The New Old World. Perry Anderson
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provincial reserve and propriety that surrounded his person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Malraux than of Georges Duhamel. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for continental unity and dreams of a global directorate. From cornering Canadian brandy markets to organizing Allied wheat supplies; floating bond issues in Warsaw and Bucharest to fighting proxy battles with Giannini in San Francisco; liquidating Kreuger’s empire in Sweden to arranging railroad loans for T.V. Soong in Shanghai; working with Dulles to set up American Motors in Detroit and dealing with Flick to sell off chemical concerns in Nazi Germany—such were the staging-posts to the post-war Commissariat au Plan and the presidency of the High Authority, to the Companion of Honour and the first Citizen of Europe.
Monnet’s marriage gives perhaps the best glimpse of his life, still only visible in part, between the wars. In 1929 he was floating a municipal bond in Milan, at the behest of John McCloy, when he fell in love with the newly wed wife of one of his Italian employees. There was no divorce under Mussolini, and a child was born to the married couple two years later. Attempts to get the union annulled were resisted by the husband and father, and refused by the Vatican. By 1934 Monnet’s headquarters were in Shanghai. There one day he headed for the Trans-Siberian to meet his lover in Moscow, where she arrived from Switzerland, acquired Soviet citizenship overnight, dissolved her marriage, and wed him under the banns of the USSR. His bride, a devout Catholic, preferred these unusual arrangements—Monnet explained—to the demeaning offices of Reno. Why Stalin’s government allowed them, he could never understand. It was a tense time for a wedding: Kirov was assassinated a fortnight later. Subsequently, when her repudiated Italian spouse attempted to recover his four-year-old daughter in Shanghai, Madame Monnet found refuge from the kidnapper in the Soviet consulate—an establishment of some fame in the history of the Comintern. By the end of 1935, still holding a Soviet passport, she obtained residence in the US, when Monnet relocated to New York, on a Turkish quota. We are in the corridors of Stamboul Train or Shanghai Express.
Cosmopolitan as only an international financier could be, Monnet remained a French patriot, and from the eve to the end of the Second World War worked with untiring distinction for the victory of his country and the Allies, in Paris, London, Washington, Algiers. In 1945, appointed by De Gaulle to head France’s new planning commission, Monnet was a logical choice. The organizer of the Plan for Modernization and Equipment is with reason described by Milward as ‘a most effective begetter of the French nation-state’s post-war resurgence’.8 Here, however, he was in a substantial company. What made Monnet different was the speed and boldness with which he slipped this leash when the occasion arose. His opportunity came when in late 1949 Acheson demanded of Schuman a coherent French policy towards Germany, for which the Quai d’Orsay had no answer. It was Monnet’s solution—the offer of a supranational pooling of steel and coal resources—that set the ball of European integration rolling. The larger part of the institutional model of the EEC eight years later descended directly from the ECSC Monnet’s circle designed in 1950.
There is no doubt that, as Milward suggests, Monnet’s initiatives in these years owed much to American encouragement. His decisive advantage, as a political operator across national boundaries in Europe, was the closeness of his association with the US political elite—not only the Dulles brothers, but Acheson, Harriman, McCloy, Ball, Bruce and others—formed during his years in New York and Washington, abundantly documented by Duchêne. Monnet’s intimacy with the highest levels of power in the hegemonic state of the hour was unique. He was to become widely distrusted in his own country because of it. How much of his European zeal, both compatriots at the time and historians since have asked, was prompted by his American patrons, within the strategic framework of the Marshall Plan?
The structural interconnexion was indeed very close. It is possible that Monnet was first set thinking about post-war integration by discussions in the US, and certain that his subsequent achievements depended critically on US support. But his political inspiration was nevertheless quite different. American policy was driven by the relentless pursuit of Cold War objectives. A strong Western Europe was needed as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, on the central front of a world-wide battle against Communist subversion, whose outlying zones were to be found in Asia, from Korea in the north to Indochina and Malaya in the south, where the line was being held by France and Britain.
Monnet was strangely unmoved by all this. In France itself he got on well with CGT leaders after the liberation. He considered the colonial war in Indochina, financed by Washington, ‘absurd and dangerous’; feared the Korean War would escalate American pressure for German rearmament to a point where French public opinion would reject the sharing of sovereignty envisaged in the Schuman Plan; thought Western fixation with the Soviet menace a distraction. As late as June 1950 he told the editor of the Economist that the underlying purpose of the ECSC was ‘the setting up of a neutralized group in Europe—if France need not fear Germany, she need have no other fears, i.e. Russia’.9 The important task was to build a modern and united Europe, capable in the long run of an independent partnership with the United States. ‘We would transform our archaic social conditions’, he wrote in 1952, ‘and come to laugh at our present fear of Russia’.10 American power set the limits of all political action in Europe, and Monnet knew better than anyone how to work within them. But he had an original agenda of his own, which was diagonal to US intentions.
Where did it come from? Monnet had lived through two devastating European conflicts, and his over-riding goal was to bar the road to another one. But this was a common preoccupation of his generation, without inspiring any general vision of federalism. Part of the reason was that the passions of the Cold War so quickly succeeded the lessons of the World War, displacing or surcharging it in another set of priorities for the political elites of Western Europe. Monnet was detached from these. His career as a deracinated financial projector, adrift from any stable social forces or national frontiers, left him at a psychological angle to the conventional outlook of his class. As Duchêne points out, people thought Monnet ‘lacked political values’, because he did not care very much about the ‘struggles over economic equality springing from the French and Russian Revolutions’.11 It was this relative indifference—not exactly the same as insensibility—that freed him to act so inventively beyond the assumptions of the inter-state system in which these struggles were fought out.
Although he was proud of his country, Monnet was not committed to the framework of the nation-state. He opposed the French nuclear deterrent and tried to dissuade Adenauer from signing the Franco-German Treaty. From the conception of the ECSC onwards, he worked consistently for supranational goals in Europe. He was initially cool towards the idea of the EEC, which he did not originate, thinking the Common Market to be a ‘rather vague’ scheme—he was anyway not particularly impressed with doctrines of free trade. Milward makes much of his paradoxical underestimation of the potential of a customs union for integration, but the question Monnet put as early as 1955—‘Is it possible to have a Common Market without federal social, monetary and macro-economic policies?’12—is still the central issue before the European Union forty years later. The order of the phrasing is significant. A banker by profession, Monnet was not economically conservative. He always sought trade-union support for his schemes, and late in life even expressed sympathy with the student movement of 1968, whose warning of social injustice stood for ‘the cause of humanity’.13
On the other hand, Monnet was a stranger to the democratic process, as conventionally understood. He never faced a crowd or ran for office. Shunning any direct contact with electorates, he worked among elites only. From Milward’s standpoint, in which European integration flowed from the popular consensus inside each nation-state, as expressed at the polls, this was in itself enough to condemn him to the irrelevance that affected federalism more largely. It is more plausible, however, to draw the opposite lesson. Monnet’s career was emblematic, in a particularly pure way, of the predominant character of the process that has led to the Union we have today. At no point until—ostensibly—the British referendum of 1976 was there any real popular participation in the movement towards European unity.
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