 by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, and established in 1946 with the help of the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (NEI), which was formed in 1947 and would become the European Union of Christian Democrats in 1965. The Hague Congress was a federalist triumph, and the ensuing Brussels Pact of 1948 had three important consequences: it created the Western European Union (with the goal of common defense); it launched the European Movement (the first European party); and it laid the foundation for the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949.

The years 1949-1950 proved a turning point in European politics, leading to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and from there to the European Economic Community (1957) and on to the EU of today. The most important achievement has arguably been the continued coexistence of the functionalist and federalist visions of unity, even though the realization that the two are complementary would not come until much later. Like the earlier interwar efforts to foster European unity, the new efforts were both reactive and proactive, the products of both political pragmatism and grand visions. The continuing growth of the European Union today is thus borne of a synthesis, and its dual paternity is likely to make it all the stronger.

—Dr. Carls is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Martin, where Ms. Naughton is a student majoring in history.