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Extracts from an Article: The Campaign of the European Congresses*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
JUST AS THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 WAS PRECEDED BY A ‘campaign of banquets’, so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a ‘campaign of congresses’ spread over the years 1947–49. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogeneous and many-sided movement — a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.
Historians may argue that the congresses achieved nothing — and indeed we do not normally expect congresses to achieve much. Members of the same profession meet together to sit through tedious sessions and enjoy themselves all the better afterwards. But in those days, a strange driving passion, unknown to this generation, inspired the militants of Europeanism, and induced them to prefer the nightly labours of commissions and operas. It is the sense of this driving passion which must be communicated, if we are to convey the psychological and historical reality of the campaign of congresses, and pay due tribute to the influence it exerted. Their action should not be considered as that of a general seizing a military position, a law-giver imposing a legal structure, or even a medicine effecting a cure. Rather should it be regarded as a concerted concentration of psychic and psychological factors which prepare the ground and enable the organism to resorb certain poisons, overcome certain inhibitions and liberate new energies. It is such profound metamorphoses which really deserve the name of revolution.
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- Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988
Footnotes
*
These extracts are from the article published in Government and Opposition, Vol. 2 no. 3, Summer 1967 and republished in G. Ionescu (ed.), The Politics of European Integration, London, Macmillan, 1972, pp. 10–31.
References
1 Reports and collected Resolutions of Montreux, the Hague, Westminster, Lausanne; and two small books: Europe Unites (The Hague Congress and After) and European Movement and the Council of Europe, edited by the secretariat of the European Movement, London, 1949 Google Scholar. On the Hague, see also Le Problème de L'Union Européenne by Philip, , 1950 Google Scholar, and my Europe en jeu, 1940.
2 Rapport du premier congrès annuel del' UEF, 27–31 08 1947, Montreux, published by UEF, Geneva, n.d. (1948) 142 ppGoogle Scholar.
3 Delegates from the Resistance had already met secretly in Geneva in spring 1944, to draw up a European federalist manifesto; cf. L'Europe de domain ed. Baconnière, La, Neuchâtel, 1946 Google Scholar. The main ideas expressed in Montreux and the Hague, will already be found here.
4 Unpublished document from the archives of the European Union of Federalists, 24 September 1947.
5 The political Resolution (para 9–13) deals in very similar terms with the same points, Charter and Supreme Court, as the cultural Resolution (paras. 4 and 5).
6 Cf. Political Resolution, al. 3. and Political Report, III, 26, a.
7 Summary of Recommendations, in European Movement, chapter on Westminster conference, p. 97 Google ScholarPubMed. In the leaflets containing the texts of the congress, published in 1949, I read: ‘It is urged that European organizations should be formed to which governments will agree to hand over some part of their sovereign powers in certain defined spheres of economic activities.’