The most fundamental misconception about how the European Union came into being stems from the myth that its intellectual genesis emerged after the Second World War. All the essential ideas which lay behind the moves to unite Europe at that time had in fact been conceived in the 1920s, before the rise of Hitler, as a way to prevent a recurrence of the First World War. The chief problem they were designed to solve, the national rivalry between France and Germany, paled into insignificance beside a new, much greater threat, identified by Churchill in his other famous speech of 1946, given at Fulton, Missouri. Then he spoke of how, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Although it was Churchill’s Fulton speech on 5 March 1946 which made this phrase famous, the term ‘iron curtain’ had been used many times before, not least in a widely reported article by Josef Goebbels in Das Reich on 25 February 1945, in which he warned that German surrender would lead to Soviet occupation of most of the Reich and eastern Europe, dividing the continent by ‘an iron curtain’ of ‘enormous dimensions’. Churchill himself, in a cable to President Truman on 4 June 1945, wrote ‘I view with profound misgivings ... the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward’. Another phrase was given general currency through the Fullton speech when Churchill urged the continuation of ‘a special relationship between the British Common-wealth and Empire and the United States’.

One thing the Utopian visions of the 1920s all had in common, from the League of Nations itself, to Pan Europa and Briand’s European Federal Union, was that they were all based on the idea of nations coming together to co-operate on an ‘intergovernmental’ basis.

Most influential on the birth of the later EC however was Arthur Salter’s collection of papers published in 1931  titled:  The United States of Europe, in which he addressed the possibility of building a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations itself. Because the League, had become largely a regional organisation, Salter saw that it might be adapted to provide a framework for a politically united Europe. In an essay entitled ‘The United States of Europe’ Idea he drew on the model of how Germany had been politically united in the 19th century, through establishing a Zollverein, a’common market.  His ‘United States’ would work in the same way, raising its funding through a common tariff on all goods imported from outside.

The central source of authority in this new body, Salter urged, must be reserved for the ‘Secretariat, the permanent body of international civil servants, loyal to the new organisation, not to the member countries. The problem with giving too much power to a Council was that they would always remain motivated primarily by national interest:
‘In face of a permanent corps of Ministers, meeting in committees and “shadow councils”, and in direct contact with their Foreign Office, the Secretariat will necessarily sink in status, in influence, and in the character of its personnel, to clerks responsible only for routine duties. They will cease to be an element of importance in the formation or maintenance of the League’s traditions.’ (Salter, Arthur (1931), The United States Of Europe, George (London, Allen & Unwin), p. 134.).

The Secretariat, Salter argued, would be above the power of national ministers, run by people who no longer owed any national loyalty. ‘The new international officer needed for the League’s task’ he wrote, ‘is something new in the world’s history.’

What Salter was describing, of course, was precisely the ‘supranational’ principle by which nearly three decades later his friend  Jean Monnet would inspire the setting up of the European Economic Community, deliberately intended as an embryonic ‘United States of Europe’.

By now, however, as Europe plunged into the Great Depression, the shadows were gathering over such dreams: 1932 saw the death of Briand himself, the most distinguished champion a’United States of Europe’ had yet won to its cause. The next year brought the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. His idea of how Europe might be united was very different.
In 1941then,  Churchill appointed Salter to head a British mission to Washington, to press on the Americans the need for a vast programme of new shipbuilding, this would eventually lead to the ‘Liberty ships’ which were to provide Britain with such a vital lifeline. (Dictionary of National Biography 1971-80 ,1985,Oxford, Oxford University Press).

At the end of February 1943, after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, he was sent by President Roosevelt to Algiers to arrange for arms shipments to the Free French forces. Here he found bitter rivalry developing between the two French generals who could claim to act as leader of the Free French, de Gaulle and Giraud. In his efforts to resolve this dispute, Salter’s friend Jean Monnet formed a close alliance with the politician sent out by Churchill to act as the British Cabinet’s Political Representative in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan records how he and Monnet had extensive conversations about the future of France and post-war Europe, and despite their reservations about de Gaulle’s high-handedness, agreed he was the only man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile.

In 1947, at the Albert Hall in London, Churchill conjured up his vision of a’Temple of World Peace, which would have ‘four pillars’: the USA; the Soviet Union; a’United States of Europe’; and, quite separately, ‘the British Empire and Commonwealth.  Ironically, this was almost the only point on which Churchill and Monnet were agreed. If a’United States of Europe’ was to be brought about, it would be without Britain.

But it where however  two of the most active campaigners for integration, Josef Retinger and Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys, who in fact had gone to America to lobby for support for their campaign for European unity. Here they met two key figures, William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, founder in 1947 of the CIA, and his colleague Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA under President Eisenhower (and whose brother John Foster Dulles was to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of State). These two very senior members of the US intelligence community had recently joined in support of Coudenhove Kelergi another early proponent of a pan-European idea to form a Committee for a Free and United Europe. And a  new organisation was set up, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE).

From this time on, as  academic research has established, the ACUE was used as a conduit to provide covert CIA funds, augmented by contributions from private foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, to promote the State Department’s obsession with a united Europe, in what one historian has called a’liberal conspiracy’.( Joshua Paul of Georgetown University, Washington, reported in Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000, and Coleman, Peter ,1989, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress For Cultural Freedom And The Struggle For The Mind Of Europe (New York, The Free Press).

Over the next few years, ACUE funding was secretly channelled to a range of individuals and organisations working for European integration, from politicians such as Paul-Henri Spaak and trade unions to such influential British magazines as Lord Layton’s The Economist and the intellectual monthly Encounter.  However, the major beneficiary of ACUE funding was the European Movement. Between 1949 and 1960, it was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income. ACUE funds were also used for a range of other purposes in Europe, including the financing of anti-Communist parties. In 1948, for instance, the CIA paid $10 million to support the Italian electoral campaign of Alcide de Gasperi a staunch supporter of European integration.  This substantial contribution was intended to help avert an Italian civil war in which the Communists might prevail. (See Spaak, Paul-Henri ,1971, The Continuing Battle: Memoirs Of A European Boston, Little, Brown and Company).

This  culminated when the ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe, issued its inaugural manifesto on 15 October 1955. By this time the principal roles in the British government however had changed. The ageing Churchill had retired, succeeded by Anthony Eden, who led his party to election victory in May 1955.
Macmillan became Foreign Secretary.

Eden’s Cabinet considered the Six’s invitation to join the talks just beginning in Brussels. Despite rejecting British participation in any supranational organisation on principle, it decided on 30 June to send Russell Bretherton, an under-secretary of the Board of Trade. Much would later be made that only a civil servant rather than a minister was sent, but the talks were intended to be technical discussions rather than negotiations. But bids to turn both the OEEC and the Council of Europe into supranational bodies were rebuffed.

All this was, of course, to be repeated  a few years later when Jean Monnet, now head of his Action Committee for a United States of Europe, began discussing with the Prime Minister of Belgium P.H.Spaak the next leap forward. It was Spaak who more than anyone was responsible for guiding the project towards its greatest breakthrough of all, the Treaty of Rome. And it was Spaak who steered Monnet into accepting what was to become the central deception of the whole story, when he urged that all mentions of political or ‘federal’ union should be suppressed and that the project should be sold to the world as no more than a’common market’, designed to promote peaceful economic co-operation, trade and general prosperity.

Britain’s post-war record in promoting European cooperation on an intergovernmental basis however was second to none, from the OEEC and the Council of Europe to NATO and the WEU. This was precisely why Jean Monnet and Spaak were  determined to keep Britain out of their project at all costs: not least by making membership of the EEC conditional on joining Euratom, on terms they knew would make it impossible for the British to accept.

When Britain then persisted in trying to promote intergovernmental co-operation through free trade, the OEEC, the FTA and EFTA, Monnet used all his influence behind the scenes, not least through the USA, to sabotage those efforts. Only when he became seriously alarmed that his old ally de Gaulle was trying to subvert the project from within, by dragging it back towards intergovernmentalism, did Monnet go through that U-turn which led him to want Britain in. From Britain’s point of view, the story can then be understood better in terms of psychology than of rational political calculation. Britain’s change of heart over ‘Europe’ around 1960 stemmed more than anything from her post-Suez loss of national self-confidence and from the onset of that collective inferiority complex which resulted from comparing the performance of her own faltering, obsolescent economy with the new-found ‘dynamism’ of her Common Market neighbours.

On the other end France -in to the launch of the euro was first to object to the Maastricht criteria, and was then in 2003 leading the opposition to the Anglo-American coalition to topple Saddam Husein.  During the latter period then France’s president at the time led the way in pushing for that ‘directoire’ form of inter govern-mentalism which would legitimise France’s right to play top dog in settling Europe’s affairs for some time. By comparison, the role played by Germany, tucked in alongside France as her closest ally but inhibited by her wish to show she had forsworn her old nationalistic arrogance and the shame of her earlier record, was insignificant. (More to follow in two days)