![]() The idea was to follow the model of the ECSC, the first tangible result of the Schuman Declaration of 1950, which Monnet also drafted. To make the process work, states were to transfer real decision-making capacities to common institutions rooted in a supranational principle and that wielded authority superior to that of national governments. Monnet continued to believe that both the German problem and the reconstruction of the European economy should be resolved through the Continent’s economic and political integration. The Soviets, meanwhile, had conveyed to the Messina forum their firm opposition to any further progress in the efforts to promote European unity. Adenauer’s representative, meanwhile, was not entirely convinced of the idea of jointly managing nuclear power for peaceful purposes –Euratom–. Antoine Pinay had spoken on behalf of France to express his opposition to reindustrialising Germany beyond coal and steel. ![]() Spaak had sent Monnet the final version of the memorandum accompanied by a hand-written note that said ‘this is your baby’. Spaak now headed the intergovernmental working group that was to develop and implement the document, approved by the ministers of foreign affairs, with certain reservations, at the Messina Conference on 1 June 1955. In fact, the Belgian politician had all but reproduced the plan prepared by Jean Monnet and Pierre Uri before withdrawing from the High Authority of the ECSC. The idea of launching two further Communities had been devised by the minister Paul Henri Spaak in what was termed the ‘Benelux Memorandum’. At the same time, the committee studied and drafted improvements to these projects in order to link them to the Community that was already in existence. ![]() The Committee, funded primarily by his American friends, proposed to create a favourable political environment in the parties and trade unions of the ECSC’s six member states in order to establish two new European Communities, one for atomic energy and the other a common market. Now, having stepped down, he decided to work independently to re-launch integration. Following this political setback, Monnet had decided not to serve again as president of the High Authority of the ECSC. The Committee was the old cognac merchant’s personal response to the failure of the European Defence Community (the Pleven Plan, actually the umpteenth Monnet Plan), wrecked in De Gaulle’s France in late August 1954 by a disappointing vote in the National Assembly. Monnet would spend many hours around the long table in the dining room, piled with stacks of papers, accompanied by his former collaborators from the ECSC, Max Kohnstamm and Jacques Valmont, and supported by a team of secretaries overseen by the able Madame Miguez. The association had its headquarters at 83 Foch Avenue, in the apartment the French politician shared with his brother-in-law. On 13 October 1955 the Action Committee for the United States of Europe began to operate in Paris under the direction of Jean Monnet. The first city: a Europe that rescues its states The task at hand cannot be based on taking the same road again, and treading it in the same way, but rather on charting a new path and proposing another way of traveling together, that leads to the second city, as a metaphor for a pro-European vision adapted to our own time. The initial steps were taken under exceptional circumstances in the wake of World War II and under the threat of a new world war, a context that strongly moulded the European project. Through them it aims to present a narrative that can be useful for understanding European integration as a whole, presenting a critique and re-launching it in our time.Įach of the two cities represents an approach to the future of European integration, as bearers of a Utopian component, an ideal that gives meaning to ‘Europeanism’ at very different historical moments.Īrrival at the first city, formulated by Jean Monnet and Europe’s other ‘founding fathers’, took place at the beginning of the 21st century. This short essay borrows its title from the novel by Charles Dickens in order to describe two European ‘cities’ that are very different from each other.
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