European Identity and the Second World War

European Identity and the Second World War

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Also by Menno Spiering: ENGLISHNESS: Images of National Identity in Post-War Literature IDEAS OF EUROPE SINCE 1914: The Legacy of the First World War (edited with M. Wintle)

Also by Michael Wintle: AN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS THE IDEA OF A UNITED EUROPE (edited with J. Shahin) IDEAS OF EUROPE SINCE 1914 (edited with M. Spiering) IMAGE INTO IDENTITY IMAGINING EUROPE THE IMAGE OF EUROPE

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European Identity and the Second World War

Edited by

Menno Spiering Lecturer in European Studies, University of Amsterdam and

Michael Wintle Professor of Modern European History, European Studies, University of Amsterdam

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Editorial matter and selection © Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle 2011 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–27323–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Preface

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Editor’s Introduction: Ideals, Identity and War: the Idea of Europe, 1939–70 Michael Wintle

1

Part I 1

2

3

World War II, Europe and Human Rights

Human Rights and European Identity since World War II: Vergangenheitsbewältigung through Law Helle Porsdam

21

Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe Hagen Schulz-Forberg

37

From War Talk to Rights Talk: Exile Politics, Human Rights and the Two World Wars Jay Winter

55

Part II Reflections: Narratives of European Civilization and World War II 4

Myth and History in European Post-War History Writing Jan Ifversen

5

From Nazi Legacy to Cold War: British Perceptions of European Identity, 1945–54 Wendy Webster

6

The Nordic Way Out: Europe in Danish Literature after the Second World War Henk van der Liet

75

92

111

v

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vi

7

Contents

‘Europe is the Country of the Spirit’: Albert Camus and Europeanism in France, 1944–7 Manet van Montfrans

Part III 8

9

Visions: Plans for a New Europe after World War II

The Ventotene Manifesto: the Crisis of the Nation State and the Political Identity of Europe Matthew D’Auria Max Kohnstamm’s New Europe Annemarie van Heerikhuizen

10 Atoms for Europe Menno Spiering 11

Before Self-Reflexivity: Imperialism and Colonialism in the Early Discourses of European Integration Wolfgang Schmale

Part IV

141 159 171

186

Shoah, War and European Civilization

12 Holocaust Literature and the Shaping of European Identity after the Second World War: the Case of Jorge Semprún Karen-Margrethe L. Simonsen 13 Goodbye to All That? Jewish Views of Europe after 1945 Irene Zwiep 14

124

Language Out of Darkness: George Steiner Speaking the Unspeakable Ricardo Gil Soeiro

205 224

235

References

247

Index

265

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Illustrations 5.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

Cover illustration of Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika (1954) Atom and Eve, by Muriel Howorth, 1955 The atom as a kind genie (Howorth 1955, 49) Euratom logo (Communauté européenne de l’énergie atomique 1966) Cover of Achtenvijftig (1957, 33), celebrating ‘the atom’ as a flower of harmony and prosperity

102 175 176 178 182

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Acknowledgements The cover illustration is of a Marshall Aid poster of Europe as a ship, 1950, courtesy of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary amendments, where possible, at the first opportunity.

viii

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Preface The idea for this book was one of the fruits of a project of research cooperation between the departments of European Studies at the Universities of Amsterdam (NL) and Aarhus (DK), and more broadly between the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus and the Huizinga National Research School in the Netherlands. The project was a multidisciplinary study of European identity in the period between 1939 and 1970, and was directed by Professor Michael Wintle. It was generously sponsored in 2005–7 by the Netherlands Research Council (NWO), which facilitated the holding of three international symposia and conferences over the period of three years, with more than eighty papers delivered in all. Some of the chapters in this collection began as papers at those conferences. That collaboration built in turn on a previous research exercise undertaken by some of the same partners in 1999–2002, which examined the First World War and its impact on the idea of Europe. Special thanks are due to Jan Ifversen, Head of History and Area Studies at Aarhus, who was a co-applicant to the NWO and was our host at a very successful academic gathering in Sandbjerg, DK in January 2007. We are grateful to the NWO, and to various research funds at the Universities of Amsterdam and Aarhus, which contributed additionally to some translation and other costs. Thanks also to Noortje Willems, who compiled the index. Most of all, our thanks are due to our colleague contributors both to the book and to the conferences, for their patience, perseverance and collegiality. Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle European Studies, University of Amsterdam

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Contributors

Matthew D’Auria graduated from the Università l’Orientale of Naples in Political and International Studies. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis at the Centre for European Studies at University College London on the history of European political thought, focusing on the relationship between historiography and politics in eighteenth-century France. He is collaborating with the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Università degli Studi di Salerno on a research project on the history of European federalism. In 2005 and 2006, he was awarded a Marie Curie Assistantship at UCL, where he taught several BA and MA courses. He is currently a Teaching Fellow in the German Department and in the Centre for European Studies at UCL. Annemarie van Heerikhuizen is a historian and a Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, working in the Department of European Studies. She studied Modern and Theoretical History, and took her doctorate in 1998. She lectures on European integration politics, Dutch foreign policy and the history of the idea of Europe. Her research is directed towards the cultural–political development and transformation of the idea of European unity since the Renaissance. She is interested mainly in the personal ideas of the European founding fathers, as laid down in their writings. Her publications include Pioniers van een Verenigd Europa. Bovennational denken in het Nederlandse Parlement (1946–1951) (Amsterdam, 1998); ‘William Thomas Stead, Den Haag en de wereldvrede’, De Negentiende Eeuw 29/2 (2005), 134–46; ‘How God Disappeared from Europe: Visions of a United Europe from Erasmus to Kant’, The European Legacy 13/4 (2008), 401–11. Jan Ifversen is Associate Professor of European Studies and Head of the Department of History and Area Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, Denmark; his main research interests are in the history of European democracy and nationalism, the history of modern key concepts of European self-presentation and theories of conceptual history. He has published on such themes as nationalism, conceptual history, European civilization and globalization, including Om magt, demokrati og diskurs [On Power, Democracy and Discourse] (1997); ‘The Crisis of x

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European Civilization’, in Ideas of Europe since 1914: the Legacy of the First World War (2002); ‘Europe and European Culture: a Conceptual Analysis’, European Societies 4/1 (2002), 1–26; Civilisation and Barbarism (Lancaster, Institute for Advanced Studies in Social and Management Sciences, 2005). Henk van der Liet studied at the Universities of Groningen and Copenhagen. He has taught at Groningen, Odense and Berlin (FU) universities; since 1998 he has held the chair in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of numerous articles in the field of Scandinavian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on Danish literature. He is editor of the Dutch–Flemish scholarly journal Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, and editor-in-chief of Amsterdam Contributions to Scandinavian Studies. Recent publications include ‘Engendering a Memorable Place – Holger Drachmann as travel-writer’, in Marie Wells (ed.), The Discovery of Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia (Norwich, 2008); ‘Über die Grenze – Identität und Identitätsverlust bei Claus Beck-Nielsen’, in Wolfgang Behschnitt and Elisabeth Herrmann (eds), Über Grenzen. Grenzgänge der Skandinavistik (Würzburg, 2007); ‘Martin A. Hansens Hereticabreve i international belysning’, in Anders Thyrring Andersen (ed.), PS. Om Martin A. Hansens korrespondance med kredsen omkring Heretica (Copenhagen, 2005). Manet van Montfrans was until 2009 a Lecturer in Modern European and French Literature in the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam, and is now a research fellow in the Department. She co-edits the literary journal Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui; her research focuses on the perception of the First and Second World Wars and on the renewed interest in regional and rural matters in French literary prose and in contemporary European novels. Her publications include Georges Perec. La contrainte du réel (1999); ‘Pacifism and the European Idea: War and Inner Conflict in the Work of Léon Werth’, in M.J. Wintle and M. Spiering (eds), Ideas of Europe since 1914. The Legacy of the First World War (2002); ‘La réception de Primo Levi aux Pays-Bas’, in Ph. Mesnard and Y. Tanassekos (eds), Primo Levi à l’oeuvre. La Réception de l’oeuvre de Primo Levi dans le monde (2007); ‘Dante chez Modiano: une divine comédie à Paris’, in E. Jongeneel et al., Relief (revue électronique de littérature française), Paris, lieu de mémoire, no. 2, 2008. Helle Porsdam holds a chair of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She received a Master’s in English from the University

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xii Contributors

of Copenhagen and subsequently also an MA and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. She was a Liberal Arts Fellow at the Harvard Law School in 1992–3 and again in 2000–1. Her main areas of teaching are American history in the twentieth century, human rights and law and literature, and her research has focused for the past ten years on the role of law in American culture and history. Among her publications are Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Folkways and Law Ways: Law in American Studies (Odense, 2001); Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity (Edward Elgar, 2006); Human Rights and Copyrights: Transatlantic Dialogues on Law and Literature (Edward Elgar, 2009). Wolfgang Schmale holds the chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Vienna University. His fields of research are general European history, French history, the social history of law and the history of masculinities. He is on the advisory committees of the European Forum Alpbach and the Institute for European History (Mainz), and is President of the Austrian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. His main books are Geschichte und Zukunft der Europäischen Identität (Stuttgart, 2008); Europa-Historiker. Ein biographisches Handbuch, 3 vols (Göttingen, 2006–7); Geschichte Frankreichs (Stuttgart, 2000); Human Rights and Cultural Diversity (1993). Hagen Schulz-Forberg is Associate Professor of Global and European History at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has worked on European history in a variety of ways, applying different theoretical and methodological perspectives to his empirical work. His main interest is in the modern period from the Enlightenment until today, where questions of legitimacy and modernity, as well as the role of the idea of Europe in history, frame his research. His recent publications include ‘The European Public Sphere and the Transnational History of the Notion of Europe since 1945’, in José M. Faraldo et al., Europe in the Eastern Block (Böhlau, 2008); ‘Cosmopolitanism or Ethnic Homogeneity? Roma Identity, European Integration and the European Public Sphere’, in Cristiano Bee and Emmanuela Bozzini (eds), Developing the European Public Sphere: Institutions, Media, Civil Society (Ashgate, 2009); ‘The Berlin Wall Crisis: Global Cold War and the Role of Europe’, in Ruth Wodak et al. (eds), Europe in Crisis: The ‘European Public Sphere’ (Palgrave, 2009). Karen-Margrethe L. Simonsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is

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Director of the Nordic Network for Law and Literature, a member of Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies and director of the research group on ‘Aesthetics, Society and Politics’ at the Institute of Aesthetics, Aarhus University. Her research interests lie in law and the concept of justice in literature, literature and politics, relations between individual and collective memory, world literature and literary historiography. Recent publications include World Literature and World Culture, with J. Stougaard (Aarhus UP, 2008); Æstetik og politik. Politiske potentialer i samtidskunsten, with H.K. Nielsen (Klim, 2008); Reinventions of the Novel, with M.R. Thomsen and M.P. Huang (Rodopi, 2004). Ricardo Gil Soeiro is a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, where he also teaches the courses ‘Memory and Literature in a Globalized Culture’ and ‘Contemporary Portuguese Literature’. He obtained his PhD in Literary Studies in 2009 with a dissertation on George Steiner, and his interests include contemporary Portuguese poetry, Holocaust studies, philosophy of language, ethics, hermeneutics and memory studies. He is also columnist for Revista Autor and a member of the Editorial Board of Gewebe – Grupo de Estudos Walter Benjamin. His publications include O pensamento tornado dança: Estudos em torno de George Steiner (Roma Editora, 2009); Gramática da Esperança: Da Hermenêutica da Transcendência à Hermenêutica Radical (Vega Editora, 2009); Iminência do Encontro: George Steiner e a Leitura Responsável (Roma Editora, 2009); A Alegria do Sim na Tristeza do Finito (Apenas Livros, 2009). Menno Spiering is Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, Director of the MA in European Studies and series editor of European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics. He took his PhD in English literature in 1993 at the University of Amsterdam and has held visiting lectureships at the Universities of Hull, UK and Minnesota. His publications include Englishness: Images of National Identity in Post-War Literature (1993); ‘National Identity and European Unity’, in M. Wintle (ed.), Culture and Identity in Europe (1996); ‘The Future of National Identity in the European Union’, National Identities 1/2 (1999); Ideas of Europe since 1914: the Legacy of the First World War, with M. Wintle (Palgrave, 2002). Wendy Webster studied at the University of Cambridge, taking her BA and PhD there and is now Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Central Lancashire. She is on the editorial board

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Contributors

of Women’s History Review and is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her publications include ‘Transnational Journeys and Domestic Histories’, Journal of Social History, 39/3 (2006), 651–66; Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford UP, 2005); ‘Britain and the Refugees of Europe 1939–50’, in Louise Ryan and Wendy Webster (eds), Gendering Migration: Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in PostWar Britain (Ashgate, 2008); ‘Europe against the Germans: the British Resistance Narrative, 1940–50’, Journal of British Studies (2009). Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, joined the faculty of Yale University in 2001. He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1973, and at the University of Warwick from 1973 to 1979. From 1979 to 2001, he was Reader in Modern History and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He holds PhD and DLitt from Cambridge. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge UP, 1995), and editor of a collection of essays published by Cambridge UP entitled America and the Armenian Genocide. In 2005 he published The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present, written with Antoine Prost. In 1997, he received an Emmy award for the best documentary series of the year as co-producer and co-writer of ‘The Great War and the shaping of the twentieth century’, an eight-hour series broadcast on PBS and the BBC, and shown subsequently in twenty-eight countries. He is one of the founders and a member of the comité directeur of the research centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the international museum of the Great War, in Péronne, Somme, France. Michael Wintle studied at Cambridge, Ghent and Hull Universities taking his BA, MA and PhD respectively, and now holds the chair of European History at the University of Amsterdam, where he helps direct the degree programmes in European Studies. Prior to 2002, he was Professor of European History at the University of Hull, UK, where he had taught since 1980. His current research interests are in European identity and especially the visual representation of Europe, cultural aspects of European integration, European industrialization and the modern social and economic history of the Low Countries. He has published widely on Dutch and European history, including the following recent books: An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands (Cambridge UP, 2000); Ideas of Europe since 1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Imagining Europe (Peter Lang, 2008); The Image of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2009).

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Irene Zwiep studied Classics and Semitic philology in Amsterdam and Jerusalem. Following her PhD in 1995, she was Frances Yates fellow at the Warburg Institute, London. Since 1997 she has held the chair in Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research concentrates on Jewish intellectual history of the medieval and early modern periods, with a special focus on the history of Hebrew and Jewish scholarship. Recent publications include Sepharad in Ashkenaz. Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, with R. Fontaine and A. Schatz (Amsterdam, 2007); Epigonism and the Dynamic of Jewish Culture, with S. Berger (Louvain, 2008).

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Editor’s Introduction Ideals, Identity and War: the Idea of Europe, 1939–70 Michael Wintle

This book has two concepts at its centre: Europe and the Second World War. Both are constantly changing in the public perception: now, many decades after the end of World War II, ‘Europe’ is an even more contested idea than it has ever been, struggling with the consequences of enlargement to the east, and with the confrontation with its ‘Others’ in various forms. The book seeks to inform the current discourse about European identity, about what Europe should aspire to in terms of its institutions and its values; it does so by means of a targeted historical but multidisciplinary analysis of Europe’s reaction to the tragedy, heroism and disgrace of the Second World War. For in that post-war period lie many of the origins of Europeans’ current attitudes to and about the continent. The general premise for this collection is that the Second World War generated changes in the way Europe imagined itself, which therefore affected European identity. If in the nineteenth century, and indeed for parts of the first half of the twentieth, Europe had been rather selfsatisfied, events such as the Holocaust, the second extended civil war in Europe in a quarter of a century, and the splitting of the continent into East and West took the edge off that satisfaction, forcing a reassessment of assumptions about Europe’s place in the world. World War II also spawned new ideas about integration between the nations, new cultural movements and new directions, many of which are the subject of the deliberations in this book. For most people over the age of thirty, ‘the War’ still means the Second World War, though the numbers of first-hand witnesses are rapidly dwindling. It still casts a shadow over Europe: the German record is still a sensitive issue, and perhaps the most uncontroversially positive 1

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Michael Wintle

achievement of European institutional integration has been the avoidance of another pan-European war. This link is crucial: the fear of Europe’s propensity for infighting has been one of the main driving forces behind the move for integration in Europe. That was as true for the wartime resistance movements drawing up their plans for a brave new post-war world as it was for the idealistic but pragmatic founders of the 1950s and 1960s. Even now, in the next millennium, war is still remembered as an underlying cause for European cooperation, and there is, rightly, an increased emphasis on war trauma and Holocaust memory as essential elements in European identity. This book contains no theoretical study of the subject of collective identity, whether at local, national or European level. That is not because we view the topic as unimportant, but because we believe that enough has been said and agreed, for now, for us to take as given that a European identity exists. This allows us to explore various aspects of that ‘identity’ without becoming over-involved with the theoretical aspects of definition.1 We acknowledge that ‘ideas of Europe’ and ‘European identity’ are often confused with each other; analytically they can perhaps be separated as ways in which Europe might be organized (‘ideas’) and European self-perceptions of their collective characteristics, nature and strengths (‘identity’). In recent decades the two have tended to elide, not least because the European Commission and others believe that a strong European identity would provide legitimation for the latest (and most successful) example of the ‘idea’ of Europe: the European Union. But European identity is not only about the European integration that has led to the EU and the other E-institutions. Such bodies have loomed large in the last sixty years, but there has been a European identity of sorts for at least a thousand years. It consists of feelings of Europeanness, of what it is like to be European, for example vis-à-vis Africans, Asians or Americans. What have been the perceived essential characteristics of Europeans; what have been the European values; what has ‘European civilization’ consisted of? The answers to such questions have changed over time: often they have been positive and Eurocentric, proclaiming European ideals, and even European superiority. On other occasions, the responses have been negative, pessimistic, even ashamed. These ideas, positive and negative, about what it meant to be European during World War II and in its aftermath are the focus of this book. They do not necessarily coincide with the official forms of European identity now sponsored by the EU. Such official master-narratives of Europe were largely absent in 1939 or 1945, but there did exist ideas of Europe as self-perceptions or images of identity in that period.

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Ideals, Identity and War: the Idea of Europe, 1939–70

3

It is important to locate these post-war developments in thinking about Europe within a temporal context – at least that of the twentieth century as a whole. The period immediately preceding the war, the later 1930s, was overshadowed still by the disasters of the First World War (Adas 2004; Spiering and Wintle 2002), by the instability of the Roaring Twenties and by the horrors of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. These were chastening memories when it came to thinking about European identity and civilization. On the other hand, the later 1930s, with their economic recovery, also saw a more assertive European mood, even a partial return to the Eurocentrism and arrogance of the decades of New Imperialism preceding World War I. Two manifestations of this Euro-assertiveness in the later 1930s will make the point. First there was the gross Eurocentrism of fascism, which was often racially based, and which affected virtually every country in Europe, with support for a bombastic celebration of alleged European characteristics and the superiority of its civilization over and above everything else: the Nazi New Order was only one example. The other Eurocentric development that demands attention is what would now be called the ‘autumn’ of imperialism: the last heyday of the European colonial empires before the period of war and decolonization. At the time, after economic deprivation in the European colonies during the Depression, the later 1930s saw an imperial revival which must have seemed like a return to halcyon days: it was the Golden Age of the colonial administrator and army officer, the highpoint of ‘European’ society and solidarity in the tropics, and indeed of the White Man’s Burden. That it would all crumble into ignominy after 1945 was by no means always apparent at the time. So the immediate prelude to the subject matter of this book, the pre-war period, was one of Euro-optimism and Euroassertion, often of a rather repellent sort. Then came the War itself, which, with the early and devastating successes of the Axis powers, saw military failures in all theatres, reliance on or submission to Asian forces, dependence on the US, and universal disaster in Europe. By 1944–5 there was a general humility about the Europe ideal, and very little talk of European civilization, except a determination among many groups to adopt policies after the war that would forever prevent another of those disastrous internecine European civil wars, which had characterized the cursed continent for centuries. There was still idealism, in places, which eventually would contribute to setting up the first institutions of European integration. But in the post-war gloom Europe was not on the list of positive topics for discussion, and had little to offer the rest of the world any more, except in terms of a salutary lesson about how not to conduct affairs.

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Michael Wintle

This phase of post-war negativity about Europe continued for some years with the privations of monetary reorganizations, ration books, drab fashions, painful reconstruction, handouts from America, and the advent of what would become the Cold War, driving a wedge through Europe. Even incipient plans for European integration grew out of an almost totally negative fear that, if nothing were done, Europe would be tearing itself apart again in another civil war within a few years: a kind of preventive federalism seemed the only answer. The world was certainly not about to take any more sermons from Europe about higher morals. That gloom continued to permeate the ritual humiliation of decolonization, as, one after the other, Europe’s global empires gave up their treasured symbols of economic, political, military and moral superiority. There was a feeling among the publics of the old imperial nations, Britain and then France, but others too (the Dutch are a very good example), that their colonies were being removed from their grasp against their will, and that this was being inflicted upon the countries that had resisted and finally triumphed against the Nazi, fascist aggressor. This added to the general ignominy of the European self-view. It caused considerable indignation, and even some strenuous fighting back: witness the brutal decolonization wars fought by all the imperialist nations in the post-war period (see e.g. Martin et al. 2008), for example the ferocious military campaigns conducted by the Dutch in the East Indies in 1947 and 1949 (the Politionele Acties). The eventual removal of much of the colonial empires, with US and UN approval, was symptomatic and even emblematic of Europeans having to accept that their role in the world had changed radically, and then for the worse in terms of power politics. However, at some point in the later 1950s or 1960s, almost incredibly, even the Holocaust could eventually be put into perspective. The truly amazing economic recovery of Western Europe, which grew faster in the 1950s and 1960s than anywhere else in the world, including America, generated a re- emerging feeling of European self-assertion. The boom lasted more than twenty years, well into the 1970s, when the dollar crisis of 1971 and the oil crises of 1973 and 1978 slowed everything down again. Feelings of Euro-assertion or even Eurocentrism were repressed by the effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but, when the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by peace and the absence or postponement of nuclear Armageddon, it was hardly surprising that an element of self-satisfaction and assertion crept back into the European self-image.

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Ideals, Identity and War: the Idea of Europe, 1939–70

5

There was a new European confidence in those years; many people alive today were there to witness it. Shame for Europe was either forgotten in the celebration of prosperity (‘You’ve never had it so good!’), suppressed as unspeakable, or unacknowledged by the emerging youth culture. The beginnings of European integration began to be institutionalized, in the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, Euratom, the European Economic Community, the European Free Trade Association, and so on. The increased trade and the general long-wave economic ascendancy assured steadily increasing prosperity, while welfare legislation generated the trickle- down of new wealth into all layers of European society, heralding a consumer boom, which further prolonged the good times and ushered in a modernist, plenteous, throw-away society in Europe, certainly in the West. In the East, too, the period of the 1960s and early 1970s was of considerable economic prosperity. However, in terms of thoughts about the nature of Europe, about Europeanness, about European identity, this period can be seen as one of chastened or moderated Euro-assertion. There was no longer the arrogant self-assurance of the Edwardian period before the First World War, when it never occurred to Europeans that there was the slightest doubt about European superiority in every way; and many of the racial assumptions of the fascist-influenced 1930s were not revived, or not as virulently. Wolfgang Schmale demonstrates here in this volume (in Chapter 11) that assumption of European superiority had not entirely left the discourse of integration before the later 1970s; nonetheless, clearly the United States was politically, militarily and economically a much greater power in the world than the individual or even the potentially united European states, and then there was the looming presence of the Soviet Union and later China, with their totally alien economic and political systems. Japan’s economic performance became a challenge to Europe, and others would follow in its wake. So Europe did not rule the world any longer, but at the same time Europe did not need to feel so ashamed of itself any more, and might even begin to think how a united European front might make it a third force in the world, between the two superpowers. Cultural optimism, economic confidence and political rehabilitation were the order of the day by the close of the 1960s. There was something of a rollercoaster, then, of feelings about European identity in much of the twentieth century: overbearing arrogance, despair at World War I and the Depression, recovery in the 1930s and horror at the effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, only to be followed by yet another revival in the 1950s and

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1960s; thereafter the positive bent of Europeanism began to ebb away again with the effects of the 1970s economic crises and 1980s recession, despite the energetic attempts of the European Commission to instil a European identity into its citizens (Wintle 2009, Chapter 8). This, then, is the chronological backdrop of the waxing and waning of ideas and perceptions of Europe in the period under scrutiny here between the late 1930s and the early 1970s. It provides the principal rationale for the timescale of the present collection, between 1939 and 1970. The Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, is the focal and starting point for our investigations, but we are most interested in reactions to that war, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The economic setbacks of the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly dominated by a generation of young people who had not directly experienced the war (baby boomers), are not part of the analysis here. Nonetheless, the reactions to war experienced in those post-war decades naturally continued to shape the contours of European identity, and indeed they still do so today.

The structure of the book Here the changing ideas of Europeanness, or what it meant to be European, are grouped into four main areas for investigation, corresponding to the four sections of the book. The initial section takes a view of the war as the gestation period for a distinctive European articulation of human rights, not least in defence against the pretensions of governments and states. It is argued here that since that time, and in their continued evolution, human rights have been a unique component of European identity. The two central sections of the book then manifest the interdisciplinary nature of this collection, not least through the wide variety of source material that is employed. In Part II, we review the way in which thinkers of all stripes looked back, reflecting on the role played by Europe in the world and in the war, and the implications for their views of the essence or identity of Europe. The authors range through historiography, literature, philosophy and the political press, searching for the effects of this unprecedented war on ideas of European civilization. Most of those effects were, of course, negative. Europeans felt stunned and even ashamed. Next, in Part III, the focus falls on emerging visions of the future of Europe that grew out of the war, and of how its more positive aspects might be harnessed in order simultaneously to build a future together and to eliminate chances of a return to internecine conflict: a mixture of damage limitation and elated utopianism. Finally, in Part IV, we pay brief attention

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to what proves to be and remains the core of the matter: the problems for European identity generated by the Holocaust. The function of literary works in assuaging the trauma of the Shoah, the views of surviving Jewish leaders and intellectuals about their role in Europe and Europe’s role in their future, and the agonies of memory as mediated in the work of George Steiner, are chosen as threads to follow this process of identity destruction, mediation and regeneration. One of the few things that unite most Europeans, and of which they seem to be proud, is human rights. In the first chapter Helle Porsdam argues that that Europeans are currently attempting to develop a human rights vocabulary. European intellectuals, EU politicians and policy professionals are talking about the need to construct ‘European narratives’ that will emphasize a political but also a cultural vision for a multi- ethnic and more cosmopolitan Europe. Porsdam maintains that these narratives evolve around human rights, partly because their authors hope that they may function as a kind of cultural glue in an increasingly multi- ethnic Europe, and partly because they are intimately connected with that part of Enlightenment thinking that sought to promote democracy and the rule of law. More directly addressing the themes of this volume, she argues that modern Europe is built on a conscious wish to learn from the terrible mistakes of the past, especially the Second World War, which also makes human rights central. Human rights are developing into a discourse of atonement as well as of hope for Europeans. The attempt to create a common European identity around human rights began after World War II, and owes much to the activities of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, which Porsdam tracks in some detail. The judges of the two courts have helped turn respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law into founding principles of the European Union, and an indispensable prerequisite for the Union’s legitimacy. They have, furthermore, helped remind Europeans that one way to avoid repeating past episodes of military and intellectual mobilization against each other is to develop new supranational forms of cooperation and governance. Hagen Schulz-Forberg takes this elevation of human rights still further in Chapter 2, focusing on the Congress of Europe debates and the minutes from the early Council of Europe Ministers’ meetings in 1948 and 1949, and shows that human rights emerged as the key concept for European integration after the war. He points out that the major preoccupations of European enthusiasts have altered and evolved over the decades: self- determination was the European desideratum before

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the war; human rights were critical in the post-war years; the Cold War then began to dominate matters; and integration and citizenship were the European watchwords later on in the 1970s and 1980s. Before the integration of Western Europe became Europe’s conceptual signpost, Europe defined its future under the regime of human rights, as one part of a global organization. With an eye to the subtleties of the persisting post-war Eurocentrism noted by Wolfgang Schmale in Chapter 11, it is important to register, with Schulz-Forberg, that even this discourse on human rights retained some of its arrogance and sense of European superiority. Jay Winter then takes the particular example of René Cassin, whose career he continues to research intensively, as an eloquent empirical case study of the way in which human rights became the distinctive discourse in Europe after the war (Chapter 3). Cassin spent most of the Second World War in England, as part of the inner circle of France Libre. In that capacity, he contributed to the emergence of Allied war aims which embraced a commitment to human rights as a bulwark of the future international order, to be built after the end of the war. That is why he was able to join other colleagues in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations assembled in Paris on 10 December 1948. This was a document about liberation, allowing the Second World War to be seen as the moment when the current human rights regime was born, which has been, Winter argues, an essential and unique characteristic of European identity ever since. In Part II we move to consider the way in which Europeans attempted to digest the events of 1939–45, and to produce new narratives of Europe that would allow the construction of a future for the beleaguered continent. Jan Ifversen, in Chapter 4, puts the case for the professional historians as myth-makers. He suggests that during and after World War II the idea of a united Europe was introduced as an answer to Europe’s problems, and it included a myth of a new order being created out of the ruins of the war. Myth-making is part of an ideological construction to justify a political order, and the professional historians played a strong role in that process. Some, like Lucien Febvre, lecturing in 1944–5 on the genesis of European civilization, saw a united Europe as the only true expression of that civilization. Friedrich Meinecke, reflecting in 1946 on ‘the German catastrophe’, could only see a future for Germany (and Europe) in a European federation. The question posed by Ifversen is about the extent to which historians contributed to a master narrative supporting a myth of Europe. He examines European histories written in the period from 1945 to 1960 for their major patterns,

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and especially for how the historians approached the fate of Europe in the light of World War II. Many, especially in Germany, were concerned with rationalizing the catastrophe of the war into a European historical narrative, as were many contemporary politicians and philosophers alike. Most explained the mid- century disgraces in terms of a decline generated by the European state system, and especially by nationalism. A degree of European unity was the remedy chosen in order to salvage the remnants of the nobility of the ‘European spirit’. This was also the tenor of the idealistic deliberations of Churchill in his Zurich speech of 1946, and of those at The Hague Congress in May 1948. The 1960s were to see an intensification of this teleological tendency to foreground European unity as the answer to problems caused by interstate rivalry. In the first of three national case studies of the modification of views on Europe as a result of the war, Wendy Webster examines the British version of ‘Europe’ in the post-war years (Chapter 5). There has been considerable historiographical consensus on this question, which identifies 1940 as a defining moment, strengthening Britain’s island identity and a sense of detachment from the continent, which persisted in the post-war period in what has been called the ‘enduring mentalité of 1940’. Webster digs deeper into British views of the continent, manifested in popular media and especially film, and argues that the consensus needs revision. In wartime a dominant British narrative focused on brave resistance to Nazi Germany, and told of a united and civilized continent: one in which Germans were ‘not European’. It was only in the context of Allied victory that the idea of a divided continent emerged. There was an interplay between three narratives about Europe in the British mainstream media in the late 1940s and 1950s. The first, developed in the immediate aftermath of war, focused on the Nazi legacy, producing an image of a suffering continent that was also divided, chaotic and corrupt. Germany was central to this image, as ideas about Germany and Europe increasingly converged. Secondly, by the end of the 1940s memories of the Second World War, particularly evident in a prolific cycle of feature films, celebrated Britain’s own wartime record largely as a masculine military conflict with Germany, making few references to Nazi war crimes. Thirdly, an emergent Cold War narrative made Germany the symbolic centre of a divided continent. In considering the meanings these differing versions assigned to the continent and to British relations with it, Webster explores their common themes – the continent as dark, difficult and menacing, where Germany had a central place – and argues that they were at least as significant for British post-war attitudes as the ‘mentalité of 1940’.

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In Chapter 6, Henk van der Liet looks at the view of Europe from Scandinavia in the light of World War II, in particular from literary Denmark in the late 1940s, and finds it to have been very critical indeed. The word ‘Europe’ had been so thoroughly exploited in Nazi propaganda that it could only be used with great reserve once the war was over. ‘Europe’ had become so discredited that it was hardly regarded as an appropriate term for any kind of democratic discourse about a joint political future for the European countries or for new concepts of identity. Van der Liet examines the Danish political and cultural debate in the 1940s, the absence of the idea of ‘Europe’ in Danish literature and, in particular, Martin A. Hansen’s 1948 collection of essays Tanker i en Skorsten [Thoughts in a Chimney]. Hansen was one of the leading Danish post-war writers, and a member of a group of authors who established a common platform in the short-lived but highly influential journal Heretica, published from 1948 until 1953. Despite the broad and international cultural ambitions of the journal, the intellectual and artistic orientation of Hansen and other authors clearly did not favour French, German, Anglo-Saxon or – for that matter – Soviet culture. Instead they focused mainly on Scandinavia, and on their own regional identity and heritage, both as an artistic point of departure and as a perspective for their own future as citizens. These authors obviously wished to turn away from the ‘old’ cultural centres of Europe, with their recent record of chaos and barbarism. Manet van Montfrans then examines post-war attitudes to Europe in France, in particular through the lens of the work of Albert Camus (Chapter 7). From August 1944 to June 1947 he was the editor of Combat, an authoritative daily paper whose origins lay in the French Resistance movement. In his many editorials and articles Camus expressed his views on the political and moral issues dominating post-war France, and unfolded his vision of a Europe in which the various states would operate internationally as ‘the United States of Europe’, thus overcoming their differences. It would not only achieve economic unity, but also lay the groundwork for a socially just society in which human rights were to be scrupulously respected; it is interesting to remark once again how important human rights were to the imagining of post-war Europe. There remains the question of how representative Camus’ ideas about the post-war Europe were among his countrymen. Thanks to his role in the Resistance and the success of his literary work, Camus was held in high esteem among French intellectuals during the first few years after the war, although most of them, for different reasons, felt unable to share his ideas about a united Europe. In other respects, too, Camus

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proved to be an outsider, which resulted in his being ostracized by the sectarian left- oriented Parisian intelligentsia soon after 1947. In some of his wartime work, Camus could wax lyrical about the spiritual ideal of Europe, especially in contrast to what the Nazis were doing, but in his articulations in Combat after the war he became rather less idealistic. In Part III, four more chapters examine various future- oriented scenarios for Europe as conditioned by the events of 1939–45. One of the most famous blueprints for a new Europe is the Ventotene Manifesto, written by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi during their confinement by the Mussolini regime in internal exile during the early years of the war, and completed in June 1941. It represents some of the most innovative of all writings on nationalism and federalism, and became one of the intellectual foundations of federalist movements across Western Europe. Matthew D’Auria follows the practical and ideological genesis of this document on the island of Ventotene off the Naples coast (Chapter 8). Many of the principles contained in Spinelli and Rossi’s pamphlet, such as the need to create a European democracy that was not merely the fusion of national democracies, and the need for a constitutional movement led by a transnational political elite, are still of fundamental importance for today’s European integration process. The manifesto was hardly a success in practical terms: it grossly underestimated the strength of nationalism, and was written too early to allow an understanding of the significance of the role to be played in Europe by the US and the Soviet Union, eventually in the form of the Cold War. But it remains important to this day because of its inspirational role in the federalist movement in Europe, and, in terms of the views of their continent held by left-wing European intellectuals, it was one of the first statements to condemn the European state system roundly for its propensity to cause war. The existence of sovereign and independent states in Europe, each free to determine its political existence, had led to the inevitability of war between them, which in the future had to be solved by pooling some of that sovereignty. In the view of Rossi and Spinelli, the mechanism of that pooling had to be federalism. In Chapter 9, Annemarie van Heerikhuizen examines the vision of Max Kohnstamm for the future of Europe in the years following the Second World War. Kohnstamm was an important Dutch official and diplomat, and became one of Jean Monnet’s most trusted assistants and colleagues over several decades. He was Secretary to the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, and before that had been a private secretary to the Dutch Queen. He was, therefore, at the practical centre of early moves towards European economic

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integration; more than most, he was profoundly influenced by his admiration for the United States, and in particular for the way in which the US had integrated its economy, not least in the New Deal. Van Heerikhuizen examines Kohnstamm’s writings to uncover the extent of American influence on this founding father’s vision for Europe, and reveals that Kohnstamm’s writings show that he had in mind a Europe of enduring peace, unity, international cooperation and openness to the world. By the end of the 1950s his ideas were further stimulated by a prodigious new technology: atomic energy. His view was that European joint action was necessary to embrace and develop this new force, but that Europe should take that joint action together with the Americans. This Americanism in his Europeanism was also shown in quite a different way, when his enthusiasm for the sectoral integration of the European Coal and Steel Community showed a desire for a supranational, federal form of organization derived from the American experience. Chapter 10, by Menno Spiering, continues with the atomic theme for a future Europe, examining the vision for Europe behind the propaganda surrounding the ‘Atomic Age’. For many, the enormous energy unleashed by the first nuclear bombs in 1945 marked the birth not just of new weaponry, but also of a new era: the Atomic Age. The early, postwar references to this age were altogether negative. The years ahead would spell disaster for the world, and for Europe in particular, for this continent would surely furnish the arena for the imminent nuclear clash of the superstates. In the early 1950s, however, the Atomic Age rapidly began to acquire positive connotations. It was to be a wondrous time, bringing unlimited energy, prosperity and peace to all, not least the Europeans. At the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels the impending age of European cooperation (marked a year earlier by the signing of the Treaty of Rome) was celebrated with the same ebullience as the coming of the Atomic Age, whose wonderful promises were on show in almost all the pavilions. Spiering examines the similarities between the pro-Europe and pro-atomic movements of the 1950s, suggesting that the 1953 American ‘Atoms for Peace’ propaganda initiative provided the pro-Europeans with irresistible ideas and images of hope, progress and prosperity. The effects of the Marshall Plan on European cooperation have been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny, and perhaps the interrelation between the Atoms for Peace programme and post-war ideas of Europe deserves a similar degree of attention. It was, in any event, an extremely positive take on Europe’s future, in contrast with the gloom of the immediate post-war years.

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Finally, in the section on post-war plans and dreams for a future Europe, Wolfgang Schmale explores the continuance of the rhetoric of imperialism in the early stages of European integration (Chapter 11). Trawling through source material from the Resistance movements, official E-institution documentation, and the federalist movements of the 1950s, he finds no lack of evidence for a very strong presence of White Man’s Burden sentiment underlying European identity right up to the 1960s. In its relations with the rest of the world, Europe’s cultural and moral superiority was a leitmotif in its discourse on European unity and European identity. There was a deep conviction that European civilization was superior, and the most developed in the world. The European post-war discourse merged traditional patterns of colonial or imperialist thinking with the concept of Europe as a third force between the US and the Soviet Union. There was a clear understanding of what the world and mankind owed to Europe: Europe had contributed to making the world more noble and more human, and would continue to do so. Europe’s mission in the world, the world’s debt to Europe, European civilization and its diffusion around the world: these things were seen as the foundation for European unity. As late as 1961, in his Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe, Denis de Rougemont was still putting out the message, and such convictions were widely held until the 1970s. Only in the 1980s was European international identity based on new foundations. The eventual transformation was due not only to decolonization, but also to what might be called the beginning of self-reflexivity in the European Communities. A quest began for the individual citizen and his/her role in European identity. Before that, however, the language employed to talk of European identity and Europe’s role in the world was one of imperialist condescension and a civilizational Eurocentrism, despite the enormous blows suffered to Europe’s reputation in World War II and the Holocaust. The final section of the book ventures into the difficult but core terrain of reactions to the Holocaust, in thinking about the form Europe would take in the post-war decades, and, indeed, the role it should adopt in the world. This is, of course, an extremely broad and intense subject, and our approach in this book is necessarily selective, choosing particular approaches which interface with the other sections in the collection. In Chapter 12, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen tries to estimate the role of Holocaust literature in shaping European identity after the Second World War. In the wake of post-Holocaust theory, attempts have been made to create out of the devastating experiences in the concentration camps a point of departure for a common European spirit (Ulrich Beck) and

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for resistance against the political world situation (Giorgio Agamben). Literature written on the basis of experiences in the camps can be read as a literature of mobility, transgression and multicultural experience (Ottmar Ette). Simonsen takes the example of Jorge Semprún, who has written extensively about the camp experience, but did not do so until 1963, with his Le grand voyage; the delay may have given the writings a more reflective character. Semprún is compared to Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Paul Celan in asking about the role of literature in periods of war, and about the role played by that literature of the camps in later reassessments, in particular of the place of Europe. The historical lesson to be taken from the Holocaust undoubtedly involves a rethinking of the relationship between identity and politics. What Semprún calls a new European spirit or identity cannot in any way be built on homogenization; it must be built on the experience of diverse cultures and languages: European unity through cultural difference. As part of this project on the reactions in ideas of Europe to the Second World War, Irene Zwiep takes the perhaps unusual step in Chapter 13 of asking what characterized Jewish thought about the continent after 1945. She shows that, in the decade immediately following the end of World War II, there were two main Jewish sentiments regarding Europe as a viable locus of Jewish life. On the one hand, one sees a collective effort to restore the pre-war Jewish infrastructure, as witnessed in the catalogue of organizations listed in the European Jewish Year Book, a joint Franco- German Jewish publication that appeared during the 1950s. Inevitably, this effort entailed a largely undisputed, if not somewhat ambivalent, reaffirmation of pre-war Jewish national identities. On the other hand, the ‘Jewish spiritual renaissance’ in the young state of Israel proposed autonomous Zionism as an obvious alternative to the dangers of assimilation into European society. It is important to realize that these two competing approaches to Europe did not first arise in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but had their roots in the later nineteenth century, at a time of formulating concrete Jewish strategies for emancipation, either through an ‘enlightened’, individualist assimilation or by means of a ‘romantic’, collective nationalism. In the decades after 1945 the latter position acquired unprecedented plausibility and authority, whereby the previous diasporic dimension was lost. By the 1980s, however, a new generation of intellectuals was ready to reclaim the Jews’ unique, constitutive role in European history. In doing so, they continued the notion of ‘the Jewish contribution to Europe’, rethought by post-war intellectuals, positioning themselves as an ethical conscience and the sole remnant of a liberal–humanitarian tradition that had been

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erased in the ultimate European cataclysm: the Holocaust. But this came later; in the post-war decades Zionism took precedence over a continuing role in Europe for its Jews. Finally, in the last chapter, Ricardo Gil Soeiro returns to the work of George Steiner, in his attempts over the decades to deal with the appalling or unspeakable nature of the Holocaust, in particular in the context of European identity. In a pamphlet of 2004, The Idea of Europe, Steiner offered five axioms to define Europe, the last of which is that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset, which has always shadowed the idea of Europe. This sense of an ‘epilogue’ was, according to Steiner, poignantly substantiated by the horror of the concentration camps, which has proved to be crucial to a distinctively European self-understanding, in the sense that Europeans can no longer believe in the dream of reason which animated the spirit of the Enlightenment. In Language and Silence (1967), Steiner mournfully declared that silence grows palpable. Haunted by the terrifying paradox of the inhumanity in humanity which grew from the very core of Europe, as well as by the Shoah’s revelation of how human speech can be used both to love and to hate, it is Steiner’s post-Auschwitz Jewishness that informs his dark reading of man. Gil Soeiro sheds light on how, initially calling for silence in relation to the Shoah, Steiner then altered his conception of ‘silence’ to act as a metaphor, warning against the use of ordinary linguistic techniques when speaking or writing about the Holocaust. Steiner has been wrestling with these impossibilities, of the horrors at the core of Europe, for five decades now; it is appropriate to end the collection with a short study of his evolving take on the essence of Europe in the light of the events of World War II.

Conclusion This collection aims to assess the impact of the events of the Second World War on the way in which Europeans thought about their continent. That impact has been shown to be profound and widespread. Rather than striving for a comprehensive treatment, we have chosen certain aspects of that interaction between war and identity on which to focus the analysis. We have, for example, relatively little to say in this book about the advent of the Cold War. Instead we have concentrated on the feelings of remorse and sorrow for the tragedy of the slaughter and persecution, and for the breakdown of European ‘civilization’ and political order. Our investigations have in the main been case studies, and every case was different; nonetheless, it is possible to draw some

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generalizations out of the work presented here. Sometimes the events of the war produced an almost total rejection of the idea of Europe: this was the case in the Nordic countries, especially in Danish literary circles, and among Jews there was little enthusiasm for the continent that had inflicted such horrors; many writers and intellectuals could not bring themselves to consider the issue of what Europe had committed for many years, sometimes decades. Among those who sought a guilty party or a scapegoat, many came down against the European state system, evolved over centuries but particularly enhanced in its twentieth- century form by the self- determination ideology of the period succeeding the First World War, trumpeted at Versailles, by Woodrow Wilson and in the League of Nations. There was a wide acceptance that the system of independent sovereign states of relatively small dimensions required structural reform; this led to various forms of attempts at integration, notably federalism in the Ventotene Manifesto, eventually generating initiatives that resulted in incremental forms of European integration, requiring the ‘sacrifice’ of some of that sovereignty. It also was reflected in the historiography of the period, as the professional interpreters of Europe’s behaviour sought to provide Europeans with an explanation of what had gone wrong. This set of answers to the question of what had led Europe into such desperate straits implied an acceptance of the unforgivability of what had happened, but also sought the cause – and implicitly the remedy – in an artificial construct of international relations, rather than in the intrinsic heart and soul of European civilization or identity itself. This neatly demonstrates the difference between the idea and the identity of Europe. That early tendency to evade the possible problems at the core of Europe was borne out by the evidence uncovered here that Euroassertion and even Eurocentrism seemed only to be temporarily stunned by the appalling events of the war. Within a relatively short period of time, the discussions in all manner of forums about the future organization of Europe began to revert to the rhetoric of European civilizational eminence and, indeed, superiority. That Europe had led the world for centuries was clearly believed by most of the participants in the discourse, which provided a good reason to resurrect the continent and integrate its structures, so that war would become impossible, and Europe could continue to shed its benevolent influence on the world at large. The colonial imagining was never very far from this rhetoric, and, indeed, several of the European states in the early post-war period envisaged a significant role for their revived global empires, despite

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the fact that they would be systematically dismantled over the next decade or so. The two clearest reactions in the context of Europe to the war were horror at the Holocaust and a growth in importance of human rights in the post-war debates. It would perhaps be possible to link the two, even causally, allied to the manner in which Ulrich Beck (2003) has done so, seeing those devastating camp experiences almost as a launching pad for a new common European spirit, with human rights at its heart. As Jay Winter relates in the case of René Cassin, the experience of totalitarianism in general was a powerful incentive to move towards protection of individual rights against predatory regimes. Albert Camus, too, championed the importance of human rights in his post-war writings. The moves towards declarations of rights in international forums, and in particular those taken through the offices of the Council of Europe, were to lead to a human rights regime that was in some degree centred in Europe, albeit in an international context. And that international context was important: many early visions of the structuring of Europe were seen as a prominent part of what should become a global infrastructure, not confined to Europe alone. The importance in and to Europe of the American atomic power campaigns and of Max Kohnstamm’s US-influenced ideas and, indeed, practical actions for European integration are good examples of that global, or at least Western, dimension to thinking about Europe in the post-war years. In terms of the historical context outlined above in this introductory chapter, where do we stand now with regard to European self- esteem and self-image in the post-war years, located on the ‘rollercoaster’ of positive and negative aspects of European identity in the twentieth century? Clearly much feeling was negative: there was sorrow and regret at the war, and some humility too, as well as some classic symptoms of denial. Europe had much to answer for, indeed so much that some abandoned it altogether, at least for a while. However, perhaps the most surprising feature to emerge from this collection is that, within a few years, positive narratives of Europe were resurfacing or being devised anew: its leading civilizational role in the world was linked with a discourse of cooperation and integration, supported by a new legal order which would promote human rights. Europe had been humbled, in its own eyes as well as in those of the world, but the resurrection of old paradigms and indeed the construction of new ones about the ‘spirit of Europe’, or European identity, were astonishingly rapid and persistent.

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Note 1. The studies on European identity are many in number; a summary of the issues can be found in Wintle (2009), Chapter 1.

References Adas, M. 2004. Contested Hegemony: the Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology. Journal of World History 15/1: 31–63. Beck, U. 2003. Understanding the Real Europe. Dissent, summer 2003. European Jewish Year Book. Jewish Life in Europe. 5714/1953–1954. Frankfurt: H. Bary. Martin, T., B. Moore and L.J. Butler. 2008. Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918-1975. London: Hodder. Rougemont, D. de. 1961. Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe: la conscience européenne à travers les textes d’Hésiode à nos jours. Paris: Payot. Semprún, J. 1963. Le grand voyage. Paris: Gallimard. Spiering, M.E. and M.J. Wintle, eds. 2002. Ideas of Europe since 1914: the Legacy of the First World War. London: Palgrave. Steiner, G. 1967. Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. London/Boston: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 2004. The Idea of Europe. Tilburg: Nexus Institute. Wintle, M.J. 2009. The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part I World War II, Europe and Human Rights

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1 Human Rights and European Identity since World War II: Vergangenheitsbewältigung through Law Helle Porsdam

In his book The Failure of the Word: the Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction, Richard Weisberg deals with eight well-known works of modern fiction in which the protagonists ‘prefer the safety of wordiness to the risks of spontaneous human interaction’. Suffering from what Weisberg calls an ‘overheated verbal imagination’, these protagonists ‘no longer respond simply and directly to real or imagined acts of injustice. Because of their nagging sense of futility, they make guiltless others the butt of their sometimes cool but nonetheless fatal eloquence’ (Weisberg 1984, xi, 8). These protagonists are lawyers because the writers who created them recognized that heroism and religious faith were dying out, and that legalism was taking their place in modern society. The writers in question are Dostoevski, Flaubert, Melville and Camus, so we are dealing with the period between 1860 and the mid-1950s. As far as Weisberg is concerned, those protagonists created by Dostoevski et al. exhibit all the characteristics of modern Western culture’s deepest problems or sicknesses: anti-Semitism, mass hatreds, and a shift away from a universal, classical sense of earthly justice – applicable to oneself and hence to all one’s fellows[...] The positively motivated individual was giving way. Social injustice was tolerated, and legalized violence became the periodic emblem of a civilization in distress. (Weisberg 1984, 20) The Failure of the Word is today considered one of the founding texts of the so- called ‘law and literature movement’ in the United States. It 21

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started in the late 1970s, and scholars who ‘do’ law and literature are concerned with the possible meeting points of the disciplines of law and literature, one such possible meeting-point being hermeneutics (the interpretation of texts), another rhetoric. It was mainly lawyers and law professors who were initially interested in this new discipline, and there was much talk of how to make legal education better and more suitable to a totally legalized society such as the American – the point being that perhaps if law students studied works of literature they would learn something useful about empathy, and about how laws and decisions made by people in power affect others. One of the most interesting things about the American law and literature movement is the way in which the belief in law’s promise has never really been deconstructed. Many attempts have been made, but in the end the belief in the rule of law, in judicial review and in legal activism – using the law to do good and to fight for a better and more just society through the courts – always survived in the American context. Richard Weisberg is himself a case in point. He ends The Failure of the Word by pointing out that there is still hope: ‘But glimmerings of the ethical and the heroic survive in Melville’s tale, as they do in history, and a restoration of meaningful language may accompany their emergence’ (Weisberg 1984, xiv). Note here that it is in Melville’s tale (Billy Budd Sailor, 1885–91), and not in any of the European works, that Weisberg finds hope. ‘There has been a flair on these shores which is lacking abroad,’ as he puts it in his ‘Afterword’ (Weisberg 1984, 179). This chapter will discuss the possibility that Weisberg may no longer be right. He was certainly right in pointing to hope and law’s promise in the American context, but he was wrong when he claimed that such hope was lacking abroad, that is, in Europe. One major argument here will be that Europeans have attempted for some time to develop their own version of what law professor Mary Ann Glendon once called in the American context ‘rights talk’; on the European side of the Atlantic, we are talking about ‘human rights talk’. Along with European Union politicians and policy professionals, European intellectuals have emphasized the need for European narratives that may help construct political but also cultural visions for a multi- ethnic and a more cosmopolitan Europe. Several of these narratives are framed around human rights, in part because their authors hope that they may function as a kind of cultural glue in an increasingly multi- ethnic Europe, and in part because they are intimately connected with that part of Enlightenment thinking that sought to promote democracy and the rule of law. In addition, as Ulrich Beck has argued, modern Europe is ‘self-reflexive’; it is built

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on a conscious wish to learn from the terrible mistakes of its past, especially the Second World War, and this is also something that makes human rights quite central.1 The chapter is divided into two parts. After discussing some of the arguments concerning the importance of human rights for a European identity after the Second World War, and advanced by European intellectuals and policy professionals over the years, I will examine the way in which the two European courts, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), have helped turn human rights into a discourse of atonement as well as one of hope for Europeans. While the ECJ, which, as the high court of the European Union, covers the twenty-seven Member States of the EU, meets in Luxembourg, and ensures compliance with EU law in its interpretation and application of the European Treaties of the European Union, the ECtHR, which is the judicial arm of the Council of Europe and therefore covers the forty-seven member states of that Council, interprets the European Convention of Human Rights and is based in Strasbourg, France. In some ways these two courts divide the functions of the US Supreme Court between them: generally speaking, the ECJ resolves questions concerning the regulation and the division of power between EU Member States and between the EU and its Member States, whereas the ECtHR deals with questions concerning the fundamental rights of citizens of the member states of the Council of Europe, as laid down in the European Convention of Human Rights and the protocols supplementing it (Goldhaber 2007, 2–3). In its desire to protect the competences of the European Community, however, the ECJ has, over the years, also evolved its own doctrine of human rights. In settling on human rights as the framework for discussions concerning European identity, judges at the two European courts as well as European intellectuals and policy professionals have engaged themselves in a Vergangenheitsbewältigung (a struggle to come to terms with the past) through law. ‘What are the appropriate narratives around which a European identity could, over time, develop? What should the focus of a self- conscious politics of memory be?’, asks Mattias Kumm in an article in a special issue of the German Law Journal (Kumm 2005, 320). As to a possible focal point for such narratives, Kumm then points to constitutional patriotism – a patriotism that is based on certain ‘historical experiences and accomplishments’ that might ‘enable European citizens to understand themselves as having suffered a common past and [...] [might] animate them to see themselves engaged in

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the construction of a common political future’ (Kumm 2005, 320). The power to shape identities in the present and to articulate ambitions for the future thus derives from the struggles of the past, and the language used in the process is a legal one.

On European culture and narratives of human rights Talking about ‘European culture’ is not easy. The first problem that one runs into is defining what ‘Europe’ and ‘European’ mean. Once such a definition, however tentative, is obtained, a second problem immediately presents itself: is this ‘Europe’ an entity that we should do our very best to promote, or is it an entity we should set about undermining as quickly as possible? Regardless of whether one sees ‘Europe’ today as a geographical destination only, encompassing the twentyseven countries that form the membership of the European Union, or the forty-seven countries that make up the Council of Europe, or whether one perceives ‘Europe’ as referring to a state of mind or way of life and therefore as open to anyone and any country that considers him, her or itself European, it is hardly possible to be neutral when discussing what Europe is, has been and should be. As Étienne Balibar ably sums it up, Thus, the name of Europe – derived from distant antiquity and first designating a little region of Asia or Asia Minor – has been connected to cosmopolitan projects, to claims of imperial hegemony or to the resistance that they provoked, to programs dividing up the world and expanding ‘civilization’ that the colonial powers believed themselves the guardians of, to the rivalry of ‘blocs’ that disputed legitimate possession of it, to the creation of a ‘zone of prosperity’ north of the Mediterranean, of a ‘great power in the twenty-first century’. (Balibar 2004, 10) ‘Europe’, in other words, is a construction which may refer both to a continent and to a civilization – a source of pride for some and very much the opposite for others. ‘What is Europe then?’ asks Irish writer Colm Toíbín, for example. ‘It is not a culture and not an identity. It is a word we should set about undermining further as time goes by.’ Yet, when it comes to Ireland’s membership of the EU, Toíbín is very positive. If not for this membership, Irish women would still earn less than Irish men, and homosexuality would be a punishable offence, he admits (Toíbín 2003, 323, 325–6 – my translation). Even for a Eurosceptic like

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Toíbín, it would thus seem, ‘Europe’ is associated with human rights gains and with respect for individual autonomy. As Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande see it, modern Europe has developed out of a conscious attempt to come to terms with and never forget the past. In this, the realization of the importance of self- criticism, they hint, Europe may well be different from both the United States and Islamic societies: ‘Is it perhaps this radical, self- critical confrontation with its own history that makes Europe different from, for example, the United States or the Islamic societies?’ (Beck and Grande 2004, 21).2 If there is much not to be proud of, this is one kind of ‘European exceptionalism’ that Europeans can be proud of, they suggest. They call their vision of the new Europe a ‘cosmopolitan Europe’. It is a Europe that has admitted to and worked through the many mistakes of the past – a selfreflexive Europe. And it is a Europe that has come to see that there are elements of European intellectual thinking that are worth preserving. Again, these evolve around individual rights and cultural diversity. Human rights are very important to Beck’s and Grande’s vision for a better Europe. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, their vision resulting from a self- critical reflection on the crimes of European history. It was during the Nuremberg trials that the world first heard of ‘crimes against humanity’, Nuremberg being the first truly international court to prosecute such crimes and the first to create international categories of law that went beyond the sovereignty of the nation state. And this transnationalization of human rights in opposition to the legal sovereignty of the individual nation states is the key, for Beck and Grande, to the creation of a European civil society. The universal or cosmopolitan quality of human rights serves a further purpose, too. Human rights guarantee diversity, but they also form a set of common rules by which that very diversity can be regulated and integrated. Hopefully, some day ‘Europe’ will be lived on a day-to-day basis, by the peoples of Europe. At its best, ‘doing Europe’ will become a grass roots endeavour. While we are waiting for this to happen, certain supranational European institutions are doing their best to make the dream of cosmopolitan Europe come true. Chief among these, argue Beck and Grande, is the European Court of Justice. Much like the US Supreme Court, the ECJ has created a supranational law that supersedes that of the individual states. It has thus become a ‘cosmopolitan entrepreneur who, by virtue of the law, succeeds in gaining some ground for a cosmopolitan Europe against a nationalist Europe’ (Beck and Grande 2004, 19).3 On the role that law and the courts have played in the integration of Europe, Beck and Grande are in agreement with other scholars. ‘It

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was the Romans who elevated the law to the place it still holds today as the sole guarantor of the continuity of “civilization” [...] that law remained, and remains, the single most unifying feature of the continent’, writes Anthony Pagden (2002, 42–3). And, on a more popular note, Mark Leonard asks rhetorically in Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, ‘What was it that transformed Europe from being an incubator for world wars into a transmission belt for peace and democracy?’ The simple answer, he continues, is ‘international law. The law is Europe’s weapon of choice’ (Leonard 2005, 36). We see these arguments and analyses reflected in official EU European narratives in which law and human rights figure quite prominently. ‘The formation of Europe – and of the European Communities and the Union that lie at the heart of the continent’s political life – has largely been expressed in legal terms,’ as Philip Ruttley explains. On ‘the long road’ towards European unity and integration, the law has made a large contribution (Ruttley 2002, 228). As for human rights, it was the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997, amending the Maastricht Treaty on European Union of 1992, that truly made the European Convention on Human Rights central to the Union, and made explicit the extent to which the latter is founded on respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law (Ruttley 2002, 246). New applicant states must honour and observe the rights outlined in the European Convention of Human Rights; if they do not, they become liable to legal action. Indeed, should a state be in ‘serious and persistent breach’ of its human rights obligations, the Council of Europe has the power to suspend its voting rights. An earlier proposal went so far as to talk about the possible expulsion of infringing states, but this met with too much resistance to ever receive serious consideration (Ruttley 2002, 246). In a 2007 publication by the European Commission, The European Union: Furthering Human Rights and Democracy across the Globe, we find it stated directly in the Introduction that ‘liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, are founding principles of the European Union and an indispensable prerequisite for the Union’s legitimacy.’ Further on, the importance of ‘mainstreaming human rights and democratization’ is explained in this way: ‘Mainstreaming is the process of integrating human rights and democratization issues into all aspects of EU policy decision-making and implementation, including external assistance. European institutions are deeply committed to intensify the mainstreaming of human rights’ (European Commission 2007, 5, 13).

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For Ruttley, as for Beck and Grande, the role played by the European Court of Justice has been remarkable. With one important ruling after another, the ECJ has furthered Community integration and has helped shape the emerging European Union: Nearly fifty years after the first European Community was created in 1951, one can discern a unique and distinct European political and legal framework. It will, in turn, create a European identity. In retrospect, EC law and the European Court of Justice were fundamental in shaping the new political consensus. (Ruttley 2002, 259) And underlying the judicial activity of the ECJ, Ruttley claims, is a federalist vision of European unification and a belief in a common European culture – a vision and a belief that are shared by other agents of the official EU system: What is undeniable, and should not be underestimated, is the strength of the European ideal. A wide spectrum of political forces – socialist, democratic, liberal – can support this ideal. Yet it is the consciousness that Europeans have a common heritage and a common culture, that there exists a ‘European’ way, that inspires the various intergovernmental conferences where the [...] Member States [...] meet. (Ruttley 2002, 250) In addition, there is the other European court, the European Court of Human Rights. Much like the ECJ, the ECtHR has played a major role when it comes to the formation of European myths and identities. ‘The case law of the European Court of Human Rights,’ writes Michael D. Goldhaber in his conclusion to A People’s History of the European Court of Human Rights, ‘is an unmined source of self-understanding in a region that seemingly craves self-understanding. It’s a system of myth in search of an audience.’ There are symbols that may help create a modern European mythology of the sort that is needed for Europeans to feel a common identity, but ‘outside of human rights law, the list of Europe-wide rituals is short – and not very serious’ (Goldhaber 2007, 180, 175). The Eurovision Song Contest and the Ryder Cup golf tournament do not quite seem to be working effectively in this way, and the Euro has its limitations too. Goldhaber could have mentioned some of the more sustained attempts made by the European Union to create new symbols to represent Europe – the EC emblem and flag, a European ‘anthem’, the

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harmonized European passport, driver’s licence and car number plates, for example. Yet, reading his chapters on various cases that have come before the European Court of Human Rights, one does indeed get the impression that there is plenty of material right here for European myths and symbols. Human rights law would, as he sums up his argument, indeed be the most satisfying basis for a communal identity. Americans are raised to revere cases like Brown v. Board of Education and New York Times v. Sullivan as central pieces of the civic culture. Clarence Gideon, who established the indigent right to counsel in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, has become an American folk hero, thanks to the book Gideon’s Trumpet by journalist Anthony Lewis, and the movie version starring Henry Fonda. By all rights, Lingens v. Austria ought to be as famous in Europe as New York Times v. Sullivan is in America. Inspiring figures like Zeki Aksoy and P.J. McClean ought to become rallying symbols for European sentiment. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights is a veritable mythology in waiting. (Goldhaber 2007, 180, 176–7) A closer look at the two European courts and their history may help explain how human rights came to be so important to visions for a better Europe.

The two European courts, human rights and European identity The origins of the European Union (EU) lie, first, in the Treaty of Paris of 1951, which established the European Coal and Steel Community, and subsequently also in the Treaty of Rome of 1957, which created the European Economic Community (EEC), or ‘common market’. The 1993 Treaty of Economic Union (the Maastricht Treaty) created the European Union, subsequently amended by the Treaty of Amsterdam, which entered into force in 1999, and placed a greater emphasis on citizenship and the rights of individuals. Now there is also the Lisbon Treaty, in which the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights of 2000 is given binding effect by the insertion of a phrase conferring on it the same legal value as the Treaties. The Charter sets out in a single text, for the first time in the EU’s history, the whole range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of European citizens and all persons resident in the EU.

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Within the European Union, the European Court of Justice is the highest judicial body. It settles disputes between Member States, or between Member States and the European institutions, and sees to it that EU legislation is interpreted and applied in the same way in all EU countries. It was set up in 1952 and through its case law it has identified an obligation on the part of administrations and national courts, firstly to apply EU law in full within their sphere of competence, and secondly to protect the rights conferred on citizens by that law and to abolish any conflicting national provisions. It was in the mid-1960s that the ECJ established the supremacy of European law vis- à-vis the legal systems of the Member States. This happened with the Dutch case Van Gend & Loos v. Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen (1963), which launched the ECJ on the road towards ‘what can only be termed a legal revolution’. The following year, the ECJ completed this revolution with its decision in the Costa v. ENEL case – an Italian case which challenged the supremacy of European law over Italian law. At stake was an Italian nationalization law, and the question was whether this law was in breach not only of the Italian Constitution, but also of the EEC Treaty. In its ruling, the ECJ invented a new doctrinal principle – namely that European law had ‘internal primacy, thereby conferring on national courts the task to enforce EC rules over conflicting national legislation’. This was a principle taken from international law, where a treaty is traditionally considered to take precedence over national law. Now, however, the ECJ ‘turned treaty obligations directed towards member states into rights for member-state citizens [...] National courts would over time embrace these fundamental principles, thus allowing the ECJ to develop a comprehensive and strong case-law and binding their respective governments to respect it. A European rule of law had been established’ (Rasmussen 2010). In the area of human rights, too, the ECJ has made a difference. A bill of rights had been proposed in the early 1950s, but nothing ever came of this proposal; in none of the subsequent treaties – until the Lisbon Treaty – was a bill of rights or even a list of enumerated rights included. The 1957 Rome Treaty was concerned mainly with protecting states’ rights from encroachments by Community organizations; human rights were by and large seen as sufficiently protected by each individual nation state. In spite of the absence of a proper bill of rights, the ECJ ‘began in 1969 to evolve a specific doctrine of human rights [...] Over the years during which the human rights doctrine has evolved, the Court has identified several different normative underpinnings for it. They include the Treaty of Rome, the constitutional traditions of the

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member states, and international treaties accepted by member states’ (Steiner and Alston 2000, 790). In 1999, in accordance with the Amsterdam Treaty, a new Article 6 was added, which reaffirmed that the EU ‘is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member States’. Article 6 furthermore states that ‘The Union shall respect fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, as general principles of Community law’ (Steiner and Alston 2000, 790–1). To what extent the EU Charter will strengthen the process of full constitutionalization of citizenship rights, we cannot yet know. But ‘the sheer fact that something akin to a bill of rights – including social rights – has been codified in the Constitutional Treaty [now the Lisbon Treaty] must be regarded as a very significant (some have said “spectacular”) innovation [...]’ (Ferrera 2005, 37). The European Convention on Human Rights (a Council of Europe treaty) occupies a privileged position within the EU legal order. Yet the EU itself is not a member of the Council of Europe, even though the EU’s accession to the Strasbourg convention has been a top priority for various EU politicians and policymakers for a number of years. The Treaty of Lisbon states that the EU has legal personality, and Protocol No. 14 of the European Convention, which opened for signature in May 2004, explicitly announces that the EU may accede to the Convention. The path to accession has thus been prepared. At the moment, the Russian Federation remains the only Council of Europe member state that has not ratified Protocol No. 14. This delaying of its entry into force is not only a problem in terms of the question of the EU’s accession to the European Convention; it is also a major problem in that Protocol No. 14 amends the control system of the Convention. ‘Although arrangements exist to facilitate consultation and coordination between the EU and the Council of Europe,’ as Steiner and Alston sum it up, ‘they remain separate entities operating in very different settings despite the fact that the activities of each organization are very relevant to those of the other’ (Steiner and Alston 2000, 791). The ECJ only allows individual petitions in cases in which the acts of Member States or of European institutions directly violate EU treaty law. ‘Generally, therefore, an individual seeking redress from acts or omissions of a European government must look to the European Court

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of Human Rights in Strasbourg rather than to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for a remedy’ (Williams 2000, 79). In general, the ECtHR case law encompasses a far larger variety of human rights issues and is more value-based than the relevant case law of the ECJ, which appears more technical, based as it is on the principles of nondiscrimination and of the freedom of movement in the EU. The Council of Europe was founded in 1949. Based in Strasbourg, it is distinct from the European Union, but no country has ever joined the European Union without first having been a member of the Council of Europe. It currently counts forty-seven members (including Turkey, Russia and the nations of the Caucasus), and it has granted observer status to five more countries (the Holy See, the United States, Canada, Japan and Mexico). Thus it involves some 800 million people, who speak at least twenty different languages. The aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realizing the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress. This aim shall be pursued through the organs of the Council by discussion of questions of common concern and by agreements and common action in economic, social, cultural, scientific, legal and administrative matters and in the maintenance and further realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms.4 The Council of Europe’s most significant achievement is the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It was adopted in 1950 and came into force in 1953; it outlines the rights and freedoms which Member States must guarantee to everyone within their jurisdiction. All member states of the Council of Europe have to sign and ratify the Convention. Protocols – the abovementioned Protocol No. 14 being the latest – have since been added. To monitor compliance by Signatory Parties, the European Convention established the European Court of Human Rights. The European Convention mentions two different procedures for holding Member States accountable before the ECtHR for violations of rights: the individual petition procedure and the interstate procedure. The former is the more interesting; by far the majority of cases brought before the ECtHR are individual petitions. The ECtHR, it should be mentioned, is one of only two international courts in the world (the other being the Inter-American Court of Human Rights) to allow individual

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petitions against violations of human rights by the governments of its member states. The ECtHR works, as Goldhaber puts it, ‘by shaming European nations’. Technically speaking, the court can do two things. It can order a state to pay compensation to an individual. More importantly, however, ‘it can declare a state to be in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights – and require the state to give an “effective remedy”. An effective remedy often means a change in law’ (Goldhaber 2007, 5). It falls to the Committee of Ministers, the executive arm of the Council of Europe, to make sure that states comply. It is made up of a representative from each member state’s foreign ministry, and a state in violation must produce reports on its progress to these representatives. In principle, by a two-thirds vote, the Committee of Ministers can even exclude noncompliant members of the Council of Europe – a very serious threat indeed, as membership in the Council of Europe is a prerequisite for membership of the EU itself. ‘In effect, the Council of Europe is the EU’s antechamber’ (Goldhaber 2007, 6). Today, now that the United Kingdom’s 2000 Human Rights Act and the Irish 2004 ECHR Act have come into force, European human rights law ‘is operative in the domestic courts of every member state. That makes domestic courts a driver of enforcement and uniformity in their own right’ (Goldhaber 2007, 6). The ECtHR has, however, fallen prey to its own success. Its caseload is so formidable today that judges and scholars talk about a caseload crisis – a result, first, of the acceptance by more and more Member States of the right to individual petition, and secondly of the accession since 1990 of the East European nations. Protocol No. 14 is an attempt at reform. It proposes a general overhaul of the system, but, as the Russian Federation has still not come on board, it is uncertain if or when such an overhaul will take place.

Conclusion The European Union celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in March 2007. This is probably one reason why we have seen a number of books being published recently on Europe – on European history and identity, and on the relationship of Europe with other parts of the world. One of these is a polemical defence of the ‘European dream’ by Jeremy Rifkin, former advisor to Romano Prodi while he was the president of the European Commission (1999–2004). Rifkin argues that ‘the EU citizen is the first in the world to be fully guaranteed universal human rights enforceable by law.’ Whereas the American dream was based on property rights,

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markets, and nation-state governance, the new European dream – which, as the book’s subtitle announces, is currently ‘quietly eclipsing the American Dream’ – is centred around human rights, networks, and multi-level governance. Human rights are the norm that govern much EU activity; indeed, human rights are the legal articulation of the new European Dream. The European Dream and universal human rights come together as a single package. The Dream is the aspiration; the rights are the behavioral norms for fulfilling Europeans’ hopes for the future. (Rifkin 2004, 278–9) More cosmopolitan and less focused on the brute force of power, the European dream is better suited, argues Rifkin, to an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world in which norms of behaviour will be rewarded that further inclusion, instead of exclusion. For Mattias Kumm, the issue is not so much a European dream as a European ‘constitutional patriotism’. In his discussion about the need for a ‘thick’ as opposed to merely a ‘thin constitutionalism’5 he refers to ‘a proactive politics of memory that members of civil society as well as public institutions at the national and European level support’ and engage in. A constitutional commitment to liberal universal principles such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law is not enough to foster a constitutional patriotism, he argues. For Europeans to become constitutional patriots, more is needed than fine words, theories and concepts: Citizens do not simply identify with the abstract norms laid down in the constitution. Instead, citizens appropriate and interpret them in the context of their particular history and in the light of their own ethical and political commitments. This process of appropriation and interpretation of basic political ideals takes place not only and as part of education in national schools. It takes place to a significant extent when political and legal claims are deliberated and negotiated in the public sphere. It also takes place as alliances are forged, programmes are articulated, political and legal battles are fought and choices are made. Thus, universal principles of justice may be textually fixed in the constitution. But they derive their power to shape identities in the present from the connection with the struggles of the past and the ambitions for the future. By being connected to the particular history, ambitions and current political practices of a particular community,

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thick constitutional patriotism reflects the specificity of a particular community. (Kumm 2005, 320–1) This chapter has explored two places or forums in which what Kumm calls ‘a proactive politics of memory’ has been taking place: the writings of European intellectuals and policymakers, and the two European courts. Intellectuals and policymakers have made use of a human rights discourse to create awareness of the fact that hope for the future is only possible, in the European context, when responsibility for past sins is acknowledged. And in evolving a specific doctrine of human rights over the years and in identifying several different normative underpinnings for it, including the Treaty of Rome and subsequent treaties, the constitutional traditions of the Member States, and international treaties accepted by Member States, the judges of the two European courts have helped turn respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law into founding principles of the European Union and an indispensable prerequisite for the Union’s legitimacy. They have, furthermore, helped remind Europeans that one way to avoid repeating past experiences of military and intellectual mobilization against each other is to develop new supranational forms of cooperation and governance. As Christian Joerges puts it, ‘the “constitutionalizing” moment to which the European integration project responded was the sum of the atrocities of the twentieth century in general, and the persecution and extermination of European Jews in particular. The post-war effort to create a European community derives its strength and legitimacy from the dignity of this response’ (Joerges 2005, 245–6).6 While it may be exaggerated to talk about European wishes to ‘redeem the word’ – referring to and punning on Richard Weisberg’s arguments on the ‘failure of the word’, with which this chapter began – there are attempts underway in the European context to reintegrate language and values. Such attempts have much to do with human rights. This chapter has been mainly concerned with European intellectuals and policy professionals, but these attempts are currently finding their way into the cultural sphere as well. Being commissioned in 2005 to write a hymn on human rights, Italian composer Francesco Cali and Danish poet Jeppe Marsling suggested, for example, that the International Declaration on Human Rights might be compared to a tree growing on a grave. The roots of the tree will forever be tied to the grave, but the tree has found a way to grow all the same. ‘Finding inspiration for an art work on justice,’ wrote Marsling, who was responsible for the lyrics of the hymn, is ‘not easy. It is not possible to search one’s heart

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for the glory of human rights without having to feel the dark inhuman background out of which the declaration emerged sixty years ago. The declaration is a tree on the grave. And therefore: the most beautiful of trees. Its bitter-sweet fruits are to be handled with care’. The Human Rights Hymn, which consists of four parts and a chorus, opens with a reminder of the war and the ‘loss of humanity’. It then goes on to celebrate peace as ‘both an end and a beginning’, and ends on the suggestion that ‘out of remembrance and darkness the inspiration now surfaces and unfolds into a celebration of how we – the human race(s) – can avoid injustice’ now and in the future (Marsling 2005).

Notes 1. Many of the themes that I touch upon in this article are dealt with in more depth in my From Civil to Human Rights (Porsdam 2009). 2. ‘Ist es vielleicht diese radikale selbstkritische Konfrontation mit der eigener Geschichte, die Europa beispielsweise von den USA oder den islamischen Gesellschaften unterscheidet?’ I thank Manuela Thurner for translating the passages from Beck and Grande from the German. 3. ‘kosmopolitischen Unternehmer, der mit der Macht des Rechts ein Stück kosmopolitisches Europa gegen das nationale Europa durchsetzt.’ 4. Article 1 of the Statute of the Council of Europe (Statute of the Council of Europe, 5th of May 1949, ETS no. 001), available at http://conventions.coe. int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/001.htm (accessed 12 January 2010). 5. Robert Leckey explains the very useful distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ understandings of constitutions in this way: ‘The thin understanding regards them as utilitarian, rule-based, and represented satisfactorily by their texts. It takes their principal site of operation to be the constitutional or highest court. By contrast, the thick understanding apprehends constitutions as symbolic, cultural, discursively embedded, and operative in multiple sites. It may reject a strict division between legislation and interpretation, emphasizing constitutional culture as formal and informal interactions between citizens and officials. A thick view of constitutions may regard them not only as mediating between cultures, but as constituting one (or more)’ (Leckey 2009, 437). 6. I wish to thank my colleague at the University of Copenhagen, Henning Koch, for drawing my attention to the special edition of the German Law Journal in which both Joerges’ and Kumm’s contributions were published (Koch 2007).

References Balibar, É. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Beck, U. and E. Grande. 2004. Das kosmopolitische Europa. Gesellschaft und Politik in der Zweiten Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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European Commission, External Relations. 2007. The European Union: Furthering Human Rights and Democracy Across the Globe. Brussels: EC. Ferrera, M. 2005. Towards an ‘Open’ Social Citizenship? The New Boundaries of Welfare in the European Union. In EU Law and the Welfare State: in Search of Solidarity, ed. G de Búrca, 11–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldhaber, M. 2007. A People’s History of the European Court of Human Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Joerges, C. 2005. Introduction to the Special Issue: Confronting Memories: European ‘Bitter Experiences’ and the Constitutionalization Process: Constructing Europe in the Shadow of its Pasts. German Law Journal 6/2: 245–54. Koch, H. 2007. Den Europæiske Værdiorden. In Denne verden fortjener at blive forandret - Hyldest til Isi Foighel, eds E. Ersbøll et al., 173–93. Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag. Kumm, M. 2005. The Idea of Thick Constitutional Patriotism and Its Implications for the Role and Structure of European Legal History. German Law Journal 6/2: 319–74. Leckey, R. 2009. Thick Instrumentalism and Comparative Constitutionalism: The Case of Gay Rights. Columbia Human Rights Law Review 40: 425–78. Leonard, M. 2005. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. London: Fourth Estate. Marsling, J. 2005. On the Human Rights Hymn. Copenhagen: Institute for Human Rights [unpaginated]. Pagden, A. 2002. Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent. In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. A. Pagden, 33–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porsdam, H. 2009. From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Rasmussen, M. 2010. From Costa v. ENEL to the Treaties of Rome: a Brief History of a Legal Revolution. In The Future of European Law: Revisiting the Classics in the 50th Anniversary of the Rome Treaty, eds M.P. Maduro and L. Azoulai, 69–86. Oxford: Hart. Rifkin, J. 2004. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Cambridge: Polity. Ruttley, P. 2002. The Long Road to Unity: The Contribution of Law to the Process of European Integration since 1945. In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. A. Pagden, 228–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, H.J. and P. Alston, eds. 2000. International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toíbín, C. 2003. Die Zukunft Europas. In Europa schreibt. Was ist das europäische an den Literaturen Europas?, eds U. Keller and I. Rakusa, 323–9. Hamburg: Körber- Stiftung. Weisberg, R.H. 1984. The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Williams, S. 2000. Human Rights in Europe. In Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact, eds S. Power and G. Allison. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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2 Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe Hagen Schulz-Forberg

In 1956, the Council of Europe proudly presented its precious and delicate gift for Strasbourg Cathedral. The first European institution contributed to the reconstruction of the war- damaged Gothic monument, and donated a choir window designed and built by the French master of stained glass, Max Ingrand. It was also a sign of welcome and partnership to the city in which the Council had taken root itself. The window shows the ‘Blessing Madonna’ spreading her arms gracefully. In the top compartment of the window, the twelve stars of Europe shine on a blue background. The inclusion of the recently designed European flag in the window did not seem to have stirred any confusing ripples then, at a time when the European movement and the early post-war European institutions were closely connected to the Christian heritage of Europe. The fact that the window was furthermore dedicated to the first General Secretary of the Council of Europe, Jacques Camille Paris, who died in 1953, illustrates this broadly shared connection.1 The story of the flag signifies the characteristics of European selfunderstanding in the early years after the Second World War. The European flag was designed in 1955 for the Council of Europe to substitute the large and rather clumsy capital ‘E’ used previously. The unavoidably long debates about the design of the flag were headed by Paul Lévy, the final design drawn by Arsène Heitz. Lévy, the Council’s Head of Communications, originally supported the flag used by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s interwar pro-European organization, the Pan-European Union, which was light blue with a red cross on a golden background in its centre. After opposition from the socialists, and from the Turkish representatives who had joined the Council’s Committee of Ministers in August 1949, the cross and the golden sun had to go, and twelve stars on a dark blue background were decided upon.2 A mixture 37

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of secular Enlightenment thought and Christian values remained, however. The twelve stars could refer to many things, among them not only the zodiac, but also the halo of the Virgin Mary – on display in Strasbourg Cathedral, too – or to the twelve apostles. Communicating the semantics behind the new flag, the Council of Europe explained that ‘against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars represent the peoples of Europe in a circle, a symbol of unity. Their number shall be invariably set at twelve, the symbol of completeness and perfection [...], the twelve gold stars stand for all peoples of Europe – including those who cannot as yet take part in building up Europe in unity and peace’ (Council of Europe 1955). This official declaration by the Council illustrates the general conceptual field of all European integration movements following the war: European unity or even union implied all of geographic Europe, and not only Western Europe. The dark blue Western sky should not be understood geographically but ontologically, referring to a common Enlightenment heritage shared by civilized peoples. And the new and yet unavoidable European unity should rest on the moral basis of Christianity and Enlightenment, on revitalizing the foundations of Europe’s greatness, which had been buried under the rubble of a devastating war. This chapter will examine the early debates in more detail, especially the verbatim reports of the Congress of Europe in The Hague and the first Committee of Ministers and Assembly meetings of the Council of Europe, in order to show how Europe’s past future was debated and how the imagination of what Europe was, is and should be developed before 1957. I shall leave aside established historical narratives about the beginnings of tensions between intergovernmentalists and federalists, and the simplistic conclusion that the Congress and the Council were failed institutions. Not only do most historians of European integration simply ignore the Council of Europe because of the focus on the institutional landscape emerging after the Treaties of Rome, but also historical analyses tend to brush aside the relevance of the early institutions in their own contemporary contexts. For example, Knipping (2004) devotes just two pages to the Council, and uses those to show how irrelevant it was; Judt (2005) provides information about the Council even more sparsely and scattered throughout his book. Both mention, however, the surprising success of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights – without any further consideration of that success. This chapter will thus embrace an open and global perspective on the immediate post-war situation and its complicated institutional mushrooming (OEEC, NATO, UN, Council of Europe, ECSC),

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without imposing a teleological interpretation of European integration, with the Rome Treaties as its foundation myth. This approach does not imply a claim for seamless continuity from the Congress of Europe and the Brussels Pact to the Treaties of Rome; rather, the period should be seen as a time in which older discourses on Europe, established in the interwar period, lost influence – after an initial phase of positive frenzy for full European union, in the process of increasingly pragmatic institution-building in a Cold War setting. Thus the argument is made that European debates and imaginations of a future European union immediately following the Second World War were, through notions of occident and Christianity, more connected to those of the interwar period than to those following the Treaties of Rome, when the integration of Western Europe became the key concept,3 based on intergovernmental negotiations and treaties (Stråth 2000, 385). The main concept on which this early post-war self- description rested was – in contrast to the interwar years – the concept of human rights. This emerged as central and successful from The Hague and the early Council meetings, while it was mainly absent beforehand and was not embraced by the Treaties of Rome.4 Human rights and fundamental freedoms became key words for the Council of Europe, as well as for the Consultative Assembly and the Committee of Ministers, bearing concrete fruits in the form of the European Court of Human Rights established under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms from 4 November 1950. None of these institutionalizations would have been possible without the strong influence and organization of the European movements after the war, and the cohesive power of human rights within the post-war global setting. From the late 1940s until the early 1950s, the European movements and early institutions manoeuvred in a conceptual space based on ideas popular in the Interbellum, such as tolerance, culture, Christian values, romance, literature, and, of course, civilization, and on the additional concepts of human rights and fundamental freedoms: they also had to come to terms with the immediate experience of war and destruction and the threat of new wars that might deliver the final blow to an already battered Europe.

Coming up for air after the war: from self-determination to human rights The conviction that international organizations were a necessity to guarantee peace among nations was widespread, and met little resistance in

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the mid-1940s. The Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, GATT, and the IBRD (later the World Bank)), decided upon in 1944, the United Nations of 1945 and the OEEC from 1947 reflected the need for international coordination under both international institutional design and US leadership, at least in one part of the world. The Soviet-led Cominform was also founded in 1947, and the Congress and Council of Europe were well aware that a competitive situation between different international organizations had emerged, understood as a ‘race between the methods of the Cominform and those of democratic Europe’, as the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin, put it during the first session of the Committee of Ministers (Council of Europe 1949a, 36). In the immediate post-war situation, European movements re-emerged rapidly after a period of hiding, most of them in a new gown, such as the European Parliamentary Union, led by Coudenhove-Kalergi, who did not participate with his former organization, the Pan-European Union. Among the new movements were those that organized the Congress of Europe in The Hague: the Parliamentary Union, the Conseil pour l’Europe Unie, the Ligue Indépendente de Coopération Européenne, the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales, the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes, and the United Europe Movement were all founded between 1947 and 1948 to gather the old, pre-war European activists and the newly convinced.5 These new movements even managed to unite in the European Movement, coordinated by Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, in order to organize the Congress of Europe in The Hague from 7 to 11 May 1948. The fact that the European movements, and subsequently the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, thrived on the concepts of human rights and fundamental freedoms can be better understood through a global rather than a European perspective, even though the very origins of the Declaration of Human Rights and the inner logic of this and subsequent documents were European. Jay Winter argued that the Universal Declaration of 1948 represented Europe’s dark experiences, at the same time as being an effort to revitalize the typical French vision of both national patriotism and ‘aggressive universalism’ (Winter 2006, 101; see also his chapter in this volume). The experience of the war and of the extremes of nationalism called into question the very basic concepts of sovereignty and its relation to territory. The horrors Hitler was able to inflict on his own citizens and on those engulfed by his war, as well as the merciless mills of systematic extermination, called into question the prime position of national self- determination in the conceptual field of political legitimacy, while

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giving international law and international cooperation a high level of legitimacy. To be sure, this was not the end of nationalism, but represented a time in which hopes for a peaceful world embraced a global goal. The concept of self- determination was tarnished in the eyes of many. The Wilsonian move for it as a key element of global organization under the League of Nations was blamed by European activists for the catastrophe of the war and petty nationalism. The inaugural speech by Pieter Adriaan Kerstens6 at the Congress of Europe illustrates this position strongly. Reflecting on the former impossibility of a gathering as large and heterogeneous as the one in The Hague, he concluded that different political streams and different confessions would not have met face to face to shape the future of Europe and to serve a common goal, had it not been for the common shared folly of self-determination. ‘It will probably be easiest to form an idea of the distance covered [towards a united Europe] if one recalls the first years after the first World War, when the slogan of the right to self- determination of the smaller nations was greatly en vogue in the whole of Europe.’ It was, however, this selfdetermination that kept small nations small and helpless in the face of external aggression, while giving Hitler enough argumentative material to make firm his grip on Germany and Europe. Kerstens continued: it will be clear to everybody, who has given due consideration to this matter that this unlimited and sovereign right of self- determination could only lead to the suicidal tendencies of military and economic autarchy, which we have known indeed. Every country wanted to export so much as was necessary for the maintenance of its standards of living. At the same time every country wanted to exclude as much as possible the imports from abroad, which could be considered as a threat to its own level of prosperity. Are there nowadays any people, who do not realize the absolute folly of such an individual sovereign policy of the various European countries? (Kerstens 1948, 5) This fatal misconception, so Kerstens reasoned, led to a situation in which no leader or politician of the democratic opposition could openly criticize the situation and proclaim a departure from the focus on selfdetermination. It would have simply cost all political influence and all political power. ‘This fatal circumstance has resulted in a Europe, which in many respects still is a great source of scientific, political, cultural and philosophical powers, becoming a hopelessly divided and

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vulnerable continent with all the characteristics of a civilization, which is doomed to go under’7 (Kerstens 1948, 5). Winston Churchill, who followed Kerstens as the main speaker of the Congress, picked up Kerstens’ notion that international cooperation was the only way ahead. ‘To rebuild Europe from its ruins and make its light shine forth again upon the world, we must first of all conquer ourselves,’ he exclaimed. And, after forcefully calling for a suppression of the very recent memories of war and destruction, he suggested that the way ahead for Europe was to enjoy ‘that glorious treasure of literature, of romance, of ethics, of thought and toleration belonging to all, which is the true inheritance of Europe, the expression of its genius and honour, but which we [...] have almost cast away’. To embrace common moral and spiritual values would be the only way for a sustained rebuilding of Europe in the face of growing insecurities. This common morality and spirit could be found, Churchill continued, in ‘a dynamic expression of democratic faith based upon moral conceptions and inspired by a sense of mission. In the centre of our movement stands a charter of human rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.’ Only after installing human rights as the ultimate and universal frame for all legitimate action – something he did not do in his Zurich speech, in which he mentioned human beings and human history but not human rights8 – did Churchill continue with the forceful but well-rehearsed claim for a European institution that would be able to deal with economics, matters of defence and political concerns (Churchill 1948, 8). Additional to the urgent claim for a common European defence, Churchill included all Europeans in his definition of what the united Europe was all about: ‘We aim at the eventual participation of all European peoples whose society and way of life are not in disaccord with a charter of human rights and the sincere expression of free democracy. We welcome any country where the people own the Governments, and not the Governments the people’ (9). The universal claim inherent in human rights, freedom and democracy made it much easier for Churchill to embrace all of Europe. By installing human rights as the main framing concept, clumsy constructions of European brotherhood or culture are moved to second-rank importance. Furthermore, the focus on human rights makes European integration fit with world organization: ‘Nothing that we do or plan here conflicts with the paramount authority of a World Organization of the United Nations. On the contrary, I have always believed, as I declared in the war, that a Council of Europe was a subordinate but necessary part of the world organisation’ (ibid.). While it was discussed fervently

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in the subsequent debates about the political nature of the Council of Europe, a European seat at the United Nations was not claimed, only national seats. The imagination of a European representative among those of other continental organizations or federations remained strong during the Congress, however. Since 2008 the EU has been represented at G20 meetings. Yet, in 1948, Churchill merely repeated the old continental vision of Pan-Europe, with Soviet Russia, the British Empire plus its Commonwealth, the United States of America and an Asian representation of some sort.9 For many other members of the Council as well as for Churchill, Europe’s union would thus be a step towards a world organization based not on self- determined small nations of all kinds but on regional units forming ‘an effective World Government resting upon the main groupings of mankind’ (Churchill 1948, 10). To imagine Europe meant to imagine the world. Europe was part of this world and a European union a necessary element of world peace.10 Peace had to be achieved by all means. The fear of war was already menacing in the late 1940s: one of the reasons to include Greece as soon as possible in the Council of Europe was the Communist threat; the notion that European unity would stabilize and provide security for its members was a very practical political tool from very early on. Another illustrative example of the new place of human rights in the semantic field of European self-description is the speech held by the veteran Dutch European activist, Henri Brugmans, co-founder of the Union of European Federalists and founder of the College of Europe in Bruges in 1950, who connected European modernity’s constant experiences of critique and crisis to human rights – and interpreted this as Europe’s biggest virtue: Le mot magique de l’Europe indique, non seulement une région du globe, mais aussi un mode de vie, individuelle et commune. Jamais l’Européen n’a accepté durablement la suprématie d’un groupe dominateur. Jamais il n’acceptera d’autorités, si elles ne garantissent les droits de l’homme. [...] L’Europe, c’est la civilisation des non- conformistes, c’est la terre des hommes continuellement en lute avec eux-mêmes, c’est le lieu où aucune certitude n’est acceptée comme vérité si elle n’est continuellement redécouverte. (Brugmans 1948, 20) The concept of human rights provided breathing space for European activists. It allowed them to formulate European causes, to subsume established European discourses under a new banner, to embrace all

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of Europe, including the Central and Eastern European countries, under a concept that moved decisively beyond the minority and selfdetermination-based reasoning of the League of Nations, and to insert European union into a global vision of world government. The concept was developed and pushed during the war, especially by Central European exiles such as Eduard Benes, precisely to make sure that the minority treaties situation after the First World War would not be repeated, and became a remarkable success in the early years after the war (Mazower 2004, 388). It was not a key concept when international schemes were being developed more officially during the war, however. One of the leading scholars of international law, Hans Kelsen, did not mention it at all in his General Theory of Law and State of 1945, but did so frequently – and critically – in his 1950 book on The Law of the United Nations. The closest he came in 1945 was to say that ‘only human beings can be citizens of a state, just as only human beings can possess duties and rights. The duties and rights of a juristic person are the duties and rights of human beings as members or organs of the community presented as juristic person’ (Kelsen 2007, 240). The importance here lies in the existence of a state in which normative orders of law are implemented. As Kelsen himself observed, the idea of human rights, so pervasive in the late 1940s, was nowhere to be seen only a couple of years earlier. ‘No other subject matter is so often referred to in the Charter [of the UN] as the human rights and freedoms. They were not mentioned at all in the Dumbarton Oaks Proposal [for the Establishment of a General International Organization from October 1944]’ (Kelsen 2000, 33). The comparison of Churchill’s speeches at Zurich and The Hague, held within only two years of each other, leads to the same conclusion. The concepts of human rights and fundamental freedoms emerged in the immediate post-war setting, and their success is connected to the consequences of the League of Nations’ vision based on self- determination.

Human rights and American influence ‘L’Europe ou la mort’, declared Paul Ramadier, former French Prime Minister, in concluding his speech following Winston Churchill’s opening statements. His was a voice more representative of the cautious and slow Europeanizers, who preferred a slow growth of European cooperation between governments, who did not support a European constitution or ‘federalist revolution’, and who saw the ministers who signed the Brussels and the Paris Pacts as the ‘veritable founders of European union’

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(Ramadier 1948, 13). However, though Ramadier was not especially visionary when it came to Europe, the military and strategic situation did not leave any room for doubt: Europe had to move closer together to survive. ‘Death’ in this case was meant quite literally, for it was assumed that Europe could easily be conquered or destroyed by another war. This immediate threat shaped the discussions of European union very decisively and led to a common conviction among all delegates that Europe needed to give a clear sign of its will to survive and to remain independent in some way. At the same time, European unification was strongly supported by the USA. Strategically, it was most important that Europe should reconstitute economic power and social peace as quickly as possible to counter the Soviet Union and her growing influence in the world. From very early on, and thus also at the Congress of Europe, American supporters of European union made their voices heard, even though they were physically absent. It was Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the third speaker after Churchill and Ramadier, who reported from a ‘most satisfactory meeting with President Truman, General Marshall and other leaders of the United States’. He also brought a letter from James William Fulbright, the president of the American Committee for a Free and United Europe in 1948, which left no doubt about why the USA supported European unity and what was the expected outcome of the Congress. Fulbright wrote that he encouraged ‘in every possible way, the political unification of Europe’. He was furthermore convinced that European prosperity and peace could only be regained in this way. In the last paragraph of his letter, however, he made clear that Europeans were expected to recompense the Americans. ‘The only way that the people of Europe can repay the American people for their sacrifices in two wars and in the European Recovery Programme is to overcome their ancient nationalism, recognize the identity of their interests, and create a living, vital European community, able once more, as they have been in the past, to contribute to the forward march of Western Christian civilization’ (Fulbright to Coudenhove-Kalergi 1948, 15). This was the general situation in which the Congress of Europe had to manoeuvre between global goals and US power.

Defining human rights for Europe One of the main problems related to human rights for the Congress of Europe, and later on for the newly established Consultative Assembly and Committee of Ministers, was not how to implement them – it was clear that a court with powers to prosecute human rights violations

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within member states of the Council of Europe had to follow – but how to define the rights in precise terms. ‘The meeting recognized that, this being a subject to which the Assembly attached special importance, everything possible should be done to enable a positive decision to be reached without delay. The Greek representative [Argyropoulo] observed that the draft Convention submitted to the Committee of Ministers contained certain weaknesses and even certain contradictions which might make its implementation a matter of some delicacy’ (Council of Europe 1950, 99). Chairman of the Fifth Meeting of the Committee of Ministers, Paul van Zeeland, had already remarked on 13 August 1949 that ‘due consideration’ should be given to the ‘definition’ of human rights (Council of Europe 1949a, 12). To define human rights for Europe became the officially assigned task of the Assembly. The Committee, however, almost withdrew the European human rights charter from the Assembly’s agreed list of matters to pursue. In the morning session of 9 August 1949, the Committee of Ministers discussed ‘item (a) of Part IV of the draft Agenda of the Assembly which had been drawn up by the Preparatory Commission: “Definition, safeguarding and development of Human Rights” ’ (Council of Europe 1949b, 34). The division of labour among the Consultative Assembly and the Committee of Ministers was quite clear from early on. Put simply, the Committee members were the pragmatists, who, as democratically empowered representatives of national governments, would decide on the Assembly’s scope of decision-making, and the members of the Assembly were the idealists who would always strive for more integration and more power for the Council of Europe than the Committee would be ready to yield. The logic was, therefore, that the Committee decided upon which subjects they would like see discussed by the Assembly. It was Robert Schuman, a supporter of a clear hierarchy between Committee and Assembly, who, together with Halvard Lange from Norway, did not want the Assembly to get to work and define human rights. The United Nations had already developed the problem at great length, he argued. After objection by Gustav Rasmussen from Denmark, who insisted on defining human rights, it was Schuman who tried to block the assignment for the Assembly by reiterating his point that the UN had already dealt with it. Yet Rasmussen, who would not let Schuman’s second claim stand alone without a remark, repeated his conviction that, if the Council of Europe did not provide a definition of human rights, the resulting European Court of Human Rights would have much less force. Following this intervention, the

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Swedish representative Oesten Unden stepped in and supported the view expressed by Lange and Schuman. A representative of another small country, this time Ireland’s Sean MacBride, then raised his voice to insist on the definition of human rights by the Assembly; it was a popular topic in Ireland, and it might be a good idea to anticipate the wishes of the Assembly rather than appear frightened of them. Finally, Great Britain’s Ernest Bevin moved on the side of the small countries, saying that Rasmussen’s arguments were convincing to him. After this, the meeting was adjourned. When the meeting reassembled, Schuman made a last move and suggested again the removal of the definition of human rights from the task list of the Assembly. When chairman Paul-Henri Spaak asked whether there were any objections, there were, and so a vote was taken. The group of ministers who wanted to take the item off the list needed a two-thirds majority, or eight of the twelve votes.11 Schuman and his camp scored seven votes against four with one abstention (Council of Europe 1949b, 34–6). It was thus by only one vote, or one abstention, to be precise, that the Committee of Ministers failed to withdraw the task from the Assembly to define human rights for Europe. The concerns raised by Rasmussen would probably have been manifested, and the Court of Human Rights would have been stillborn. Churchill continued pushing for human rights as a European cause and remarked to the Assembly: ‘We [...] are glad that the obstacles to discussion by the Assembly have now been removed by the Committee of Ministers. A European Assembly forbidden to discuss Human Rights would indeed have been a ludicrous proposition to put to the world’ (Churchill 1949a, 284). His overall rhetoric had already shifted gear, however, towards attaching human rights more firmly to the United Nations, but he believed that the European declaration of human rights had to be more extensive, and that it should lead to a European Court (Churchill 1949b). What form did the European version of human rights take? What was delivered in Rome in early November 1950 was a follow-up to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but manifesting a clear European will to embrace the duties of a new world order based on human rights. Justice and peace thrive on the guarantee of fundamental freedoms, which are guaranteed only in a political democracy under the observance of human rights. While the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights was considerably longer than its UN model, mainly because of the elaboration of a European Court of Human Rights, specificities of the European situation were

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integrated into the general part of the Convention. The war experience and the early post-war years had left their mark. For example, while Article 4 of the UN charter states that ‘no one shall be held in slavery or servitude’, the European Convention follows this formulation exactly, yet adds that ‘no one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour’ (Convention 1950). Most importantly, the European Convention established the Court of Human Rights, to ‘ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the High Parties in the Convention and the Protocols thereto’ (Convention 1950, Article 19). With this court, the European movements had reached their first goal. The concepts of human rights and fundamental freedoms were successfully used for the cause of European unity. As the discussions of the Committee of Ministers have shown, however, this was not a straightforward and unanimous process. In 1949, when the Council of Europe was founded, Schuman and others tried to water down human rights along with the political and economic mandate of the Council. The successful implementation of the court meant the firm normative installation of human rights as a European core concept. In the long run, this normative anchor proved to be decisive for European self- definition, for example during the Helsinki Process of the mid-1970s (Thomas 2001); and it provides legitimacy for European agency to this day, and perhaps increasingly so. Fresh memories of the war and the pressing present insecurities had a bearing on the early pro-European movements and institutionalizations. The Congress of Europe from 1948 embraced human rights as a core concept, uniting all Europeans and connecting Europe to the world. The resolutions passed by the Congress reflected the global situation, the American political pressure and overall influence, and the European traditional self-understanding, as well as the new partition of Europe, which was perceived as a deadly threat. Political and economic union was the only way towards a future marked by security and prosperity in Europe. In line with the UN, the Congress of Europe blamed self- determination for many of the mistakes of the past and demanded a reasonable transfer of sovereignty to an international level. A European Assembly and a charter of human rights were demanded by the Congress as a first guarantee of security and peace, ultimately leading to a united world in which Europe would constitute one element. The Cold War was to despatch many of these global scenarios into oblivion. The mushrooming of international organizations and the division of Europe cooled down pan-European claims. With the Coal and Steel Community, the Marshall Plan, the OEEC, NATO and the

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division of Europe, the main tasks were already distributed to other organizations and not to the Council, which did not become the powerful European body it had striven to be, and the claims of pan-European cooperation became increasingly unrealistic. The ambition to install a European Assembly was fulfilled, but it had no authority. The demands for economic cooperation were implemented with the Schuman Plan from 1950. Moves for a political union, a constitution and a common army all failed in the mid-1950s, and, with the concentration on Western European economic integration, the concepts of human rights and fundamental freedoms lost impact and legitimacy, and integration became the new pragmatic conceptual signpost. With the shift from human rights as a global concept under which the whole of Europe would thrive to integration as a Western European affair, European integration provincialized itself, located in the Cold War setting. The early post-war years, however, witnessed a global vision of human rights on the part of the UN and the Council of Europe, informing European selfunderstanding and agency as well.

Conclusions – the human rights circle Reconsidering the key terms informing a European self-understanding, it is important not to forget the twelve years before the Rome Treaties of 1957. From the war, human rights emerged as a cohesive vision. Integration took over as the pragmatic watchword of the 1950s and 1960s, before identity was launched in the 1970s. In the 1990s and 2000s, constitution and public sphere became the new magic formulae (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010). With the failure of the constitution, today’s European concepts again revolve around human rights and fundamental freedoms. The EU, since the 1990s, has increasingly adapted its self- description to the much older, already existing general discourses about the idea of Europe, striving to represent not only a pragmatic and tedious technocracy, but core European values and concepts. Human rights and fundamental freedoms have been progressively embraced by the EU, moving the Council of Europe and the Commission closer to each other on the normative playing field, despite remaining feelings of competition between the two organizations. The EU will soon become a member of the Council of Europe, and thus join the European Convention on Human Rights itself. And the current Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland from Norway, selfconfidently calls for a common European project under the umbrella of human rights and security in Europe (Jagland 2010). Have human

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rights thus come full circle? Certainly human rights are back on the agenda very strongly. Europe increasingly understands itself as a global player promoting human rights (Kølvraa 2009). Today’s is a very different European semantics, however, when compared with the immediate post-war period. Senator Fulbright’s letter to the Congress of Europe mentioned the forward march of Western Christian civilization, and, indeed, so did many other contributions. That European integration would return to Europe its natural place as moral leader and example for the world was all-pervasive in the early debates. Of course, this did not go uncontested. But it was natural that priests and church representatives should sit among European intellectuals and politicians. Human rights and fundamental freedoms were a Western concept, excluding other religions and cultures, resting on a residue of arrogance and feeling of superiority. Europe, as was clear to members of the Congress and the Council of Europe, would be one part of a world system, but a leading part. Remaking Europe under the concept of human rights meant explicitly that Europe would again pick up its ‘traditional’ role ‘de guide, de pionnier, son rôle de grande sœur; elle [Europe] redeviendra la grande force culturelle, pacifique, sur laquelle l’humanité entière appuiera de nouveau des plus hautes aspirations vers la paix, vers le bonheur’ (Van Zeeland 1948, 42). Some elements of that post-war discourse on Europe still reverberate today, as the debates in the European Convention for a European Constitution have shown (Krzyzanowski and Oberhuber 2007). Assertions about European global responsibility and leadership are not built solely on self- confident claims for human rights, but are softened by Europe’s growing embrace of its own darker pasts. The European institutions of today would not insert their symbols so openly and obviously into a discourse of Christian heritage as the early Council of Europe did when it included the European flag in the window of Strasbourg Cathedral. Despite the inherent arrogance of earlier European semantics, the Council of Europe has managed to install itself as a truly normative power12 with the ability legally to pursue abuses of human rights. Of course, the claim that the West somehow owns the concept of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and uses it as a continuation of influencing foreign countries and keeping its supremacy, is still rightly criticized (Sen 1999). But human rights have also become much more inclusive through agency and decades of practice. The European Court of Human Rights is a forum acting continuously as a normative agent

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in a European public sphere (Schulz-Forberg 2010), and which has played an important part in the process leading towards increasingly inclusive semantics of human rights – though not necessarily towards a fully fledged world organization.13 It has been the goal of this chapter to illustrate the conceptual field in which the European future was imagined before the stabilization of Cold War bipolar imaginations and institutions, and before the Rome Treaties of 1957 confirmed the Cold War scenario, to show how human rights and fundamental freedoms emerged as the most cohesive concepts right after the war, and to reflect on the success of the Convention on Human Rights, which is granted by all historians of European integration.

Notes 1. Certainly, Christian heritage was not regarded as spotless by all members of the Council of Europe and the Congress of Europe. The main debate about Europe’s Christian heritage and foundations took place in the Cultural Committee of the Congress of Europe, and Bertrand Russell, for example, took a strong standpoint against Christian Europe as morally superior: ‘We have learned tolerance with great difficulty, whereas in other parts of the world – in China, India, among Mahometans – you find much greater readiness for tolerance’ (Russell 1948, 332–3). Nevertheless, the meetings of the Cultural Committee ended with the announcement of a sermon to be held by one of the committee members. 2. The movement from light blue to dark blue also has semantic implications. The light blue referred to untroubled peace, the dark blue to the West in the sense of occident or Abendland. 3. The delegates were very sensitive of talking about occidental Europe. In the debates of the Economic Committee it was discussed whether or not one should say ‘Europe occidentale’ (in French) or whether it would not be more advisable merely to say ‘Europe’. The debate was a geological one. It dealt with carbon resources and their location in Europe. But even in these very pragmatic discussions, the ontology of the occident crept in – and after a short exchange it was agreed to write ‘Europe Unie’ instead of ‘Europe occidentale’, despite the geological imprecision, since the whole of Europe was at the core of the Congress’s labour (Economic Committee 1948a, 247; see also the final version of the resolution in Congress Resolutions 1948b, 8). 4. In the treaty establishing the European Economic Community from 1957, the word ‘human’ appears for the first time under article 36 and in connection with the protection of human, animal and plant life and health. The word ‘fundamental’ is completely absent. ‘Right’ appears for the first time in article 17 and is related to customs issues and the fiscal competences of the Member States. 5. For example, the very influential American Committee for a Free and United Europe.

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6. Kerstens was Senator in the Dutch Parliament, Vice-President of the League for Economic Cooperation and Chairman of the Dutch Committee for a United Europe. 7. Coudenhove-Kalergi also referred to self- determination as the evil that ruined European unity in the interwar period, claiming that the people of Europe were supportive of European union, but that ‘elle fut sabotée par des Gouvernements aveugles, qui ont préféré voir l’Europe marcher vers l’abîme plutôt que de sacrifier leur idole réactionnaire de souveraineté intégrale’ (Coudenhove-Kalergi 1948, 14). 8. The other arguments made by Churchill in Zurich were the same; only human rights were new. 9. Churchill continued this line of thought in 1949 at the European Assembly sittings, where he also made clear that ‘We are not in any way the rival of the world organisation. We are a subordinate but essential element in its ultimate structure’ (Churchill 1949a, 282). 10. See, for example, the speeches by Henri Brugmans, Coudenhove-Kalergi and Paul van Zeeland at the Congress of Europe’s plenary session, as well as Claire Saunier’s, President of the French National Commission for Education, and representatives of the Women at the Congress of Europe, who delivered a separate resolution, expressing that building Europe is the first part of a world organization (Saunier 1948, 31). Van Zeeland complemented this statement at the end of the final plenary session on 10 May, in which, as chair, he said that ‘l’Europe unie n’est que la préfiguration et la condition d’un monde meilleur’ (Van Zeeland 1948, 41). 11. The Ministers of Foreign Affairs from Turkey and Greece had joined the Committee of Ministers for the first time at this second meeting, raising the number of votes to twelve. 12. Normative power here is not understood in the sense of Manners (2002), but in a general theoretical way that understands norms as concepts which have a normative function and are characterized by their contestedness and thus their reflexivity. See also Merlingen (2007). 13. For a theoretical approach from a political science perspective see Moravcik (2000), who includes the European Convention on Human Rights into a global framework, too – and concludes on a critical, though very obvious, note that more than an assembly and international declarations is needed to bring forth binding international commitments.

References Primary sources in the Archives of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg Brugmans, H. 1948. Speech in the Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Churchill, W. 1948. Speech in Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Churchill, W. 1949a. Intervention at the Sixth Session of the European Consultative Assembly, Strasbourg, on 17 August 1949.

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Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe 53 Churchill, W. 1949b. Speech at Place Kléber, Strasbourg, on 12 August 1949. Congress of Europe. 1948a. Minutes from the Economic Committee. Verbatim Report, Economic Committee. Paris and London: Comité International de Coordination des Mouvements pour l’Unité Européenne. Congress of Europe. 1948b. Resolutions. Paris and London: Comité International de Coordination des Mouvements pour l’Unité Européenne. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. 1948. Speech in Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Council of Europe. 1949a. Minutes from the First, Second and Fifth Sessions of the Committee of Ministers (8–13 August). Council of Europe. 1949b. Report on the Second Session of the Committee of Ministers (8–13 August). Council of Europe. 1950. Conclusions of the Sixth Session of the Committee of Ministers, Appendix I (2 November 1950). Council of Europe. 1955. Thirty-sixth Meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies: Resolution (55) 32. 9 December 1955. Fulbright, J.W. Letter to Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (read to the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948). Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Kerstens, P.A. 1948. Inaugural Speech to the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Report I, Plenary Sessions. Ramadier, P. 1948. Speech in the Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Russell, B. 1948. Intervention at the Cultural Committee of the Congress of Europe on 7 May 1948. Verbatim Report, Cultural Committee. Saunier, C. 1948. Intervention at the Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 10 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions. Zeeland, P. van. 1948. Intervention at the Plenary Session of the Congress of Europe on 10 May 1948. Verbatim Reports I, Plenary Sessions.

Printed sources Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. 4 November 1950. Rome: Council of Europe. Haller, B. 2006. An Assembly for Europe. The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly 1949-1989. Strasbourg: The Council of Europe. Jagland, T. 2010. Strengthening Human Rights across Europe. Speech at the European Policy Centre, Brussels, 16 January. http://www.coe.int/t/secretary general/sg/speeches/2010/20100216_bruxelles_en.asp (accessed 28 October 2010). Judt, T. 2005. Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin. Kelsen, H. 2000 [1950]. The Law of the United Nations. A Critical Analysis of its Fundamental Problems. New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange. Kelsen, H. 2007 [1945]. General Theory of Law and State. New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange. Knipping, F. 2004. Rom, 25. März 1957. Die Einigung Europas. Munich: dtv. Kølvraa, C. 2009. Imagining Europe as a Global Player. The Ideological Construction of a New European Identity Within the EU. PhD Thesis: Aarhus University.

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Krzyzanowski, M. and F. Oberhuber. 2007. (Un)doing Europe. Discourses and Practices of Negotiating the EU Constitution. Brussels: Peter Lang. Manners, I. 2002. Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms? Journal of Common Market Studies 40/2: 235–58. Mazower, M. 2004. The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950. The Historical Journal 47/2: 379–98. Merlingen, M. 2007. Everything Is Dangerous: A Critique of ‘Normative Power Europe’. Security Dialogue 38/4: 435–53. Moravcik, A. 2000. The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe. International Organization 54/2: 217–52. Schulz-Forberg, H. 2010. Cosmopolitanism or Ethnic Homogeneity: Roma Identity, European Integration and the European Public Sphere. In Mapping the European Public Sphere: Institutions, Media, and Civil Society, eds C. Bee and E. Bozzini, 177–93. London: Ashgate. Schulz-Forberg, H. and B. Stråth. 2010. The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-Market. London: Routledge. Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Stråth, B. 2000. Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation of the Other. In Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, ed. B. Stråth, 385–420. Brussels: Peter Lang. Thomas, D.C. 2001. The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Winter, J. 2006. Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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3 From War Talk to Rights Talk:* Exile Politics, Human Rights, and the Two World Wars Jay Winter

It is impossible to understand the current human rights regime in Europe without attending to the crucible years of the Second World War and after. In this chapter I shall highlight the way in which exile politics in the Second World War in London provided the framework for the emergence of a new international regime of human rights. Out of protests by governments and individuals in exile over the crimes being committed daily on the Continent from 1939 on, there emerged an approach to war aims that placed human rights at the heart of the post-war international order. The men and women who drafted these documents did so at a time when no one could have predicted an Allied victory in the war. And yet during those desperate hours, during the Blitz, a new human rights regime was born. Such an outcome was unprecedented and to a large degree unanticipated. And yet it gives a new meaning to the notion that the Second World War was a war of liberation. It was not a true liberation in Poland, or in Czechoslovakia, or in Hungary, caution historians of Eastern Europe, where one form of imprisonment succeeded another (e.g. Davies 2007); but, if we adopt a longer time horizon, perhaps the notion of the 1939–45 conflict as a war of liberation can be defended, and not just for the remains of the Jewish population of Europe who survived the Final Solution. Theirs was liberation pure and simple. The human rights regime of the 1940s was both an overground and an underground river; on the surface it froze during the Cold War. But there were other, slower, more indirect ways in which human rights liberated Europe. May 1968 was a plea in many registers for liberation, from South America to Vietnam. The Prague Spring of the same year gave liberation a human 55

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(and socialist) face; even after it was suppressed, Charter 77 resumed the struggle, without socialism. So did Solidarity in Poland, and so did the Helsinki Accords of the 1970s, yielding a trade- off between the recognition internationally of the Soviet Union’s western borders and Western surveillance of human rights violations in the Soviet Union itself. It would be absurd to claim that human rights brought down the Soviet empire, and yet the courage of Soviet dissidents was part of a much wider process begun, I believe, decades earlier. The longue durée does indeed matter in international history, as is shown by the story of the unfolding of the human rights movement in the mid-twentieth century and thereafter. Who were the carriers of this message? Who were the human rights activists of the generation of the Second World War? Some were lawyers; others were military men in exile. Others still were ex-soldiers, veterans of the Great War who found a way to continue the struggle they had endured in one war in the harsh conditions of another. Among them was the French jurist René Cassin, whose contribution to this story is important to note.1 It may be surprising that I focus on the role of old soldiers. The primary reason for proverbial raised eyebrows at this claim is the tendency of scholars to work from an American or from a German perspective to probe the political outlook and pressure of veterans’ groups over the last century. In that optic, veterans are overwhelmingly patriotic, conservative or reactionary. Their experience of war or of preparation for war makes them authoritarian, illiberal, or natural supporters of right-wing or extreme right-wing political parties and movements.2 What happens if we choose a different optic, a French one, and juxtapose it to the conventional view? In some respects, there is evidence of right-wing or extreme right-wing tendencies among some French veterans, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National, or the members of the interwar Croix de Feu, or among the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) assassins who tried and failed several times to kill De Gaulle after his volte face on Algerian independence in 1959. But in other respects French history provides a long and well- documented alternative narrative that still today remains in the shadows. It tells a story of a different kind, that of a mass movement of pacifist veterans, millions of them, who from the 1870s to 1940 saw military service as the shield of the Republic (Prost 1977). It arose in the late nineteenth century in the cry of Jean Jaurès for La nouvelle armée. It moved to the left in revulsion over the anti-Republican and Catholic cabal to convict, imprison and then forget Colonel Dreyfus. It railed against the use of troops as strike-breakers,

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but, virtually to a man, answered the call-up of 1 August 1914 and fought to the bitter end. Thousands of ‘troublemakers’ on the left, who could be arrested so that mobilization could go forward peacefully in 1914, could not be found. Why? Because they had already joined up (Becker 1973). During the war itself, many of these men worked to create a veterans’ movement with two central objectives. The first was decent treatment for the wounded and a decent pension for the demobilized. The second was the abolition of war. Perhaps 60 per cent of the roughly eight million men who served in French forces joined these organizations. These were not the voices of parliamentary politics, but of an extraparliamentary movement, the membership of which came from small market towns and villages – known as la France profonde. Their voices were heard throughout the interwar years and beyond, and, while they were never univocal, they carried an unmistakable pacifist message (Prost 1973). In the short term, their cause failed miserably. Betrayed by their own illusions, by their belief in reaching out to ex-servicemen in Italy and Germany, even to Mussolini and Hitler themselves, they were left in 1940 with a taste as of ashes. Their story is one of political bankruptcy, to be sure. And yet that is not the end of the story. Out of the veterans’ movement to outlaw war came another crusade, one privileging the rights of soldiers, of the wounded and the unemployed, within the framework of human rights. Drawing on elements of the French revolutionary tradition, and the Universal Declarations of Human Rights of 1789 and 1793, veterans and other democrats-in- exile created a new form of the human rights message, one which arose out of the catastrophe of the Second World War. The passage from the struggle for dignity in and after one World War to an even more profound and long-lasting commitment to human rights after a second is the subject of this chapter. Veterans’ politics found a home in the new League of Nations. The International Labor Organization (ILO) was founded by the League with the aim of ensuring the right to work for all those disabled in the war. Here is a central theme of the whole sweep of this story: it starts with the victims of war and ends with the claim that rights belong not only to victims, but to us all. On 2 September 1921, in Geneva, there was an international veterans’ discussion of work for war invalids. René Cassin represented the largest French veterans’ movement, l’Union Fédérale, with two million members, and it was at this venue that he and his colleagues met for the first time enemy veterans from the defeated Central Powers. Such contacts convinced Cassin that veterans had to

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work together with their former enemies and within the League of Nations if their voice was to be heard in international affairs. With this aim in mind, he took the initiative in establishing an international veterans’ organization, the Conference Internationale des Associations de Mutiles de la Guerre et des Anciens Combattants (CIAMAC), which met for the first time in Geneva in September 1926.3 This body emerged from earlier discussions among veterans from both sides in the war, men who were committed to coming together to discuss matters of common interest. The German delegates from the Reichsbund affirmed their commitment to Republican values. They accepted the need to pay reparations and to contribute to the reconstruction of devastated regions, all as steps to reassure Allied ex-servicemen that they too wanted to preserve the peace. Italian, Polish, Austrian and British delegates joined them, and went on in later meetings to share information through the ILO on questions of pensions, work placements, and medical and orthopaedic assistance for veterans. Belgian and Yugoslav veterans also joined these discussions. When the Dawes Plan regularized reparations payments, the political conditions were ripe for more formal discussions about the formation of an international organization of veterans’ associations. Initially eighty delegates from ten nations and twenty associations came to the inaugural meeting, and committed themselves to working for the principle of mandatory arbitration in international conflicts. Here was a body of people unattached to their governments, able to speak out with the moral authority earned by military service and sacrifice. Annual meetings were held in the later 1920s in Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. They had no difficulty in integrating German delegates, whose commitment to peace was unquestioned. It was harder to bring Soviet veterans to the table, since the war had been entirely eclipsed by the 1917 Revolution. This set of initiatives was part of the political culture surrounding the League of Nations. Veterans such as Cassin argued that repairing the physical damage caused by the war was a first step towards repairing the moral damage it had caused. Their task was political education at home and the lessening of enmity between former adversaries. They were committed to making the League of Nations as powerful as possible an obstacle to war. That is why their distance from their foreign offices was essential: these men spoke over the heads of governments to the millions of men and women whose lives and families had been disfigured by war. They spoke to youth who did not know what war was, and urged them to join in their international crusade for peace.

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Their main aim was what we have come to term moral rearmament. By that Cassin meant that those who knew war had to educate the public as to the horrors of violence and the absolute necessity of saving the new generation from the catastrophe of another war. This could not be done within the boundaries of one country alone, or solely among the victors. That is why he bypassed the objections of the more conservative Inter-allied Veterans Federation (FIDAC), which had no truck with the idea that German and Austrian veterans should be brought into the conversation. Bridges had to be built, but with prior agreement on certain clear principles about the way to preserve the peace.4 All these efforts were marked by both the strengths and the weakness of the League of Nations. Disarmament exposed them all. Cassin served on the French delegation to the League of Nations for fourteen years, from 1924 to 1938, and much of his work for that body concerned arbitration and disarmament. He therefore had a front-row view of the fragility of an institution that challenged the supremacy of state sovereignty as a principle of international political order. If a more robust League of Nations or any similar venture were ever to succeed, it would do so only after a sea change had occurred in both academic and popular notions of the indivisible sovereignty of the state, and of the power of the duly elected statesman, acting like a ‘châtelain dans son château’. Two major events led to the undermining or refashioning of this older definition of sovereignty. The first was the Nazi constitutional and lawful seizure of power in 1933; the second was the legal transformation of states like France, occupied and humiliated after 1939. But, for our purposes, it is important to note how many individuals, long before these two political earthquakes, were active in the effort to provide an alternative view of state sovereignty. And that view ultimately bore fruit in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After 1940 Exile politics emerged out of catastrophe. In 1940, Cassin watched the collapse of France from an office in the Ministry of Information. He realised that, as an anti-fascist and a Jew, he was a marked man. He returned to his home in the south of France, paid his taxes, and decided to embark on an Australian troop ship to England. He never heard the call to arms by De Gaulle of 18 June 1940, but responded to it on arrival in London on 29 June. He told De Gaulle that he was a veteran, founder of the veterans’ movement, and a Jew. He put himself, as a jurist and as a Frenchman, at the disposal of De Gaulle’s embryonic movement. De Gaulle called

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him a godsend. Why? Because De Gaulle had thirty-six hours left to prepare a document for Churchill establishing his credentials and that of his movement, France Libre, as a French government in exile. Churchill was prepared to recognize and – just as important – to fund De Gaulle’s movement if he could claim de jure status as the representative in exile of the French Republic. Cassin drew up the document that provided this crucial legitimation, later ratified on 7 August 1940, and that became the cornerstone of the French Resistance movement (Cassin 382AP27, Diary 1940). The significance of this juridical service was of the highest importance, which De Gaulle recognized by making Cassin one of his ministers (or commissioners) in exile. Cassin had responsibility for education and justice, and sat on all the major committees of the French resistance movement in London. He represented De Gaulle on missions to Lebanon and to Africa, showing that the Republic was alive in its empire. He ran the central bureau of France Libre throughout the worst months of the Blitz. It was in London that he met a group of exiles with similar inclinations, men who saw that human rights had to be part of a radically new post-war international order. Nikolas Politis, Foreign Minister of Greece, and Edouard Benes, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, were two of the men he had met in Geneva and who, like him, had been forced to escape to London to avoid execution. Alongside other legal scholars such as Hersch Lauterpacht, these men helped convert discussions about war aims into discussions about human rights. The paradox was that, as the possibility – perhaps the probability – of Nazi victory emerged in 1940 and 1941, a number of exiles in London began to construct a vision of an entirely different post-war world. It was one in which the warfare state would be turned into a welfare state, and in which the defence of human rights came before the defence of national interest.

Warfare state or welfare state: St James’s Conference I By the late spring of 1941, the Nazis had begun the construction of what they termed a new European order, whatever the fate of Britain. This Nazi version of a European Union of the future was composed of a German core and a periphery dominated by collaborators in every occupied country. To counter the notion that the collaborators were the lawful rulers of occupied Europe and that they, under German and Italian leadership, were forging a new Europe, the British decided to hold a war council of her Allies. This meeting, held in St James’s Palace in London on 12 June 1941, brought together representatives of her Empire, her Commonwealth, and her Dominions, alongside leaders of governments in exile from countries under Axis control. Poland, the

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Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Czechoslavakia and Norway were all represented at the Prime Ministerial level. General Sikorski spoke for Poland; Jan Masaryk and Trygvie Lie were there as Foreign Secretaries of Czechoslovakia and Norway respectively. Paul-Henri Spaak represented Belgium as Foreign Minister in its government in exile. Churchill met the participants in the Portrait Gallery of the Palace. There he told them and the world that ‘whatever are the movements of the Nazis worldwide, it is in the fortress formed by the British Isles where the final outcome of the struggle between liberty and tyranny will take place.’ And alongside him were men and women equally determined to see this monumental struggle through to victory. The accord all the delegates signed affirmed three points. The first was that the struggle would continue until ‘victory is won’. There would be no compromise or negotiated settlement. The second was that there would be no peace until German forces ceased to oppress or threaten to oppress free peoples, that is, until the Nazi regime was destroyed. The third was that ‘enduring peace’ would come only after ‘the menace of aggression’ was lifted, so enabling ‘free peoples’ to ‘enjoy economic and social security’. To this end the signatories promised to work together and with others ‘both in war and in peace’ (Trial of War Criminals 1946–49, vol. XV, 52). Ten days later, the war took a turn which ultimately led both to victory in 1945 and to the implementation of Allied plans for the post-war world. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and, despite spectacular victories in the weeks after the invasion, it was clear that Britain was not alone, and neither were the governments in exile who had met at St James’s Palace a few days before. It is clear, too, that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war was a decisive moment in the slow but steady tilt of the United States towards the Allies. On 9 August 1941, Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt met on board USS Augusta at Naval Station Argentia in Placentia Bay, on the southern coast of Newfoundland, then still a British colony. FDR let it be known that he was going to New England on a fishing trip. Instead he met his Chiefs of Staff and Churchill for their first, but by no means their last, council of war. It was Churchill who landed the biggest fish of all. There could be no doubt as to the American position, formulated in the document they released on 14 August, when Churchill was back in Britain. The key point was in the sixth of the common principles to which they agreed, which read: Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will

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afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want. (Atlantic Charter 1941) Here, four and a half months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States effectively declared war on Nazi Germany. When Hitler received a cable with this text attached, he exploded in fury. What followed is still a matter of controversy, but who could doubt that, just as in the First World War, the United States was going to join the Allies, and convert a European war into a World War? Hitler had promised that, should the Americans so decide, the Jews of Europe would pay the price. And so they did (Jersak 1999).

St James’s conference II The second time there was an inter-Allied conference of exiles and allies in St James’s Palace, six weeks later, the entire political landscape had changed. The war was now one of left versus right on a global scale. In September 1941, it was time to bring the Atlantic Charter to bear on Allied war aims, on preparations for the world after the war, and for the war crimes trials which would ensue. All the governments in exile had abundant evidence of Nazi war crimes against subject peoples. By announcing to their citizens suffering under Nazi occupation that retribution would come one day, they provided both hope to the oppressed and a warning to the Nazis that justice would be upheld; this was the first clear sign of Allied willingness to hold war crimes trials after the war. Anthony Eden, the newly appointed Foreign Secretary, presided at this second inter-Allied conference. The change at the top was clearly to the advantage of the Free French. The previous British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was at best tepid towards De Gaulle, whereas Eden, who, like Cassin, had served in the Great War, spoke reasonable French and admired De Gaulle. The other major newcomer was Ivan Maisky, representative of the Soviet Union, whom Cassin had known in Geneva at the League of Nations a decade before.5 In his address to the conference, Cassin made sure everyone knew that this was not the first time Germany had invaded countries with which it was at peace. Hitler [he said] has merely revived, in a more monstrous and brutal form, William II’s dream of world domination ... Invaded three times in less than a century by an adversary bent on death and destruction, France can see no safeguard for this independence and freedom, or

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for that of maritime communications, outside the framework of an effective organization of international security, an essential element of which is preliminary disarmament, the destruction of the military machine and the limitation of war potentialities in countries which have never ceased to threaten her and are still liable to do so. The French also consider as necessary to the establishment of a real peace the practical ratification of the essential liberties of man and the concerted utilization, in view of the economic and social securities of peoples, of technical progress creative of fresh wealth. Indeed when peace has come, constant respect for the law of solidarity will impose itself on all. In the future it alone will enable us to avoid a repetition of those catastrophes which rend the unity of the human race.6 ‘The essential liberties of man’ was Cassin’s prophetic way of pointing towards the need to make human rights a bulwark of peace. Here he spoke for the exile community as a whole. The primary business of the second St James’s meeting was to ratify and adapt the Atlantic Charter to serve as a succinct statement of Allied war aims. For Cassin, it meant that France, along with all other countries, had the right to choose its preferred system of government. It also meant that something stronger than the League of Nations had to carry the burden of preventing war in the future. What would strengthen such a new institution would be a clear and comprehensive statement as to the universality of human rights. It was here, in London in September 1941, long before the war was won, that the quest for a new and practical human rights regime began.

St James’s conference III The ferocity of Nazi occupation intensified in the autumn of 1941. Both Churchill and Roosevelt issued statements condemning the execution of hostages. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and the German declaration of war on the United States a day later, they joined with twenty-three other nations in signing the United Nations declaration on 1 January 1942, affirming their commitment to the destruction of the Nazi regime. The evolution of Allied thinking on the subject of the post-war world reveals a strong division between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, who ran the war, and governments in exile representing occupied populations. The Great Powers wanted to postpone any

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precise commitments on how such judicial proceedings would operate; governments-in- exile could afford no such luxury. They needed to show captive populations that their national sovereignty was still intact, and that after the war there would be a national reckoning on war crimes. Such proceedings did not at all preclude the establishment of an international tribunal, planning for which developed in the second half of the war. The first step to this end was the St James’s conference of 13 January 1942. Sir Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, welcomed the delegates, but stood aside from its deliberations, which were chaired by General Sikorski of Poland. The conference issued a declaration signed by the representatives of nine occupied countries: Whereas Germany since the beginning of the present conflict, which arose out of her policy of aggression, has instituted in occupied countries a regime of terror characterized in particular by imprisonments, mass expulsions, execution of hostages and massacres, And whereas these acts of violence are being similarly perpetrated by allies and associates of the Reich and in certain countries by accomplices of the occupying power, And whereas international solidarity is necessary in order to avoid repression of these acts of violence simply by acts of vengeance on the part of the general public and in order to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilized world, Recalling that international law and, in particular, the convention signed at The Hague in 1907 regarding laws and customs of land warfare do not permit belligerents in occupied countries to perpetrate acts of violence against civilians, to bring into disrepute laws in force or to overthrow national institutions, The undersigned representatives of the government of Belgium, the government of Czecho-Slovakia, the Free French National Committee, the government of Greece, the government of Luxembourg, the government of The Netherlands, the government of Norway, the government of Poland and the government of Yugoslavia 1. Affirm that acts of violence thus perpetrated against civilian populations are at variance with accepted ideas concerning acts of war and political offences as these are understood by civilized nations; 2. Take note of the declaration made in this respect on October 25, 1941, by the President of the United States of America and the British Prime Minister;

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3. Place amongst their principal war aims punishment through the channel of organized justice of those guilty and responsible for these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or in any way participated in them; 4. Determine in the spirit of international solidarity to see to it that (A) those guilty and responsible, whatever their nationality, are sought for, handed over to justice and judged; (B) that sentences pronounced are carried out.7 The key point here is the third one: that the framing and carrying out of war crimes trials emerged as a central element in the formulation of war aims. Signing the document for France was Charles De Gaulle, who attended while Cassin was on special mission in Syria.8 For De Gaulle, the task was not only to seek retribution; it was also to ‘take measures to ensure that a renewal of such crimes should be made impossible’ (‘Allies in conference’ 1942, 5). It was from this point that thinking about retribution and about the shape of the post-war international legal order came together in a kind of double helix. The liberation of subject people and the punishment of those responsible for monstrous acts during the war presented one key element of what the Allies were fighting for. The other part of war aims was the affirmation of positive principles on which the peace would be secured, and that is where human rights came in. Here we have reached something of a parting of the ways. The Second World War was fought to restore the territorial integrity of individual states occupied and humiliated by German military power. This was its essential character, be it with reference to France or to the Soviet Union. But the very depredations of Nazi occupation set in motion forces seeking to replace the bankrupt system of the League of Nations with an international order of a different kind. The notion that state sovereignty was inviolable and sacrosanct was contaminated by the Nazis and their allies. No state could be permitted to do what the Nazi state had done, first to its own citizens and then to the rest of Europe, or then to justify its acts on the grounds that sovereignty was indivisible and untouchable as a principle of international affairs. That is why the Second World War was the occasion for the search for a dual approach to reconstruction after the war. First came the need to restore the dignity of those states whose regimes had been destroyed by the Nazis. Territoriality came first. But, secondly, there emerged a growing consensus among the Allies on the need to reconstruct the international order on a different basis, one that rested on commitments which went beyond state

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sovereignty. Out of that search the United Nations emerged, and so did a set of human rights commitments, flowing from the adoption of the Charter of the UN in 1945 to the passing of the Convention on Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The Inter-allied commission on war crimes The period between the third St James’s conference and the formation of an Inter-Allied commission on war crimes was the time when the Holocaust was at its height. But, even though hundreds of thousands of Jews were being murdered daily, it was the death of one man, and the retribution it brought in its wake, that moved the Allies into action. On 27 May 1942, a group of Czech parachutists, trained in Britain, fatally wounded SS General Reinhard Heydrich, head of all security policy and protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In revenge, the Nazis exterminated all the inhabitants of one village – Lidice – near the site of the assassination. Czechs in London demanded that the British formally associate themselves with the January 1942 St James’s declaration on punishing war criminals. This the British were unprepared to do; they did issue a formal repudiation of the Munich agreement, which was hardly an answer to Czech demands for justice. In June 1942 in Washington, Churchill and Roosevelt discussed the question of setting up a war crimes commission. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s special advisor, drafted a paper on the work of such a commission in taking evidence and in reporting to the United Nations on egregious violations of human rights, naming those responsible. He also urged the appointment of commissioners of undoubted international standing, who would not be national representatives so much as representatives of the alliance against Hitler. Churchill agreed with the plan, approved by the British War Cabinet on 6 July 1942. They were willing to go along in order to contain public pressure to punish war criminals, a current of opinion that grew with reports of Japanese atrocities against British soldiers in the Pacific theatre. What they had in mind was that those accused of war crimes be tried in and by the countries in which the alleged crimes took place. They wanted the restoration of national courts rather than the creation of an international tribunal. Once again, we see the importance of the restoration of territoriality in the development of war crimes policies, as an alternative to extra-territorial judicial proceedings. The fact that the one prepared the ground for the other was one of the unintended consequences of the war and the monstrousness of Nazi crimes.

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The Allies did not choose at this time to define what Nazi war crimes were, preferring instead to fall back on older, commonly accepted definitions of the laws of war in the Geneva Conventions. With this understanding, the Cabinet Committee for the Treatment of War Criminals was established. On 7 October 1942, Lord Simon, the Lord Chancellor and chief legal officer in Britain, announced to the House of Lords that the Allies would set in motion an inquiry into the appropriate form to bring to justice war criminals ‘irrespective of rank’. The same day, President Roosevelt stated that there would be trials of a relatively small number of people, those he termed ‘the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of persons and the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith’ (Kochavi 1998, 28–32). On 20 October 1943, Cassin was appointed French delegate to the Inter-Allied Commission on War Crimes. He sat with colleagues from those governments-in- exile that had signed the third St James’s declaration, a document that now became official Allied policy. Once again, London became Cassin’s adopted home and the site of some of his most important wartime work, this time undertaken on behalf of the incipient United Nations. Complicating this work was the lack of consensus on the purpose of this commission. The Soviet Union started trying war criminals as soon as they liberated territory from the Nazis. In December 1943, they held trials and public executions in Kharkov.9 At the same time, Lord Simon had made it clear that the Allies intended not mass trials but ones limited to a relatively small number of people in positions of power. British law changed, though, to permit the prosecution of accused criminals whose alleged crimes took place in other countries. French law, Cassin observed, was not as advanced as British law in this respect (Cassin 1944, 2). Further difficulties arose from American doubts about the nature of the work of the commission of experts, on which Cassin himself sat. Nevertheless, on 18 January 1944, Sir Cecil Hurst, the President of the Permanent Court of Justice in The Hague, as chair, convened the Commission, even though the Soviet Union had not named a delegate. With new American backing from Herbert Pell, formerly US Ambassador to Portugal and Hungary, three subcommittees were formed. The first committee, chaired by the Belgian jurist De Baer, addressed dossiers on war crimes presented by individual nations. Between 9 and 16 February 1944, they examined the first sixteen dossiers presented by France. Several were deemed sufficiently complete to present to the whole commission, which could name individuals to be handed over to Allied authorities for trial. By May 1944 about 100 such individuals were on

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this list. The second subcommittee was chaired by Ambassador Pell, and examined procedural questions. He probed national differences in the definition of war crimes, and their handling by civil or military courts, as well as the politically charged question of the character of an international criminal court. The third commission, headed by the Polish jurist Stephan Glaser, dealt with difficulties in legal thinking on collective responsibility for crimes, as well as the viability of the defence of innocence on the grounds of following higher orders. The outcome of these deliberations was limited by the chair’s reluctance to go beyond his government’s position of ‘wait and see’ on matters of international justice. Still, the commission agreed to grant the right of lawyers or others to take evidence under oath in any country for the purposes of obtaining evidence of the commission of war crimes in another country. They also noted that the pace of atrocities had actually increased in the period of the commission’s work, and renewed their determination to make public the intention of the United Nations to bring war criminals to trial, wherever they might be found (Cassin 1944, 4–5). Cassin summarized his own contribution to this commission in uncharacteristically bold terms. He claimed credit for the convening of the third St James’s conference, a claim that could have been contested by the Czech and Polish delegations. He also claimed the leading role in preventing the side-tracking of the Commission into limited technical questions of the law. As French delegate, he turned attention time and again to the urgent matter of framing war crimes tribunals, a position which reflected the way France Libre aided the Resistance in occupied France itself. But there was another, more personal level to this part of his work. Cassin learned on his return to France in 1944 that twentyfive members of his family, including his eighty- eight-year- old uncle Samuel, and his sister Yvonne and her husband, had been deported from Drancy and killed. He himself had been stripped of his French nationality by Vichy and sentenced to death in absentia. All his property had been sequestered. His position was not objective to the problem of restoring the legal order and securing justice for those guilty of monstrous crimes. For the Nazis and for Vichy, Cassin and Jews like him were part of the problem, and now, in the months of preparation for the return of the Republican order, he insisted on being part of the solution to the legal and moral morass produced by Nazi occupation. In the following months in and out of London, Cassin assembled and framed numerous reports for the commission on crimes committed in France and against French citizens. These included maltreatment of French prisoners of war, black and white, in Germany; the

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machine-gunning of civilians during the exode of 1940; and the role of German soldiers and the Gestapo in the transit camp of Drancy, from which French Jews and other Jews found in France were deported to Auschwitz (Cassin 1944, 6). Above all, he pressed the commission, and succeeded in persuading them that they had a responsibility to act on behalf of millions still under Nazi persecution, who awaited the day of their liberation as the first day of judgement. On 4 April 1944, the Commission received from the constituent member states lists of all men in the SS, the Gestapo, or the army, or in other leadership positions, in each occupied nation, with the intention of evaluating who among them would stand trial for war crimes (Cassin 1944, 7). This was the key step before setting up trials of those whom the Germans had to hand over to Allied authorities at the Armistice as suspects in war crimes prosecutions. What Cassin had helped accomplish here was important in both the French and the international realms. For the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale, here was one means to re- establish the Republican judicial order, and to limit the role of l’épuration sauvage, or local vigilante justice. For the Allies as a whole, here was one way to approach the transnational character of crimes without precedent. The first step was to hand over those guilty of crimes against French men and women in France, and the second was to try those guilty of transnational crimes, which came later to include genocide, a word only just invented at the time by Rafael Lemkin (Cooper 2008, 24–47). What mattered was to see a pattern at the core of the Nazi order, one which used terror and murder to execute a plan of domination of Europe and beyond. This is what made the criminality to be judged after the end of the war a collective act. Individuals were guilty of crimes against infants, children, the elderly, those deported from Drancy to Auschwitz or starved or worked to death in other camps. That was true, but the nature of the crime went beyond individual culpability. It addressed the German conception that law did not touch them in their new order; indeed, to them, there were no laws of war but only the rule of force. Even if they were to lose the war, their crimes would have so weakened the countries they conquered, they might have reasoned, that Germany could prepare for the next war from a favourable position even when defeated. Hence the task was no less than the creation of some kind of common international law to restore the ties that judicial systems provide against injustice and cruelty. That reconstruction had to be both political and legal, since the Nazis had destroyed extant legal systems tout court, and the kind of national culpability that the Nazis fixed on the Jews could

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not be fixed on the German race per se, but on those among them guilty of crimes established by the rules of law and evidence. By resuscitating justice through the arrest and trial of putative war criminals, countries such as France, humiliated by occupation and collaboration, could thereby recover their political dignity. But the enormity of the crimes committed meant that legal steps had to be taken to restore what Cassin termed ‘the laws of humanity’, the sanctity of which must be protected against ‘future aggressors’ (Cassin 1944, 13–15). Part of the achievement of Cassin and this group of exiles was to keep up the pressure on Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union to set up an international court to try the major war criminals. To do so would be to drive home to the world at large the revolutionary character of Nazi crimes, and the way these crimes undermined the concept of the rule of law per se (Cassin 1944, 44). There was injury to the international order to repair as well. To reach that goal, the Allies had to consider drafting a transnational legal code (Cassin 1944, 45), stating what the laws of humanity are, and how nations that, like Hitler’s Germany, systematically violate them domestically are a threat to international peace. Here lies the link between war talk and rights talk, between protests against the inhumanity of the Nazis and the construction of a transnational code of behaviour limiting what states can do against other states and against their own citizens.

Post-war The story of the emergence of human rights thinking in the early days of the United Nations is complex, and cannot be treated in extenso here. The important point is that there were many voices in this debate, some imperialist, some simply chauvinist, and others committed to a new regime of human rights. Cassin was one of them, and it would be foolish to claim his was the loudest or the most profound. But it should not be ignored entirely, as, for example, does Mark Mazower (2009). The UN in its infancy was a house of many mansions, certainly no enchanted palace, but it gave room to those who believed that the defence of human rights was the foundation of peace. That argument is an ongoing one. The London exiles were there in San Francisco, in Geneva, in Lake Success and in Paris, where the work of establishing a new human rights regime was done. René Cassin was among them. His standing in France Libre enabled him to join Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Malik, John Humphreys and others in the United Nations in drafting the Universal Declaration of

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Human Rights in the period 1945–8. He wrote the preamble himself, and it was Cassin who made the final changes and read out the document to the United Nations assembled in Paris on 10 December 1948. It took some time, but this group of old friends and battle-hardened human rights warriors eventually saw that the opening of the Cold War made it impossible for the United Nations Human Rights Commissions to act with any coherent authority. As a consequence, they transferred their efforts in creating an institution higher than that of state sovereignty to the project of European unification. In 1950, a European Convention on Human Rights was passed, and it had teeth. It was the document all countries had to sign and respect in order to join the European Community, and it still is. To enforce the Convention, a new European Court of Human Rights was created. In 1958 it opened in Strasbourg, and Cassin was its first Vice-President (associate justice) and then in 1965 its President (chief justice). On his retirement from that post in 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I have tried to emphasize the significance of exile politics in the emergence of a post-war human rights regime. In that effort, I have focused in particular on the work of René Cassin, partly because of its intrinsic interest, and partly because his path was shared by many others who suffered in one war, risked their lives in exile in a second, and were determined to move from efforts to heal the victims of war to efforts to establish the new international order on a foundation of respect for human rights. The passage from war talk to rights talk in the Second World War is one that we should attend to, for it has had important ramifications for the construction of the world in which we live.

Notes * I borrow the phrase from Mary Ann Glendon (1991). 1. The references to Cassin form part of an ongoing project on his life and achievements, some early parts of which were published in Winter (2006), chapter 4. 2. The literature on veterans’ movements is vast. As a starting point, see Ward (1975). 3. Archives Nationales, Paris, Fonds Cassin (hereafter cited as Cassin 382AP), 382AP/10, Rapport de René Cassin a la Commission de la Paix sur la CIAMAC, 1931. 4. Cassin 382AP/10, Rapport de René Cassin a la Commission de la Paix sur la CIAMAC, 1931. 5. Cassin 382AP/68, 24 September 1941, verbatim account. 6. Cassin 382AP/63, text of Cassin’s speech to the Inter-Allied Conference, 24 September 1941.

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72 Jay Winter 7. Cassin 382AP/68, 24 September 1941, verbatim account. 8. Cassin 382AP/158, pocket diary, entries for January 1942. 9. Cassin 382AP/175, Répression et prévention des crimes de guerres ennemis. Deuxième rapport du Professor René Cassin, Delegué de la France à la Commission d’Enquête des Nations Unies sur les Crimes de Guerre, 3 mai 1944, 1. Hereafter cited as Cassin 1944.

References Primary sources Cassin, René. 1944. Répression et prévention des crimes de guerres ennemis. Deuxième rapport du Professor René Cassin, Delegué de la France à la Commission d’Enquête des Nations Unies sur les Crimes de Guerre, 3 mai 1944. Archives Nationales, Paris, Fonds Cassin, 382AP175. Fonds Cassin, Archives Nationales, Paris (cited as Cassin 382AP).

Printed sources Allies in Conference. 1942. The Times, 14 January, 5. Atlantic Charter. 1941. The Roosevelt- Churchill Declaration. London: National Peace Council. Becker, J.-J. 1973. Le carnet B; les pouvoirs publics et l’antimilitarisme avant la guerre de 1914. Paris: Klincksieck. Cooper, J. 2008. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, N. 2007. No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe 1939-1945. New York: Viking Penguin. Glendon, M.A. 1991. Rights Talk: the Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press. Jersak, T. 1999. Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung. Historische Zeitschrift 268: 311–49. Kochavi, A.J. 1998. Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mazower, M. 2009. No Enchanted Palace: the End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prost, A. 1973. Combattants et politiciens: le discours mythologique sur la politique entre les deux guerres. Le Mouvement Social, 85, Langage et idéologies: le discours comme objet de l’histoire: 117–54. Prost, A. 1977. Les Anciens combattants et la société française, 1914-1939, 3 vols. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de la Science Politique. Trial of War Criminals. 1946- 49, before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal under Control Council Law no. 10, vol. XV: Procedure, Practice and Administration. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Ward, S.R., ed. 1975. War Generation: Veterans of the First World War. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. Winter, J. 2006. Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Part II Reflections: Narratives of European Civilization and World War II

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4 Myth and History in European Post-War History Writing Jan Ifversen

‘Europe’s problem is that it has too much history’ (Barraclough 1955, 215) Communities need history. History establishes what Paul Ricœur has called ‘the narrative identity of a culture’ (Ricœur 1987, 276). The narration of what the community ‘lives through’ is what constitutes identity over time. Through the narrative, the community stands out as a permanent entity despite all the changes it experiences. Narratives are made and told in the community. If narratives are broadly accepted by the community they become master narratives with a dominant status in a given society (Jarausch and Sabrow 2002, 16). Since the nineteenth century professional historians have played a decisive role in the making of master narratives; as Hobsbawm amusingly phrased it, historians are to national identity-building what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts (Hobsbawm 1990, 23). Professional historians rely on their scientific discourse in constructing narratives. But they also act in the public realm, where master narratives are demanded to make order of community life. They point to origins, select events and show directions. The historians contribute to this order, and so are involved in providing communities with origins and beginnings. As demonstrated amply by anthropologists and scholars of religion, narratives of origin and beginnings belong to the mythic reservoir of communities. The role of myth in identity-making has also been emphasized by social scientists. Anthony Smith talks about ‘the myth–symbol complex’ as the basic structure of any community or ‘ethnie’, to use his own term. The principal driving force in this complex containing ‘myths, memories, values and symbols’ is the constitutive myth or ‘mythomoteur’ (Smith 1986, 15). It is the basis for forming 75

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a political community. Smith therefore speaks about the mythomoteur as the ‘constitutive, political myth’ of a community (Smith 1986, 58). In the same vein, Bo Stråth points to the myth – together with memory – as that which provides identity to a community (Stråth 2000). For Smith and Stråth, myth designates the inner core or the molecule of communal identity. Myths are narratives about origin and creation. In this sense, myth differs from historical narratives, which are about linking events within a chronological framework. The myth tells us about a condition prior to history. It is not the first chapter in a historical narrative, but rather the precondition for there being a history to narrate. As Ricœur puts it, myths only exist ‘when the founding event has no place in history, but is situated in a time before all history’ (1987, 273). Practising the myth means pointing to a separation between origin and present. The basic function of a myth is precisely that it is able to transgress the present time. The rendering of a founding moment thus serves to create a standard or a set of values from which to evaluate the present. Foundation is not purely about origin; it is also about the values that a community must live by. Modern myths are political, and legitimize foundational, political acts. At the same time, however, they keep their function as normative points of orientation, since they express transhistorical values that provide orientation to a given community. Myths have a narrative structure of their own. The time of ultimate beginning is not conceived as a big bang. In classical myths, origin relates to chaos, designating the condition before existential order. Modern myths also entail an idea of chaos or catastrophe. Either the foundational act breaks with an old order, which is described as disorderly, out of date (e.g. l’ancien régime) and chaotic, or it brings a community out of the ashes of catastrophe. In its most radical form, the constitutive act is represented in a revolutionary myth. Historians create new beginnings when writing the history of communities. They partake in appointing major events in history. In some cases, their narratives become ammunition for myth-making, or they themselves get directly involved in the politics of myth-making. Immediately after the Second World War the feeling that Europe and its nations had experienced a catastrophe was widespread. Politicians and intellectuals in Europe engaged in discussions of how to revive Europe; efforts were made to create European unity. For some, this project was in need of a myth. Historians also faced the challenge of reviving Europe, and had to decide how to write European history after 1945. In this chapter I shall first look briefly at European myth-making in the

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immediate post-war years, and look more thoroughly at the ways in which historians in the 1940s and 1950s narrated this new beginning.

Myth-making A few months before his death in 1940, Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay on the concept of history, in which the angel of history looked back on the past as a single catastrophe, with the rubble piling up (Benjamin 2007). Five years later, his prophecy had come true, and the pressing question for many Europeans was how to imagine life after the catastrophe. Intellectuals all over Europe were engaged in burying the old Europe. Alfred Weber, one of the old representatives of the German Geist, wrote a book during the war, taking leave of existing history. It could only be published in 1945, and opened by acknowledging the catastrophe and the end of Western history: ‘Wir stehen mit der Katastrophe, die wir durchlebt haben und noch durchleben, für jeden der etwas Blick hat, deutlich am Ende der bisherigen Geschichte ...’ (Weber 1946, 11). Although speaking to the Germans, Weber related a greater European collapse. Another of the grand old men in German academia, the historian Friedrich Meinecke, followed the same strategy of seeking to relieve German culture of full responsibility for the Nazi crimes in his book, Die deutsche Katastrophe, published in 1946. In even more direct terms than Weber, Meinecke viewed the German catastrophe as ‘a process of moral depravation within the European society’ (Meinecke 1946, 11). Despite some nostalgia for a European, abenländische, peak before the modern era of masses and nihilism, both old men expressed hope for a revival of European culture within a comprehensive new global organization, beyond the bickering nation states. As a sociologist of historical change, Weber predicted this development, whereas Meinecke, in more utopian language, spoke of ‘a voluntary federation of Central and Western European peoples’ (Meinecke 1946, 161). It was hard to escape the feeling of catastrophe in the immediate postwar Germany. The intellectual scene that emerged out of the ruins was dominated by discussions of the consequences, involving the question of guilt. Different intellectual and political strategies were formulated. Returning émigrés and older intellectuals clashed with spokesmen for a younger generation in the search for a German subject position untainted by Nazism. Hans Werner Richter, one of the founders of the famous Gruppe 47, advocated a radical break with the past: ‘this generation believes that the only possible source of spiritual rebirth lies in an absolute and radical new beginning’ (quoted in Brockmann 1996, 18).

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This call was launched in 1946, in the second issue of the journal Der Ruf, established by Richter and his friends. More conservative intellectuals were advocating – not least in the journal Neues Abendland – renewal through a reconfirmation of Germany’s belonging to the Abendland. Other intellectuals as well as politicians turned their hopes toward a new, federal Europe, as epitomized in the following statement made in 1947 by the leader of the German Social Democrats, Kurt Schumacher: ‘Die Diskussion über Europa ist doch in Wahrheit das Suchen nach einer Sinngebung des Lebens, nachdem wir jetzt eine Periode sinnlosens vegetierens durchgemacht hat’ (quoted in Kämper 2001). Europe could thus serve as a necessary point of orientation in a situation perceived as chaotic and catastrophic. A leading intellectual figure in the German post-war debate on how to find ways out of chaos was the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Like Weber and Meinecke, he spoke in favour of a European federation as the solution to what he called the European crisis. He also agreed with them in viewing this crisis as caused by destructive modernity carving its way through European culture. He was invited to participate in a prestigious meeting to bring European intellectuals together to debate the condition of European civilization. It took place in Geneva in September 1946 and was organized by the municipality and the local university under the title, L’Esprit Européen. As formulated in the advertisement, this rencontre internationale was organized to measure the health of the European spirit (Ackermann 1989). The format resembled the grand pre-war meetings of intellectuals to face the growing threats of fascism. Looming large behind the Geneva meeting was Paul Valéry, who in 1919 famously had diagnosed the crisis of the European spirit (Ifversen 2002). A panoply of great names was approached by the organizers, including Benedetto Croce, Bertrand Russell, Salvador de Madariaga and André Malraux. Among those who agreed to participate, the most prominent were Karl Jaspers, Julien Benda, Georg Lukacs and Georges Bernanos. Among the younger participants were the British poet Stephen Spender and the later famous Swiss Europhile and federalist Denis de Rougemont, who in particular would become important in linking the intellectual discourse on the European spirit with more concrete thoughts on political organization. The participants at the rencontre were invited to reflect on the raison d’être of Europe in the past and its vocation in the future. There was a general agreement that the present catastrophe was a European responsibility. The question of a particular German guilt was remarkably absent from the discussions. Most participants also adhered to

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the same narrative of a glorious European past losing momentum and facing crisis sometime in the nineteenth century. In Jaspers’s rendering the Europeans had been ‘racing towards the abyss with growing speed’ since the nineteenth century (Jaspers 1947, 19). World War II could thus be seen as the climax of this crisis. When it came to diagnosing precise reasons for the crisis, however, opinions differed. Some participants followed Jaspers in his portrayal of a spiritual ‘Einschmelzung’ and a general loss of values. Others saw nationalism as the destructive force that hindered the development of a European consciousness; for De Rougemont, nationalism was anti-Europe, ‘the particular malaise of Europe’ (Benda et al. 1947, 111). These differences led to disagreements about a possible future. Although the idea of a European federation was a dominant theme, a cleavage could be detected between those arguing in more political terms and those relying entirely on the old, European spirit, who looked for solutions in the universal values of Europe. Stephen Spender argued that, even when crippled and ruined, Europe could still rely on spiritual values ‘representing the highest aspirations of humanity’ (Benda et al. 1947, 216). He imagined a European renaissance in which Europe would come to terms with its loss of power, and acknowledge its traditional values through ‘a spiritual unity’. This rebirth was thus based on an idea of Europe rid of its old destructive forces, including nationalism, and transformed into a civilizational force of universal dimensions. Spender spoke of ‘the civilizational values that the world would desperately need’ and De Rougemont of how the global future depended on Europe’s ‘power of invention’ (Benda et al. 1947, 216, 162). There was general agreement among the participants that the source of salvation lay in re- establishing the unquestionable universal values embedded in the old Europe, uncontaminated by modernity, which was seen as ‘anti-European’. The talk about a cultural Europe seemed to offer the easiest way out of the present chaos. Political solutions were brought to the fore, but more hesitantly and often in very general terms. Some participants, such as the Italian literary critic Francesco Flora, even warned about linking the search for a European spirit to ‘a limited idea of a European federation’ (Benda et al. 1947, 57). This apolitical answer to the catastrophe relied on restoring a classic myth about Europe as a spiritual entity beyond politics. For the more politically oriented participants this was meagre. Benda read Europe’s history as marked by the permanent lack of a common ‘consciousness’. Jean Guéhenno deplored that even the acclaimed European spirit had become ‘soiled’ (Benda et al. 1947, 111). The most overtly political figure

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at the rencontre was Denis de Rougemont, who advocated the creation of a political federation, which he saw as the only antidote to the destructive forces in Europe. He even linked his idea of a federal Europe with a concrete vision of an international order in which Europe as such signified a third force between the two non-European or ‘anti-European’ superpowers.1 Denis de Rougemont was only one among several intellectuals and politicians who pinned their faith on a federalist solution for Europe. Federalism had gained new prominence within the European resistance movements, and after the war federalist organizations emerged all over Europe and came together in transnational organizations such as the European Union of Federalists (EUF), established in 1946.2 In the same year, Winston Churchill was to become the great symbolic figure of European federalism. In his famous speech in Zürich in 1946 he advocated the creation of a United States of Europe. Just like the intellectuals in Geneva, he saw a chaotic Europe – ‘over wide areas a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care-worn and bewildered human beings gape at the ruins of their cities and their homes’ (Churchill 1948, 199) – that could only be ‘re- created’ through an act of unity. Churchill was drawing a picture of a Europe trapped in a murderous past that would not go away without this inauguratory act. The emphasis on a continuous chaos blocking the future could be found over and over in arguments for European federalism. A pamphlet produced by the EUF in 1947 began by stating that ‘Europe is disintegrating’ (quoted in Lipgens and Loth 1991, 20). The only way to ‘start out afresh’, according to the EUF, was to replace the old system of nation states with a federation. Federalism was made synonymous with liberty, solidarity and peace in Europe. At its first annual congress, held in Montreux in August 1947, the EUF agreed on a resolution portraying the federalists as the only hope for a Europe on the verge of ‘a terrible catastrophe’ (Motion 1947). Of interest here is that the federalists tended to detach the catastrophic scenery from the war itself and link it more generally to the narrowminded nationalism of the post-war governments. They described a situation in which ‘the European masses’ desired a union that the governments enmeshed in a petty nationalism would not provide. Only the federalists were listening to the masses. As Denis de Rougemont pathetically exclaimed at the Montreux meeting, ‘If Europe is to survive it will owe its continued life to federalists, and to them alone’ (quoted in Lipgens and Loth 1991, 26). The efforts to build a European myth peaked in the realization of the Congress of Europe in May 1948. Much has been written about

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what was clearly a major event on the European scene. It assembled 750 delegates from twenty-six European countries, among them very prominent political figures, intellectuals and federalists of all kinds. The opening speeches all drew a very bleak picture of the current situation. Europe had ‘all the characteristics of a civilization, which is doomed to go under’, it was claimed (Congress of Europe 1991, 3). Europe was a ‘scene of chaos and prostration’ (6). Europe was ‘dismembered and weak’ (17). But, as Churchill emphasized in his speech, Europe was also ‘striving to be reborn’ (9). The metaphor of rebirth dominated all the speeches. The purpose of the congress was to ‘create the new Europe’, a Europe ‘renewed by its unity’ (9, 20) and saved from its dark past, for most speakers synonymous with nationalism. Churchill cleverly linked nationalism with religious quarrels, ‘ideological fanaticism’ and ‘totalitarian tyranny’, including the Communist threats facing Europe. Unity was also the remedy for Europe to regain its ‘global responsibilities’, its ‘sense of mission’ (17, 6). The role of unity for the speakers was to realize a peaceful Europe cleansed of its destructive traits, and to establish Europe’s universal values, reconnecting with a European civilization ‘enriched and consolidated by three millenniums’ (10). In their rhetoric, the leading speakers at The Hague Congress were all trying to link the imaginative unity to a foundational moment. Some were even prepared to turn this moment into a constitutional action. As we know, they did not succeed, and the federalist imaginary reached its climax at The Hague Congress in 1948. But the speakers partook in the construction of a mythical narrative – or at least basic elements of it – that resurfaced in later political attempts to integrate Europe. Their speeches all evoked the catastrophe from which Europe would rise through the foundational moment of unity. After The Hague Congress, the role of intellectuals in myth-making became less prominent. Politicians and technicians such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet came to dominate the scene. Although infused with a more functionalist imaginary, the builders of European projects still needed some kind of myth, and for that they called in the historians.

The historians’ call Professional historians were writing histories of Europe before 1945 (Roobol 1987; Woolf 2003). Among the most widely disseminated was the three-volume A History of Europe by the British politician and historian Herbert Fischer (1865–1940), published in 1935 (Fischer 1935). His

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work gained tremendous popularity, with nineteen editions appearing right up to the 1970s. Admittedly, it targeted a broad audience, but more professionally oriented works were also published. In 1931 Methuen launched an eight-volume series on the history of medieval and modern Europe written by British historians, with five volumes published before the war. Some of the heavyweights of the profession also contributed. Henri Pirenne’s (1862–1935) famous Histoire de l’Europe, written when he was a POW during the First World War, was published posthumously in 1936. In 1935 the highly influential La Crise de la conscience européenne appeared, written by the French historian of ideas Paul Hazard (1878– 1944). Although concerned with the pre-Enlightenment, in this book Hazard developed an idea of the core principles of Europe. There were also the ten volumes written by the German Alfred Stern (1846–1936) under the title Geschichte Europas seit den Vertragen von 1815 bis zum Frankfurter Frieden von 1871, appearing between 1894 and 1924. Wellknown intellectuals such as Christopher Dawson (1932) and Benedetto Croce (1932) wrote on European history, as well as lesser-known figures such as the Danish writer Hartvig Frisch (1928). Despite these important works, European history was a minor field within the historical discipline. If historians moved beyond the national frames, they mostly engaged in world history. The first half of the twentieth century was the heyday of huge collective efforts in various countries of writing global history, beginning with the monumental Cambridge Modern History, conceived by Lord Acton, followed by the French counterpart, Peuples et civilisations edited by Louis Halphen and Philippe Sagnac, the German Propylaën Weltgeschichte, edited by Walter Goetz and published in ten volumes from 1929, and a number of other world histories published in various European languages. European history seemed to thrive even more in the United States: in a 1951 review of textbooks on European history, the author included no fewer than sixteen works (Smith 1951). This situation changed after the Second World War. In the chaotic scene of dramatic change there was a need for stabilizing points of orientation, and Europe was one of them. European historians were called upon to give new meaning to Europe. The period after 1945 witnessed hectic activity, and major collective projects on European history were developed. Europe, including the concept of Europe, became a topic in historiography.3 Prominent figures such as Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) and Franco Valsecchi (1903–92) responded, but so did a younger generation of historians such as Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–84), Max Beloff (1913–99) and Heinz

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Gollwitzer (1917–99). Three examples of this post-war outpouring will be examined more closely here: Lucien Febvre, the grand figure of the French Annales School, Oscar Halecki (1891–1973), renowned Polish medievalist, and the British historian Max Beloff. In 1944–5, Lucien Febvre entitled his lecture series at the Collège de France ‘L’Europe: Genèse d’une civilisation’ (Febvre 1999). The reason he gave for choosing this topic was to give meaning again to the word ‘Europe’, which had been so misused (49). He began his first lecture by stating that he viewed Europe as ‘a historical entity’ (37) that expressed itself through ‘tensions transcending different spaces’ (38). Europe was, in fact, the term for this ‘long march towards unity’ (291). Febvre directly linked this teleological perspective to a demand for European unity: ‘Créons la république européenne. Constituons la nation européenne dont les nations d’aujourd’hui seraient les provinces, rien de plus’ (291). There is, however, an inbuilt ambivalence in Febvre’s concept of Europe, which questions this teleology. Europe in 1945 was very different from earlier manifestations. It did not exist as a full civilization, but rather as ideals and practices transmitted to the rest of the world. With many others, Febvre saw the involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union in the war as a sign of the loss of international status that European powers were witnessing. But for Febvre the main reason for the demise of European civilization was that it had spread to the rest of the world and thus had become global: ‘le problem de l’Europe, c’est le problem du monde’ (305). This perception of a universalized, or rather a globalized, Europe was not entirely new in 1945, and was already present in the pessimistic reactions to the First World War (Ifversen 2002). With the total geopolitical reshuffling introduced by the two ‘superpowers’,4 this topos became anchored in a spatial setting. The universalization of Europe could thus be linked to spatial delocation: Europe was not in possession of its own continent.5 The historian’s solution to this problem was to link a Europe that shapes history with the ideal of a European political unity. German historians did not immediately turn to Europe. Some, like Meinecke, were blocked in the apocalyptic perceptions of the catastrophe; others, like Gerhard Ritter, tried to rescue the better parts of German history from the cataclysm (Momsen 1991, 6–7). One prevalent strategy was to reconnect Germany with a history of the Abendland. Richard Suchenwirth (1896–1965), a minor historian and former Nazi, argued that ‘we, Abendländer’ had undermined ourselves, ‘because we destroyed each other in the war’ (Suchenwirth 1950, 105); his contribution was to write a history of how the West was to blame for its

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self- destruction. More refined historians did, however, seriously try to rethink European or Western history. Ludwig Dehio (1888–1963), Hans Freyer (1887–1969) and Hajo Holborn (1902–69) all took it upon themselves to understand why ‘what is commonly called “historic Europe” is dead and beyond resurrection’ (Holborn 1951, x). Within the first postwar years, all three published books on how to understand European or Western history in the light of the war.6 Their perspective was distinctively geopolitical. They saw the ‘catastrophe’ as a result of the European state system. Dehio interpreted all European history since the late fifteenth century as a series of unsuccessful efforts by power states (Machtstaaten) to gain hegemony within the system. This continuous power struggle increased with European expansion, and was helped by the spread of modern technology or what Dehio termed ‘civilization’ (Dehio 1948, 229). Expansion and civilization led to the rise of new non-Western powers that used their technological force to ‘dissolve’ the European system. All the historical power of Europe would thus return to Europe as an ‘echo’. Dehio’s historical interpretation is pessimistic from beginning to end. The division of the world into East and West had been something prepared by the European state system. There was no hope for European autonomy in a world where global powers were struggling with the same technologies to dominate and make uniform the entire globe. Freyer, who purported to write a European world history, puts even more weight on the globalizing effects of Western or European expansion, as captured in the metaphor of ‘the mirror image’ that jumps out of the frame to haunt the original (Freyer 1954, 587). He describes a process, beginning in the nineteenth century, in which Europe loses its grip on world history. In this perspective, the ‘continuous catastrophe’ of the world wars (602) is the ultimate expression of ‘the terrible fate of Europe’ and of the dominance of the ‘new world powers’ (605). Just as Dehio does, Freyer ends his historical reflections on a pessimistic note, in which he doubts whether it makes sense to speak of a European inheritance. Despite the title of his book, The Political Collapse of Europe, Holborn is the only one of the three German historians who delineates a future for Europe. Although he agrees that the European state system has collapsed, he sees Europe surviving in its nations: ‘Yet, though the self- contained European political system has broken down and Europe finds herself under the shadow of two world rivals, her nations are not dead’ (Holborn 1951, xi). For Holborn, the exiled historian writing from across the Atlantic, the European nations express a value of freedom and diversity, which is worth safeguarding in an age of mass civilization.

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Contrary to the other two German historians, Holborn had fewer problems in separating the valuable parts of European civilization from the negative aspects linked to the negative dynamics of the state system. Like Febvre, he intended to rescue the historical heritage in the form of values capable of guiding the future. But, where Febvre tried to ground these values in a history of European culture, Holborn was bound by an understanding of nations as the containers of culture. It is tempting to ascribe this view to a conceptual separation of culture from civilization, typical of German thinking in the nineteenth century.7 The Polish historian Oscar Halecki (1891–1973), who fled to the United States in 1940, was another important professional voice in the post-war debate on European history. In his book on The Limits and Divisions of European History (Halecki 1950), he forcefully argued that Europe was ‘a historical community’ anchored in Christianity: ‘There could not be any real Europe outside Christianity’ (15). Although his understanding of Europe was firmly embedded in a concept of the Christian Abendland, he did differ from his German colleagues by including in it the Eastern parts of Europe. Halecki was very preoccupied with setting the limits of Europe at the eastern side of Poland. Russia (and the Soviet Union even more so) was thus excluded from his Europe. In his view, Orthodox Christianity was not sufficient for inclusion in the historical community. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, carried the features of Europe, which, apart from Christianity and the linkage to antiquity, was a working ‘unity in diversity’ (20). Halecki combined this particular interpretation of the Christian Abendland with the typical view of a European age that had come to an end with the catastrophe of 1939–45 (52). Following his more internal view on European history, he ascribed the ending of Europe’s power in the world primarily to a crisis of civilization produced by the rise of secularism: ‘[its] apparent triumph in the secularization of nineteenth- century culture is now recognized as the main cause of the present crisis of European civilization’ (51). This criticism of secularism was backed by a more traditional Spenglerian vision of a superficial and non-European technical civilization destroying European culture. Halecki closely followed the traditional narrative of the modern, destructive forces developing with the French Revolution and reaching their climax in the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. He also agreed with German post-war proponents of the Abendland in seeing the only viable way forward for Europe in ‘an increasingly close association of free Europe with America in the Atlantic community of a new age of history’ (201).

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Febvre linked the fate of historical Europe to a European republic; Holborn saw the nations as the true fuel of European history; and Halecki hoped for rescue in the Atlantic community. The British also intervened in the debate. Among the most prominent were two younger historians, Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–84) and Max Beloff (1913–99). Barraclough entertained a dialogue with fellow historians in Europe. In 1955, he published a number of his articles written since 1947 about European history under the title History in a Changing World (Barraclough 1955). He agreed with his colleagues that European history had come to an end, which meant that there was a need for a ‘new vision of European history’ (14). The changes that Europe had witnessed could not be contained within a traditional understanding of this history. Barraclough was very critical of efforts to find solutions in a revived European tradition. He viewed endeavours like the threevolume work conceived during the war by the Allies, and published in 1954 under the title European Inheritance, as a pitiful example of preserving and transmitting ‘a precious fossil in a museum’ (166). For him the historical community that historians continued to portray had been ‘disintegrating’ since 1945. This was, however, not only due to the obvious reason that Europe had to be saved by extra-European powers. Barraclough’s rendering of the process of disintegration was more sophisticated. He viewed European history as formed by a ‘dilemma’ between unifying forces deriving from its civilization and splitting forces – its ‘diversity’ – linked to the constitution of the European map in nation states. The problem, as he saw it, was that Europe is not able to tame the uniting forces and create ‘a European Union’ (215). Although sometimes positive towards the idea of European unity, for instance when claiming that ‘the conception of European unity certainly is a high ideal’ (45), he would not, however, let history take responsibility for it, since ‘it draws its strength from our hopes for the future and not from our interpretation of the past’ (45). In contrast with historians such as Febvre, he dismissed the idea of a union based on a historical community. Instead he endorsed a ‘universal history’, which would match the unfolding ‘global civilization’ (220). In their debate, the historians disagreed about scenarios for the future of Europe. One saw Europe threatened by globalizing forces; in another, Europe would find itself in an Atlanticist or Western world. A third depicted a Europe reviving its historical unity. Max Beloff added a critical touch to this last scenario. In 1956, he had been solicited by the Council of Europe to be the Rapporteur- Général for a study group of prominent European scholars – among them fellow historian Franco

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Valsecchi – who were asked to discuss the background for European unity. The study group was the result of a round table meeting between leading European politicians in favour of European unity and European scholars organized under the aegis of the Council in Rome in 1953. Beloff published his report in 1957 under the title Europe and the Europeans. Perhaps because Beloff’s book emerged from a discussion among scholars and publicists, his approach to Europe and European history was far more problem- oriented than the previous contributions by historians. He certainly engaged in the historians’ debate, mentioning Halecki, Barraclough and the ever-present Toynbee.8 Beloff advocated an inclusive Europe. Contrary to many of his colleagues, he did not exclude Turkey or Russia from Europe. Neither did he accept the identification of Europe with the West. He followed the tendency of emphasizing the globalizing dimension of Europe, or what he preferred to call European civilization. For Beloff the main feature of this civilization was its openness (Beloff 1957, 18), rather than any geographical location. Just as he did not see territory as a prime defining feature of Europe, he also expressed doubt as to whether history would do the trick. His chapter on the historical foundations was devoted mainly to a refutation of the existence of early forms of European unity, which he saw as a phenomenon of his own times, but he was certainly also critical towards the idea of a historical community. In opposition to historians like Febvre, he did not accept the idea of a historical core, and even warned of ‘historical mysticism’, which could support a ‘European nationalism’ (10, 26). In his view, historians were called upon precisely to ‘put such myths to test’ (33). He offered two alternative ways of avoiding such myth-making. One was to view European history from a meta-historical perspective in which the defining feature would not be a historical core, but the sense of history: ‘Europe could then be defined in part by its sense of its own history’ (18). The other was to get rid of history as such and see European unity only as a recent political idea. Obviously this shift to politics would leave the historian without any specific role apart from myth-busting. Although critical towards the linkage of history with European unity, Beloff did not escape history entirely. He went to some lengths to show how the nation was one of the specific products of European history (48). European history thus produces something, albeit something that conveniently tends to challenge commonality, namely the nation. Like most of his fellow historians, Beloff could not imagine writing a European history that bypassed the nation.

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Conclusion The historians were certainly active in the post-war debate on Europe. At least in the immediate post-war years, they followed the intellectual trend of trying to excavate a European community out of the ruins left by the war. Some historians chose the nostalgic path of saving an inheritance from the ruins. But they clearly had difficulties in avoiding the pessimistic discourse of a crisis of European civilization so prominent in the interwar years. Others criticized the revival of past unity and inheritance. They opted, rather, for a new European history, which would recognize the new conditions after 1945. Not all these historians endorsed the new orientations towards European unity. Beloff, for one, stayed critical and relied on the role of the professional historian as a mythbuster. Very few, however, really dared to do what historians normally do, that is, include both recent and contemporary events in a historical narrative. Two larger collective projects were launched as reactions to the war. A project headed by Sir Ernest Barker, and published under the title European Inheritance, was directly instigated as part of the war effort and formulated as an attempt to safeguard European values for coming generations in the chaotic aftermath of war (Barker et al. 1954). Although the second project also sprang from a political agenda (in this case that of the Council of Europe) for rebuilding Europe around its history, it relied more on the historiographical caution of the European historians than on myth-building. The seven volumes, written in French and published between 1959 and 1967 in Italy under the title L’Europe du XIXe et du XXe siècle: Problèmes et interpretations historiques, never attracted much attention outside professional circles (Beloff et al. 1959–67). The grand narratives were primarily left to American textbook authors, who did not have the same urge to reconstitute European history. The dominant narrative of these textbooks was one in which Europe was reduced to one of the theatres in the global confrontation between two camps. In a way, they did what many Europeans feared, when they shifted the perspective from the European to the global, thus making Europe one chapter in global history. There were no attempts by European historians to write general histories of twentieth- century Europe. It is quite telling that a small German book, published in 1958 and intending to write the history of twentieth- century Europe, ended in 1945 (Dahms 1958). The books that dealt with European history were either specialized works on particular periods, or more personal interpretations of European history, such as, for instance, one by the German historian Albert Mirgeler (1953). The first chronological narrative of European

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history written by a European historian appears to have been published in Italy in 1961. Typically for what was to come in the following phase, this work ended with a chapter on Europe and the world, in which the European Common Market had the final word (Salvatorelli 1961, 2: 353). For the 1960s was to witness a flowering of works on post-war European history, written by European historians.

Notes 1. The idea of Europe as a third force was to gain some prominence in the immediate post-war years; see Loth (1988), 175–95. 2. There is an extensive literature on the various European movements in the post-war European landscape: see Lipgens (1982); Réveillard (2001); Vayssière (2006). 3. The most famous among the latter were Chabod (1961) (based on a series of lectures delivered in the 1940s); Curcio (1958); Gollwitzer (1951); and Hay (1957). 4. The term ‘superpower’ was coined in 1943 and used as the title for the book Superpowers (Fox 1943). 5. The more spatial perspective had already been presented in Fisher (1943), in which the author’s intention was to demonstrate the planting of European civilization in all other parts of the world. 6. They had very different biographies. Holborn fled to the United States after the Nazi takeover, Dehio was in internal exile and Freyer sympathized with the regime. 7. Dehio’s acknowledgement of a Rankean perspective on Europe can, in the same way, be seen as the reason behind the geopolitical focus. 8. Arnold Toynbee participated as the only historian in the Rome round table. The last seven volumes of his monumental twelve-volume history of all civilizations, A Study of History, appeared between 1954 and 1961. He also contributed to the debate with a collection of essays published under the title Civilization on Trial (Toynbee 1948).

References Ackermann, B. 1989. Les Rencontres internationales de Genève, 1946. Revue suisse d’histoire 39: 64–78. Barker, E., Sir G. Clark and P. Vaucher, eds. 1954. The European Inheritance. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barraclough, G. 1955. History in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell. Beloff, M. 1957. Europe and the Europeans: An International Discussion. London: Chatto & Windus. Beloff, M., P. Renouvin, F. Schnabel and F. Valsecchi, eds. 1959–67. L’Europe du XIXe et du XXe siècle: Problèmes et interprétations historiques. 7 vols. Milano: Marzorati. Benda, J., G. Bernanos, F. Flora et al. 1947. Rencontres internationals de Genève: l’esprit européen. Neuchâtel: Baconnière.

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90 Jan Ifversen Benjamin, W. 2007. Über den Begriff der Geschichte [1940]. In Walter Benjamin erzählen, ed. A. Honold, 129–40. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brockmann, S. 1996. German Culture at the ‘Zero Hour’. In Revisiting Zero Hour 1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture, eds F. Trommler and S. Brockmann. Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. Chabod, F. 1961. Storia dell’ idea dell’Europa. Bari: Laterza. Churchill, W. 1948. The Sinews of Peace: Post-War Speeches by Winston S. Churchill, ed. R. Churchill. London: Cassells. Congress of Europe. 1991. Congress of Europe: The Hague 7-11 May 1948. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Croce, B. 1932. Storia dell’ Europa nel secolo decimonono. Bari: Laterza. Curcio, C. 1958. Europa: Storia di un’ idea. 2 vols. Turin: ERI. Dahms, H.G. 1958. Kleine Geschichte Europas im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Ullstein. Dawson, C. 1932. The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. London: Sheed and Ward. Dehio, L. 1948. Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie: Betrachtungen über ein Grundproblem der neueren Staatengeschichte. Krefeld: Scherpe-Verlag. Febvre, L. 1999. L’Europe: Genèse d’une civilisation. Paris: Perrin. Fischer, H.A.L. 1935. A History of Europe. 3 vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Fisher, E. 1943. The Passing of the European Age: A Study of Transfer of Western Civilization and its Renewal in Other Continents. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Fox, W.T.R. 1943. Superpowers: the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union – their Responsibility for Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Freyer, H. 1954. Weltgeschichte Europas. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Frisch, H. 1928. Europas kulturhistorie, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Koppel. Gollwitzer, H. 1951. Europabild und Europagedanke. Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Beck. Halecki, O. 1950. The Limits and Divisions of European History. New York: Sheed & Ward. Hay, D. 1957. Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holborn, H. 1951. The Political Collapse of Europe. New York: Knopf. Ifversen, J. 2002. The Crisis of European Civilization after 1918. In Ideas of Europe since 1914, eds M. Spiering and M. Wintle, 14–31. London: Palgrave. Jarausch, K.H. and M. Sabrow. 2002. ‘Meistererzählung’ – Zur Karriere eines Begriffs. In Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945, eds K.H. Jarausch and M. Sabrow, 9–32. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Jaspers, K. 1947. Vom europäischen Geist. München: Piper. Kämper, H. 2001. Europa – Formeln, Begriffe und Argumente in der frühen Nachkriegszeit. http://www.dur.ac.uk/andreas.musolff/euroidee.pdf (accessed 23 February 2010). Lipgens, W. 1982. A History of European Integration, 1945-1947, vol. I. London: Clarendon.

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Lipgens, W. and W. Loth, eds. 1991. Documents on the History of European Integration: Transnational Organizations of Political Parties and Pressure Groups in the Struggle for European Union. Berlin: De Gruyter. Loth, W. 1988. The Division of the World, 1941-1955. London: Routledge. Meinecke, F. 1946. Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen. Zürich: Brockhaus. Mirgeler, A. 1953. Geschichte Europas. Freiburg: Verlag Herder. Mommsen, W.J. 1991. The Return to the Western Tradition: German Historiography since 1945. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute. Motion de politique générale. 1947. (Montreux 27-31 août 1947). http://www. ena.lu/motion_politique_generale_montreux_27-31_aout_1947- 010003528. html (accessed 19 October 2010). Réveillard, C. 2001. Les premières tentative de construction d’une Europe fédérale. Paris: F-X de Guibert. Ricœur, P. 1987. Myth and History. Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. X, 273–82. New York: Macmillan. Roobol, W.H. 1987. Europe in the Historiography Between the World Wars. In Europe from a Cultural Perspective: Historigraphy and Perceptions, eds A. Rijksbaron, W.H. Roobol and M. Weisglas, 52–83. The Hague: UPR. Salvatorelli, L. 1961. Storia d’Europa. 2 vols. Turin: Torinese. Smith, A.D. 1986. The Ethnic Origin of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, L.B. 1951. A Study of textbooks on European History during the Last Fifty Years. The Journal of Modern History 32/3: 250–6. Stråth, B. 2000. Introduction: Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of Community. In Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond, ed. B.Stråth, 19–46. Brussels: Peter Lang. Suchenwirth, R. 1950. Europas letzte Stunde: ein Beitrag der Geschichte zum europäischen Problem. Hannover: Sponholtz. Toynbee, A. 1948. Civilization on Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vayssière, B. 2006. Vers une Europe fédérale? Les espoirs et les actions federalists au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Brussels: Peter Lang. Weber, A. 1946. Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte. Bern: Franke. Woolf, S. 2003. Europe and its Historians. Contemporary European History 12/3: 323–37.

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5 From Nazi Legacy to Cold War: British Perceptions of European Identity, 1945–54* Wendy Webster

In August 1946 an article in Picture Post drew attention to the sufferings of Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War (Jacobson 1946). It prompted this response from Mrs Jackson, a reader in Redcar, Yorkshire: We had Germans for six years, and it’s still Germans, and Germany, and we in England are heartily sick and tired of hearing about them. They got more than their fair share of everything when the war was on by plundering other countries. No wonder they say they were better fed then than they are now. How soon they forget! (Picture Post, 21 September 1946) Mrs Jackson’s protest centres on the publication of any article on Germany – she goes on to ask Picture Post to provide her with lighter and more entertaining fare. But, even though she wants no reminders of the war, she also censures Germans for forgetting they inflicted suffering on others, placing memories of war at the centre of her judgement on their sufferings. There is a considerable historiographical consensus that the Second World War reinforced a sense of detachment from continental Europe through a particular memory. Kenneth Morgan argues: ‘Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the image of “standing alone” and subsequently saving a stricken continent from itself went deep into British folk memories’ (Morgan 1993, 42–3). David Reynolds calls this ‘the enduring mentalité of 1940’, when, according to national myth, Britain severed itself from ‘perfidious continentals’. This myth, he argues, ‘animated a generation 92

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of Britons who had been through the dark days of Hitler’s war’, producing ‘an abiding suspicion of the continent, or even contempt’ (Reynolds 2003, 163). Malcolm Smith similarly notes 1940 as a defining moment that endured in British collective memory: ‘France’s defeat, and Britain’s subsequent survival, not only worked to confirm Britain’s sense of innate national superiority but also helped to cement a more general distrust of European entanglements for generations’ (Smith 2000, 40. See also Garton Ash 2006, 455; Reynolds 1990, 348–9; Weight 2002, 101). Such emphasis on an enduring time-warp dominated by memories of 1940, however significant these were, takes little account of subsequent developments and the diversity of post-war meanings of the continent. Even in wartime, the story of European resistance, told prolifically across all media from 1941, drew heavily on traditional associations of Europe and civilization. Its message, encapsulated in the slogan of the ‘V for Victory’ campaign (‘Europe against the Germans’), set Germany, not Britain, outside the family of European nations. Reporting of the liberation of concentration camps strengthened an opposition between European civilization and German barbarism that was central to the resistance narrative. But in the aftermath of war the meanings assigned to the continent were volatile, and in the late 1940s drew on another association with a considerable history: Europe as a place of war and of the threat of war. This chapter focuses on three moments in the development of British media narratives of Europe, in each case considering the place of Germany within imagery of the wider continent. The first is April 1945, when reporting of the liberation of concentration camps clearly identified Germany as the perpetrator of war crimes that produced what The Times called ‘tormented Europe’ (The Times, 30 April 1945). The second, beginning in September 1945, saw some erosion of this opposition. An increasing emphasis not only on German suffering but also on wartime collaboration and post-war corruption in imagery of the wider continent meant that ideas about Germany and Europe increasingly converged. In the third moment, from the late 1940s, an emergent Cold War narrative became familiar, particularly through the metaphor that Winston Churchill borrowed from the stage and first used six months before Mrs Jackson wrote her letter: ‘Iron Curtain’ (Wright 2007). Widely taken up by journalists and politicians, this metaphor dramatized the post-war divisions of Europe and identified a new enemy: the Soviet Union. There is a substantial literature (both official and popular) on British perceptions of the Nazi legacy of suffering in Europe, particularly on concentration camps and war crimes trials (Bloxham 2001; Frank 2006;

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Kushner 1991; Ramsden 2006; Reilly et al. 1997). There has also been increasing recent acknowledgement of the impact of the Cold War on British culture and identity and a developing literature on its cultural dimensions (Contemporary British History 2005; Jones 2005; Shaw 2001). But these literatures have generally developed separately, while stories of the Nazi legacy and the Cold War circulated simultaneously in the late 1940s. What was their impact on perceptions of Europe? What was the relationship between British attitudes to Germany and to the wider continent? In addressing these questions, this chapter explores the post-war meanings of the continent and of British–European relations from the closing months of war to the mid-1950s. It argues that Britain engaged with many ‘Europes’ beyond ‘perfidious continentals’.

Civilized Europe In 1945 a film about Nazi concentration camps was shown at all German prisoner of war camps in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, part of a wider programme by the Political War Executive (PWE) – a propaganda unit of the Foreign Office – to re-educate German prisoners. Although the American Office of War Information supplied the film, the PWE requested some modifications to the commentary and the addition of extra shots showing a British Parliamentary delegation visiting Buchenwald. A report in August 1945 recorded that 202,404 German prisoners had attended screenings, involving 1,580 performances given by film projector vans. An introduction to the film, addressed to the prisoners, told them: You will see in these pictures one of the reasons why Germany earned the hate and justifiable contempt of the whole world, and why she herself must do penance to atone for her irreparable guilt. No excuses such as ‘We didn’t know about it’ or ‘We couldn’t do anything about it’ will release you from the moral responsibility which must be borne by every German.1 Extensive newspaper, magazine and newsreel coverage conveyed a similar message to the British public, generally delivering a verdict of collective guilt. The Daily Mirror declared: ‘A race which can produce so much foulness must itself be foul,’ and gave the label ‘stupid softhearts’ to readers who attempted to draw distinctions between ‘the Nazi war-makers and torturers and the German people’ (Daily Mirror, 20 April 1945). Gallup polls that asked: ‘How do you feel about the

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German people, apart from their leaders?’, recorded 54 per cent saying ‘do not like’ in February 1945, but by April 1946 this had increased to 59 per cent. Despite the idea of collective guilt, much reporting nevertheless individuated Germans, especially Josef Kramer the Belsen camp commandant and Irma Grese the SS guard, who were widely named the ‘Beast’ and ‘Bitch’ of Belsen (see, for example, Daily Mail, 21 April 1945). A view of the Second World War as a conflict between civilization and barbarism, focusing on German barbarism, was apparent in much wartime propaganda. ‘Hun’ (the term by which the German enemy was popularly known during the First World War) was banned by the BBC in 1937, but widely used after 1939 and much favoured by Winston Churchill in his wartime speeches.2 In 1944, Churchill sent a telegram to Bernard Bracken at the Ministry of Information to request that, since the name ‘Aachen’ was ‘pure Hun’, the BBC should use its French name, Aix la Chapelle, when they announced its capture. Bracken’s reply assured him that the BBC would make use of the ‘more civilised term’.3 The notion of Sonderweg (a peculiar path taken by German history) linked barbarism to Prussian and German traditions, offering an account of German history in which the Second World War was just one more episode in an epic tale of aggression, militarism and destruction rooted in the character of German people. Reporting of the concentration camps presented evidence of their horrors as the final vindication of the view that Germans were inherently barbarous and cruel. The Daily Mail concluded its reporting of the liberation of Buchenwald and Belsen: ‘These are the Germans’ (19 April 1945). The British Paramount newsreel on Belsen was entitled ‘Proof Positive’ (British Paramount News, 30 April 1945). With some exceptions, such as the Manchester Guardian, there were few references to Nazi racial ideology or its victims: Jews, Roma, Slavs. Belsen, as the only concentration camp to be liberated by the British, received the lion’s share of British media attention. In contrast to the individuation of the ‘Beast’ and ‘Bitch’ of Belsen, concentration camp victims (both the dead and survivors) generally remained unindividuated and undifferentiated and were referred to collectively as ‘inmates’, ‘slave labourers’, ‘prisoners’ and sometimes ‘political prisoners’. But The Man From Belsen, broadcast in 1946, featured Harold le Druillenec, who, as a Channel Islander, had lived in the only British territory occupied by Germany before his deportation. In December 1945, Le Druillenec sent loyal greetings from the empire and Commonwealth to the King on radio, just before the King’s Christmas broadcast. In The Man from

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Belsen, he reconstructed his experiences from arrest to liberation (Radio Times, 21 December 1945; 7 April 1946). Such a focus on a British victim suggested a tendency to nationalize a story in which everything about Belsen bespoke the difference between Britain as a tolerant and decent nation, its soldiers shown caring for concentration camp victims, and Germany. Richard Dimbleby was the first reporter into Belsen. He concluded his radio broadcast for the BBC: May I add to this story only the assurance that everything that an army can do to save these men and women and children is being done and that those officers and men who have seen these things have gone back to the Second Army moved to an anger such as I have never seen in them before. (Dimbleby 1975, 193) If reporting from Belsen tended to focus on British civilization, an editorial in the Daily Mail set this in a wider European context. Deploying the notion of Sonderweg to place Germany firmly outside European traditions, it argued that a ‘German shadow’ had darkened Europe for a century. The concentration camps showed that ‘the terror inside Germany has reached a point which could not even have been imagined by the peoples who have inherited the humane civilisations of the West [ ... ] because the course of their history has divorced them from the humanities deriving from Greece and Rome’ (Daily Mail, 19 April 1945). The introduction to the film shown to prisoners of war in 1945 conveyed a similar message: ‘When you begin to be informed of your crimes [ ... ] you will understand that the journey back from this barbarism – the truth of which has been proved by events in Germany in 1945 – to civilization and to a useful membership of the European family of nations, is no short and quick one, but one which is marked by many periods of trial’ (NA, FO 939/72). In the aftermath of the liberation of concentration camps, the contrast between Germany and Europe focused on sufferings inflicted by Germany. Reports that millions were starving in Holland and that the flooding unleashed by the German army would further increase the famine closely followed the revelations about concentration camps in April 1945. An editorial in The Times speaking of ‘tormented Europe’ noted that the people of western Holland had ‘been brought down almost to concentration camp level’ (The Times, 30 April 1945). Widespread protests at the treatment of German prisoners of war in Britain, who, under the Geneva Convention, received the same rations as their soldier captors, focused chiefly on the disparity this caused between prisoners of

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war and British civilians working together, whereby Germans ate better than their British fellow-workers. But a cartoon in the Mirror with the caption ‘Surely the waiters weren’t intended to starve’ pointed the contrast between well-fed German prisoners of war and suffering Europe. A waiter presents two fat German soldiers with a menu of dishes ‘designed by the Geneva Convention’. He is bent, haggard and emaciated and the napkin draped over his arm bears the legend ‘Starving Europe’ (Daily Mirror, 27 April 1945). The Times editorial that spoke of ‘tormented Europe’ hoped for a quick surrender by Germany, but it also outlined Germany’s condition as comparable to the rest of Europe: collapsed and ruined. The incorporation of Germany into a generalized image of a continent characterized by hunger and disease was qualified by the view that Germans had brought upon themselves their own ruination. It foreshadowed an increasing tendency in the late 1940s to blur the distinction between Germans as perpetrators of violence and other Europeans as their innocent victims in a generalized image of a continent that was suffering, chaotic, corrupt and threatening.

Suffering, chaotic and threatening Europe In The Lost People, a British feature film released in 1949, Captain Ridley (Dennis Price) gestures towards a former theatre in Germany, now converted into a dispersal centre for refugees under British administration where Ridley is the officer in charge. The war is over, but it has made millions of Europeans into refugees. ‘Something we’ll never see again,’ Ridley tells his Sergeant (William Hartnell), ‘the whole of Europe under one roof’ (The Lost People, Bernard Knowles, 1949). From 1946, as war crimes trials were held and the extent of wartime and post-war displacement became apparent through the millions of Europeans who ended the war in displaced persons (DP) camps, reporting of the liberation of concentration camps was quickly succeeded by attention to the Nazi legacy. As the perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as the site of war crimes trials and of many DP camps, Germany was at the centre of these stories. Mrs Jackson wanted to hear no more of Germany in 1946, but her letter was published in an edition of Picture Post with a four-page spread on ‘The Greatest Trial in History’: Nuremberg. Imagery of DP camps in Germany and Austria produced a generalized image of Europe in which suffering was a prominent theme and women were foregrounded. In her autobiography, Mai Zetterling (the Swedish

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actress who came to Britain in 1943) noted: ‘I must have trudged, looking pathetic, through more bombed cities and rehabilitation camps than any other living actress’ (Zetterling 1985, 83). She played Lili in The Lost People: one of the DPs who comprise the ‘whole of Europe’ at which Captain Ridley gestures. She played Hildegard in Portrait From Life (1948): the woman in a portrait seen in a War Artists Exhibition by Major Lawrence (Guy Rolfe), which prompts his search through many DP camps to find her (Portrait From Life, Terence Fisher, 1948). Both women are victims of the Nazis, but neither film explores wartime experiences. Rather, the characters played by Zetterling stand for a generalized image of European suffering at the hands of the Nazis. Alongside its imagery of suffering, The Lost People also shows chaos and division in constant quarrelling and squabbling within and between different national groups, particularly in conflicts over who had collaborated. The film may be careful to establish that the DPs are of a very wide range of European nationalities, but it shows them sharing similar characteristics regardless of nationality: prone to shouting, hysteria, fighting and sometimes violence. Both The Lost People and Portrait From Life show DP camps teeming with desperate people and as places of black market activities, corruption and spying. In Portrait From Life, Major Lawrence’s narrative voice, describing his tour through a range of camps in search of Hildegard, says that it is ‘like a nightmare’. Despite the efforts of the government, similar associations of DPs with wartime collaboration and black marketeering recurred in imagery of European Volunteer Workers (EVWs), the name given to DPs from camps in Germany and Austria who were recruited to the British labour market in the late 1940s. In an unprecedented move, and one that was never subsequently extended to any other group of migrants, the Ministry of Labour attempted to shape public attitudes in the 1940s through their interventions to secure favourable coverage in the media, setting up a Committee on Publicity for the Education of Popular Opinion on Foreign Workers in 1947.4 The Committee found that opinion about EVWs included the view that they were fascists who had fought for the Germans, ‘some of the scum of Europe’ and ‘the Jews of Europe’ (NA, LAB 12/513). An identification of EVWs as ‘the Jews of Europe’, despite the very limited numbers admitted under the scheme, drew on the history of antialienism in Britain in which the term ‘immigrant’ was widely used to mean Jews in the early part of the century, and in which many migrant and refugee groups from Europe were seen as suspicious, threatening and criminal foreigners (Cesarani 1993). Post-war media portrayals

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often drew on attitudes familiar from this history, but added distinctive inflections from post-war imagery. In 1947 the Daily Mirror, commenting on both DPs in Europe and those recruited to the British labour market, linked ideas of criminality and suffering. The paper portrayed DPs as a ‘great suffering lump of humanity [ ... ] composed almost entirely of men and women who have run away from something’, arguing that they ‘wouldn’t even be useful as labour, in England or anywhere else [as] they are broken people. One in four is a crook or has been made a crook by his suffering’ (Daily Mirror, 5 March 1947). A Daily Mirror editorial in 1948, under the headline ‘Let Them Be Displaced’, portrayed EVWs as criminals, but named them also as black marketeers (Daily Mirror, 20 July 1948). Doubts about the war records of EVWs were a consistent undercurrent in popular responses. As David Cesarani’s work demonstrates, war criminals of a range of nationalities did enter Britain under the EVW scheme (Cesarani 1997; 2001, Chapter 6). The idea of Europe as criminal, corrupt and sinister is particularly evident in The Third Man (1949), a film not only acclaimed by the critics but also the most popular film at British box offices in 1949. Its themes of black marketeering, murder, spying and mysterious disappearances and its visual references to film noir evoke a sinister and shadowy world of danger, intrigue and moral bankruptcy. The opening narrative voice, that of the film’s director Carol Reed, identifies this world as the postwar condition of Vienna. Over shots of boots, stockings, cigarettes and watches changing hands, the narrator tells the audience, ‘I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm [ ... ] I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market.’ There is no glamour in the Vienna of the film. It is framed by sequences in cemeteries, and much of its action is set in seedy apartments, hotels and bars, dark streets and sewers. Its music is the sound of a solo zither, not Strauss. Nor are the rackets only in cigarettes and watches. Holly Martens (Joseph Cotten) discovers that his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) runs a racket stealing penicillin from military hospitals and watering it down, resulting in the deaths of children. Both Holly and the amoral Harry are American, but the film shows Holly losing his innocence through his journey to Europe and ends with him shooting his old friend in the sewers of Vienna. A generalized image of a continent that was suffering, chaotic and threatening increasingly incorporated Germany through its attention to the suffering of Germans in the aftermath of war. The Save Europe Now campaign, begun in September 1945 on the initiative of the publisher Victor Gollancz, was particularly concerned with the millions

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of Germans who had become refugees at the end of the war through flight from the advance of Soviet forces and expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia. It publicized the German refugee crisis and the prospect of mass starvation among German refugees, raising the question of whether Germans were also victims of the war. In 1946, with the lifting of the ban on non-fraternization, local campaigns invited German prisoners of war to spend Christmas in British homes (Lancashire Evening Post, 19 December 1946; 23 December 1946; 15 January 1947). The plight of Germans was merged into a wider picture of European suffering by the Save Europe Now campaign, which also drew attention to the millions in the wider continent who were in danger of perishing from hunger and cold during the winter (Frank 2006). In November 1945, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a supporter of Save Europe Now, appealed to the government to take further measures to save Europe ‘from dying in our hands’ (The Times, 27 November 1945). Despite the increasing tendency to blur distinctions between Germany and the rest of Europe in a common image of suffering and chaos, schemes for the relief of German suffering, like Save Europe Now, proved highly contentious. A Defeated Nation (1946) – a documentary about the administration of the British zone in occupied Germany, directed by Humphrey Jennings – begins with a dialogue between different voices expressing these views: ‘What’s it like in Germany?’ ‘Must be terrible.’ ‘Well they’ve asked for it, they’ve got it.’ ‘Yes, but you can’t make them starve.’ ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve got a son out there. As far as I can see it would be a good thing if some of them die.’ These voices are scripted, but the letter columns of newspapers and magazines offered a similar range of opinion. In Picture Post’s letter column in September 1945, headlined ‘Should We Let Germany Starve?’, views ranged from support for ‘Save Europe Now’ to ‘let them suffer. They deserve to.’ One female letter-writer deplored what she saw as ‘organised sympathy’ being launched only four months after the defeat of Germany with no mention of ‘similar and even worse conditions [ ... ] in all the countries that have suffered from Teutonic aggression’. In contrast, a man argued that ‘The fact that those who are suffering so terribly are German makes no difference.’5 Attention to German suffering may have been a factor in the considerable decline in those who said

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they ‘did not like’ Germans in response to Gallup Polls. From their high point of 59 per cent in April 1946, they fell to 51 per cent by October 1946, but then declined steeply to 20 per cent by summer 1947, when almost half of those polled stated that they were ‘sympathetic’ or had ‘no ill-feeling’. The relief of German suffering was also contentious in newspaper coverage, where there were sharp divisions over whether Germans could be seen as victims. But, even among those who thought Germans undeserving of any sympathy, there was increasing recognition that relief was necessary for the sake of Europe. In language in which there was a notable slippage between Germany and Europe, the Daily Mirror advocated the need to solve the German refugee crisis, emphasizing that this was ‘not out of any sympathy for the German people’, and highlighting this point with the headline, ‘Feed the Brutes?’ It argued, ‘The longer Europe is allowed to sink into the bog, the longer it will take to raise up, the longer the occupation will have to go on’ (Daily Mirror, 5 October 1945). Other press coverage began to show Germans as victims. In a considerable revision of its position in April, The Times argued in September 1945: ‘It is surely not enough to say that the Germans brought these miseries upon themselves.’ Speaking of ‘the universal chaos of Germany’ and the sufferings of Germans expelled from Poland, its correspondent commented: ‘brutalities and cynicism against which the war was fought are still rife in Europe, and we are beginning to witness human suffering that almost equals anything inflicted by the Nazis’ (The Times, 11 September 1945). The turn to an image of suffering Germany, however contentious the schemes for relief, meant that Germany was increasingly incorporated into the wider image of a suffering continent. But suffering itself took on a threatening meaning as the prospect of mass starvation in Germany prompted fears of disease, rioting, violence and anarchy. The Sunday Chronicle suggested that ‘for the sake of Europe and ourselves, for the safety of our occupying troops [ ... ] Germany must be prevented from becoming a plague spot and a danger to the world’ (Frank 2006, 243). The Picture Post article that prompted Mrs Jackson’s objections argued: ‘Europe can’t afford a dead Germany now, or the war that will certainly come later out of her economic chaos and bitterness’ (Jacobson 1946). As peace was ushered in, the narrative of European suffering continued to associate the continent with the threat of war. The immediate post-war period could be regarded as a transitional moment between war and post-war for Britain as well as other European nations. Wartime conditions persisted. There were extreme shortages of

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food in Germany, and continued and sometimes intensified rationing in Britain and France.6 The legacy of war was apparent in many other aspects of everyday life: housing shortages, bomb-sites, bereavements and divorce rates – which peaked in Britain in 1947, in France in 1946 and in Germany in 1948. But British hardships could not be compared with conditions on the continent. In the late 1940s, as Europe was defined as much by its sufferings and its menace as by its civilization, the wartime opposition between Britain and Germany often slid into a wider opposition between Britain and Europe: British stability and order against a war-torn and chaotic continent.

‘Eastern’ Europe In 1954, in the context of debates about the rearmament of West Germany and its membership of the European Defence Council, the British government considered censoring an episode of the BBC’s first

Figure 5.1 Cover illustration of Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika (1954)

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television series on the Second World War, War in the Air, which showed Germany as a militaristic power. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister in 1954, minuting that he had watched the ‘offending film’, stated: ‘compared to the harm done by Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book it is trivial’.7 On the same day, apparently having difficulty in bringing himself to name the title of the book, he informed the Foreign Office: ‘Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book has already sold 60,000 copies and is being reprinted as fast as possible as the demand is very great.’8 The title of the book was The Scourge of the Swastika and, according to the preface, it was ‘intended to provide the ordinary reader with a truthful and accurate account of many [...] German war crimes’ (Russell 1954, viii, Figure 5.1). Earlier that year, the government had attempted to prevent its publication.9 The government’s attempts at censorship in 1954 marked a dramatic shift in official ideas about Germany and its place in Europe. The introduction to the film shown to prisoners of war in 1945 had told them that their journey back to membership of the European family of nations would be neither short nor quick (NA, FO 939/72). Nine years later, the government was committed to the speedy reinstatement of West Germany as a member of the European family. Its thinking about The Scourge of the Swastika was in the context of the Cold War and, as one official noted, a commitment to ‘controlled German rearmament, and to a policy which contains, as an important element, belief in the possibility of a free Germany reborn on democratic lines’.10 The book was therefore deemed ‘offensive’ because ‘there is no doubt that many Germans would now be frightfully hurt by this book,’ and because ‘it does little good to rake over the ashes of the past.’11 Lord Salisbury, commenting on the proposal to censor the episode of War in the Air that showed Germany as a militaristic power, stated succinctly: ‘It is of course true that the Germans are a warlike nation. That is why we want them on the side of the West.’12 In the 1950s, public memories of the Second World War, evoked most obviously in a prolific cycle of Second World War films, celebrated the national wartime record largely as a masculine military conflict with Germany. Nazi war crimes, genocide against the Jews and sufferings on the Eastern Front were all neglected. The Scourge of the Swastika devoted considerable attention to such themes, went through seven editions by 1955, and came out in paperback from Corgi in 1956. The initial demand for it, noted by Churchill, was probably fuelled by the considerable press coverage it received as a result of the government’s attempt to prevent its publication. Its popularity might also suggest an eagerness for alternative memories of war, beyond the standard fare of

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British–German conflict. But the publisher’s provision of a lurid yellow dust-jacket showing emaciated figures standing in the shadow of a huge pair of jackboots suggests that they anticipated another kind of interest. Billie Melman, tracing the development of an English popular culture of history from the nineteenth century, has noted that it was often perceived as ‘a place of [...] pleasurable horror’ (Melman 2006, 23). British schoolchildren made The Scourge of the Swastika into an illicit source of such pleasurable horror, passing it round classrooms under desks.13 Its black and white plates included pictures captioned ‘shrunken heads found at Buchenwald’, ‘a mass grave at Belsen’, ‘a wagon-load of corpses at Buchenwald’ and ‘Polish women’s legs disfigured by human guinea-pig operations’. Some plates showed naked women. The Daily Express reported the attempt to ban The Scourge of the Swastika under the headline ‘Monstrous Act of Censorship’, and proceeded to serialize the book (Daily Express, 11 August 1954). Most newspapers reviewed it and affirmed the importance of remembering Hitler’s death camps, but a number also invoked Siberian labour camps.14 The onset of the Cold War involved a distinct shift eastwards in notions of barbarism, as the Soviet Union was identified as the principal Cold War enemy, a shift particularly apparent in the terms used for European geography. Announcing the descent of an ‘Iron Curtain’ on the continent in his Fulton speech of 1946, Churchill had listed a wide range of capitals ‘in Central and Eastern Europe’ which were now behind this curtain. By 1954 the ‘Iron Curtain’ signalled a division between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Once the war was over, the Soviet Union’s wartime role, including its liberation of the death camps of Eastern Europe, played almost no part in memories of war. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s post-war menace and corruption loomed large in the Cold War narrative. A report on public opinion polls in 1947 suggested that popular attitudes were slow to shift away from the wartime admiration for the Soviet Union repeatedly reported in wartime Home Intelligence Reports (Rose 2005, 50–6). Anti-Russian feeling was hardening ‘slowly, painfully, but steadily’, it commented, while the large number of ‘don’t know’ responses to questions could be attributed not only to lack of interest but also hesitancy, in a context where news sources were distrusted as propagandist (Willcock 1948, 70–2). A year later, the story of the blockade of West Berlin and the Allied airlift clearly identified the Soviet Union as oppressor, but it was through news of ‘Eastern Europe’ that it was increasingly revealed as a tyrant.

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In a striking comment on the invention of the idea of ‘Eastern Europe’ in the eighteenth century, Larry Wolff suggests that uncertainty over the geographical border between Europe and Asia ‘encouraged the construction of Eastern Europe as a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe’ (Wolff 1994, 7). The Cold War narrative told a similarly paradoxical story. A merger of the USSR and Nazi Germany in a common image of totalitarianism (‘Red Fascism’) has attracted the attention of scholars in both American and British contexts who trace it to the 1930s (Adler and Paterson 1970; Shaw 2001, Chapter 3). The invocation of Siberian labour camps in reviews of The Scourge suggests another merger that has attracted less attention. Behind the Iron Curtain were the brutality and oppression practised by antiChristian totalitarian regimes, but also oppressed peoples who were deprived of European democracy and freedoms. ‘Eastern European’ nations acquired a double meaning: police states like the former Nazi Germany, but also places of suffering under Soviet oppression, like occupied Europe under Nazi rule. As barbarism was located in the east, ideas about Germany became increasingly ambiguous. Official attitudes that recast West Germany as ally were not always replicated in the media, but the Democratic and Federal Republics were generally distinguished in Cold War language as East and West Germany. Distinctions between their values were particularly apparent in an ongoing story about refugees, in which East Germany inflicted sufferings on its people, while West Germany provided asylum. In 1953, Norman Swallow, a BBC producer, was in the midst of making a television documentary on refugees for the Special Enquiry series when news broke of an East German uprising repressed by Soviet tanks. Despite the holiday that he was taking, he immediately wrote what he called a ‘business letter’ about plans for this documentary: ‘I feel we must cash in on the East Berlin riots in a big way. They fit well into the programme as being a more violent form of evidence than our refugees that the East German government drives people to desperate measures’ (Letter, 19 June 1953, WAC, T4/66). Swallow had made a documentary on EVWs for the BBC in 1951 (I Was a Stranger), which portrayed refugee experiences as part of the brutal legacy of Nazi rule in Europe. His reaction to the East Berlin uprising demonstrates a shift of attention from the Nazi legacy to the Cold War. It also suggests that East Germany could take on the meaning formerly assigned to occupied Europe under Nazi rule: suffering under oppression and brave resistance. As the destination of most refugees, West Germany had a different meaning, exemplifying the freedom of the

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‘West’. The final version of Swallow’s documentary noted that nearly 500,000 refugees had fled from the Soviet zone in the past four years, the majority of them in the previous six months. It claimed that ‘the story of Berlin’s refugees is probably the most awful human story in Europe at this moment’ (WAC, T4/66). A BBC Viewer Research Report found that, while there were a ‘few dissentients who feel no compassion for the sufferings of ex- enemy peoples’, the majority reacted to the programme with ‘keen interest and approval’ and ‘as a rule the reaction was one of unreserved sympathy’ (Viewer Research Report, WAC, T4/66). Second World War records were largely irrelevant to this story. The Man Between, set in Berlin, was released three months after the East German uprising and, like The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed. Dilys Powell’s review noted: ‘there is a world of difference between the baroque, decaying elegance which Reed discovered in the ruins of Austria and the cautionary carelessness of life which he has seen in Germany’ (Sunday Times, 27 September 1953). Even so, the films share imagery of a corrupt, seedy city characterized by criminality, rackets, spying and blackmail. Many reviews noted shared ‘Iron Curtain’ imagery, suggesting how far the Cold War shaped their memories of the earlier film, since they had made little mention of the ‘Iron Curtain’ at the time (Shaw 2001, 29). Picturegoer identified the star of The Man Between as ‘Berlin itself, hysterical, suspicious, forever alive with menace’ (Picturegoer, 17 October 1953). But, while corruption, suspicion and intrigue characterize West as well as East, the East is a particular place of danger and menace. The West is the British zone of occupation where Susanne (Claire Bloom) arrives from Britain on a visit to her brother, a Medical Officer working with the British army of occupation. In a film in which divisions of the city are prominent in the theme of border crossings (by foot, by car and finally by laundry van), it is men from the East who kidnap Susanne and take her to the Eastern sector. As she recrosses the same border in the final sequence, travelling West, her German lover is shot in the back. Claire Bloom as Susanne in The Man Between has to cope with threats to her life in Germany, but as Susan in Innocents in Paris she faces no more than the advances of a middle-aged Frenchman (Innocents in Paris, Gordon Parry, 1953). Narratives of continental visits began to emerge quickly once the war was over. A Times editorial on the British holidaymaker in March 1946 was titled ‘the return to Europe’, and noted that ‘the first announcements of Continental readiness to greet foreign guests come from countries which have been spared the ravages of war’ (The Times, 23 March 1946). Switzerland, neutral in the war, was

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the setting of the first post-war film about continental tourism: The Passionate Friends, directed by David Lean (1949). But two films released in 1953 showed more modest excursions encompassing Britons of a range of social classes and ages. A Day to Remember, directed by Ralph Thomas, showed a day trip to Boulogne by a darts team from a London pub. Innocents in Paris, which showed a weekend trip, earned criticism from many reviewers for its clichéd representation of ‘gay Paree’ as ‘a city given up to a perpetual good time’ with ‘buckets of champagne’.15 Such a vision of what was ‘continental’ was familiar to viewers of BBC television’s Continental Café, which featured international cabaret and champagne buckets and was introduced as ‘l’heure du champagne’, although guests drank ginger ale.16 The ‘return to Europe’ reinstated ‘continental’ as sexuality, glamour and sophistication, in contrast to ‘Eastern Europe’ as a place of drabness, oppression and impoverishment, signified particularly by unglamorous and unfeminine women. A British officer in The Colditz Story (Guy Hamilton, 1955) – a film about British prisoners of war in Germany – when reminded of the sufferings of occupied Europe, thanks God for the English Channel. The Cold War narrative never completely displaced attention from wartime Europe under Nazi rule, as the publication of The Scourge of the Swastika demonstrated. Although 1950s filmic images of the war were dominated by military conflict with Germany, the post-war persistence of the Resistance narrative meant that British wartime involvement in continental Europe, German war crimes, and the courage of European resisters continued to resonate in British memories. But, as menace and barbarism shifted eastwards, narratives of day and weekend trips to the continent identified a ‘Europe’ that excluded the ‘East’ and began to lose associations with war.

Conclusion Mrs Jackson was not alone in 1946 in hoping that she would hear no more of Germany and that the media would provide more entertaining fare than news from the continent. In the late 1940s attitudes in Britain to the recent war were complex and ambivalent, and the peace was associated with austerity, difficulty, national exhaustion and sometimes with national decline (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2000). Films about the war were not popular in the last years of the war, and did not regain popularity until the 1950s. Even so, the centrality of Germany to late 1940s stories of the Nazi legacy in Europe meant that attentive media audiences could not avoid hearing a good deal about Germany. In the

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1950s they heard even more, not only through war films which paid far more attention to Germany than to other former enemies, but also through the central place of Germany in the divided continent of the Cold War. One common thread ran through these diverse narratives of Germany: war, the legacy of war, the threat of future war. In the late 1940s, these were associated with the wider continent – the legacy of chaos and suffering itself threatening violence and further war. Ending a half- century in which the majority of journeys from Britain to the continent were for the purpose of war, they reinforced the idea of Europe as a place of danger and of threat to British lives. They cast Britain as champion of civilization and bastion of stability against a war-torn continent. The moment when Britain was defined against Europe proved shortlived. Churchill’s Fulton speech of 1946 identified the ‘West’ mainly with the English-speaking peoples (the United States, Britain and the Dominions), paying comparatively little attention to the continent. The divided continent of the Cold War not only meant that the wartime vision of ‘Europe against the Germans’ increasingly receded, but it also gave salience to the European dimensions of a ‘West’. By 1961 these European dimensions were significant to a new meaning of ‘Europe’ that gained currency in Britain in the context of the British bid to join the European Economic Community (EEC). But membership of the EEC, while hotly debated through the failed bids of the 1960s, had little relevance to a further meaning of ‘Europe’ anticipated by narratives of excursions to the continent, foreshadowing the development of mass tourism in the 1960s. This ‘Europe’ had associations that Mrs Jackson perhaps might have enjoyed: playground, not battlefield.

Notes * This chapter forms part of a wider project on ‘Englishness and Europe, 1939–65’; I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship, during which this chapter was researched and written. 1. National Archives, London (hereafter NA), FO 939/72. 2. Memo, 21 May 1937, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), R34/282. 3. Churchill to Bracken, 16 September 1944; Bracken to Churchill, 18 September 1944, NA, PREM 4/68/8. 4. Publicity for the Education of Popular Opinion on Foreign Workers, Minutes of Committee Meeting, 5 December 1947, NA, LAB 12/513. 5. Picture Post, 29 September 1945. Questions of German suffering were widely debated in local as well as national newspapers. See, for example, Yorkshire

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

Post, September 1945 and Lancashire Evening Post, October to December 1946. Bread rationing was introduced for the first time in Britain in 1946. In France, bread rations were reduced after the war was over. Minute from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Secretary, 1 November 1954, NA, FO 371/190343. Minute from Prime Minister’s Office, 1 November 1954, NA, FO 371/109733. Letter to Lord Russell, 30 July 1954; Memorandum, 9 August 1954, NA, LCO 4/273. Minute, 12 August 1954, NA, FO 371/109733. Minute, 12 August 1954, NA, FO 371/109733; Memorandum, 30 July 1954, NA, LCO 4/273. Letter, 30 October 1954, NA, FO 371/109343. Personal communications from Mike Paris and Lynn Froggett, who attended British schools in the 1950s. Manchester Guardian, 19 August 1954. See also The Star, 11 August 1954; Spectator, 20 August 1954. Evening News, 9 July 1953; Daily Telegraph, 11 July 1953. See also Daily Mail, 10 July 1953; Daily Express, 10 July 1953; News Chronicle, 10 July 1953; Evening Standard, 9 July 1953. Continental Café was a long-running series on BBC television from 1947 to 1955. See WAC T12/37.

References Adler, L. and T. Paterson. 1970. Red Fascists: the Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s. American Historical Review 75: 1046–64. Bloxham, D. 2001. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trial and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cesarani, D. 1993. An Alien Concept? The Continuity of Anti-Alienism in British Society Before 1940. In The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain, eds D. Cesarani and T. Kushner, 25–52. London: Frank Cass. Cesarani, D. 1997. Lacking in Convictions: British War Crimes Policy and National Memory of the Second World War. In War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, eds M. Evans and K. Lunn, 27–42. Oxford: Berg. Cesarani, D. 2001[originally published 1992]. Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals. London: Phoenix Press. Contemporary British History. 2005. 19. Special Issue on the Cold War. Dimbleby, J. 1975. Richard Dimbleby: A Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Frank, M. 2006. The New Morality: Victor Gollancz, ‘Save Europe Now’ and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945- 46. Twentieth Century British History 17: 230–56. Garton Ash, T. 2006. Why Britain is in Europe. Twentieth Century British History 17: 451–63. Jacobson, S. 1946. The Problem of a Dying Germany. Picture Post, 31 August 1946.

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Jones, H. 2005. The Impact of the Cold War. In Companion to Contemporary British History, eds P. Addison and H. Jones, 23–41. Oxford: Blackwell. Kushner, T. 1991. The Impact of the Holocaust on British Society and Culture. Contemporary Record 5: 349–75. Melman, B. 2006. The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, K. 1993. The Second World War and British Culture. In From Reconstruction to Integration: Britain and Europe Since 1945, eds B. Brivati and H. Jones, 33–46. London: Leicester University Press. Ramsden, J. 2006. Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890. London: Little, Brown. Reilly, J., D. Cesarani, T. Kushner and C. Richmond, eds. 1997. Belsen in History and Memory. London: Frank Cass. Reynolds, D. 1990. 1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century? International Affairs 66: 325–50. Reynolds, D. 2003. Britain and the World since 1945: Narratives of Decline or Transformation? In The British Isles since 1945, ed. K. Burk, 157–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, S. 2005. Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell of Liverpool, Lord. 1954. The Scourge of the Swastika. London: Cassell. Shaw, T. 2001. British Cinema and the Cold War: the State, Propaganda and Consensus. London: I.B. Tauris. Smith, M. 2000. Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory. London: Routledge. Weight, R. 2002. Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Willcock, H.D. 1948. Public Opinion: Attitudes towards America and Russia. Political Quarterly 19: 61–72. Wolff, L. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wright, P. 2007. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zetterling, M. 1985. All those Tomorrows. London: Jonathan Cape. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I. 2000. Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption 1939-1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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6 The Nordic Way Out: Europe in Danish Literature after the Second World War Henk van der Liet

Während Ost und West sich drohend gegenüberstehen, hält die Schlacht der Ideologien die besten europäischen Köpfe in Bann. (Klaus Mann, Die Heimsuchung des europäischen Geistes, 1949) During the Second World War the various Scandinavian countries found themselves in fundamentally different military and political positions. Denmark and Norway were occupied from 1940 till 1945; Sweden declared itself neutral during the war; Iceland was occupied by British forces in 1940 and proclaimed its independence in 1944; meanwhile Finland was engaged in two wars, the so-called Winter War against the Soviet Union (1939–40) and, with German help, the Continuation War against the Soviets (1941–4). Norway and Finland suffered immensely, while war damage in Sweden and Denmark was relatively limited. Hence, it is not surprising that the era of the Second World War cannot be treated in the same way for all the Scandinavian countries; the political and social differences are simply too great to allow such an approach. This essay focuses mainly on Denmark. One of the reasons is the interesting role of this country’s political and cultural elites during the German occupation and the years immediately after.1 Special attention is paid to the author and cultural celebrity Martin A. Hansen (1909–55), whose works provide a good insight into the different positions and dilemmas of the Danish public and literary debate of the mid-1940s. Hansen, one of the uncontested leading Danish post-war writers, was part of a group of authors who had established a common platform in 111

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the short-lived but highly influential journal Heretica, which was published from 1948 till 1953. This literary journal was one of the most important discussion platforms for aesthetic issues in the broadest sense of the word. The main focus of this chapter will be on some of Hansen’s essays and the journal Heretica as a vehicle for airing different ways of looking at the notion of ‘Europe’. In an earlier article (Van der Liet 2005, 69–82), primarily dealing with Hansen’s epistolary oeuvre, it was argued that Hansen – despite the broad and international cultural ambitions of the journal Heretica – preferred to see himself as part of a ‘Nordic’ or Scandinavian regional, cultural community, rather than placing himself in the larger context of European, or even global, cultural internationalism. Hansen’s – and other authors’ – intellectual and artistic orientation in the years immediately after the Second World War clearly did not favour French, German, Anglo-Saxon or, for that matter, Soviet culture. Instead he mainly focused on Scandinavia, and on his own ‘national’, or rather ‘regional’, identity and heritage, both as an artistic point of departure and as a political perspective for his own future as a citizen. Perhaps Hansen, and many other contemporary writers with him, turned away from Europe and from the common features of European culture, and instead looked for inspiration in his own northern cultural backyard. Hansen and his colleagues had probably seen enough of the process of European unification and centralization, especially as its most recent attempt had been by the Nazis. Now they evidently wished to look away from the ‘old’ cultural centres of Europe, which had been the backdrop to unprecedented forms of warfare, barbarism, destruction and political totalitarianism during most of the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, there is something awkward and paradoxical in their efforts to revive and reuse other historic, cultural resources. They turned to a variety of forms, originating in prehistoric Scandinavian mythology and iconography, which had played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, not only during the war itself, but right from the beginning of the formation of the Nazi party and the earliest articulation of its political ambitions in the 1920s. Scandinavia, or rather Der Norden in German, had been of crucial importance in the German nation-building enterprise since the late nineteenth century, and ‘The North’ later reappeared in Nazi propaganda and ideological self-imagery (Henningsen et al. 1997; Sørensen and Stråth 1997). Nevertheless, in the years immediately after the Second World War ‘The North’ still transpired to be a vital concept, and it could apparently

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be employed by writers from a new generation, such as Hansen, who actually had a background in the resistance movement. The same notions and the same terminology were used, but with fundamentally different semantic content. Furthermore, the word ‘Europe’ and the idea of the political unification of Europe seem to have been even more discredited in those days than the phrase ‘The North’.2 In the first postwar years ‘Europe’ was, not surprisingly, often associated with images of war and destruction. During the war, the word Europa had been widely used in Nazi circles as alternatives to, and synonyms for, words such as Neu- ordnung and Großraum. These words not only carried ideological and political meaning, but were also used in an economic context (Hardis 2003, 21; Lund 2005, 7). As a matter of fact, the word Europa (which is spelled the same way in German as in most Scandinavian languages) had been so frequently used in Nazi propagandist contexts during the Second World War3 that immediately after the war it was hardly regarded as an appropriate term in any kind of democratic discourse about the political future. For intellectuals such as Martin A. Hansen and others, who were not affiliated to a political party or movement, in contrast to, for example, a Communist author and opinion leader such as Hans Kirk (1898–1962), it was difficult to define a position in the chaotic and harsh political and intellectual climate of the late 1940s (Thing 1997). The problem was made worse because referring to the common northern cultural heritage, like the Viking era and the pagan Germanic past, had been much discredited by their ideological and iconographical application by the Nazis. In the work of Martin A. Hansen and the group of young literary talents around the journal Heretica we can observe a number of more or less desperate attempts to find viable ideological and aesthetic frames of reference, or positions in the Danish cultural landscape that would separate them from any of the dominant ideologies of the time: Communism, National Socialism and what might be called ‘Americanism’ – a portmanteau for a wide range of superficial forms of modernity such as consumerism and popular entertainment. From their perspective, Communists were, culturally speaking, puppets on a string, because they depended entirely on the Soviet Communist Party, while radical nationalists were sidetracked because they were either imprisoned or completely occupied by evaluating their obvious political misjudgement during the war. The only real counterbalance to both Marxism and Nazism seemed to be ‘Americanism’, which had the disadvantage that it involved consumerism and brought the ‘hazardous’ popular Anglo- Saxon youth culture

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to Europe. In other words, in the eyes of these writers it seemed as if driving out the Nazi demon provided a new breeding ground for other forms of ‘barbarianism’, not only Communism but also sheer unlimited consumerism and new forms of entertainment and artistic expression that might eradicate what was left of the European cultural heritage after the Second World War. These issues in the Danish political and cultural debate in the late 1940s find expression in the collection of essays by Martin A. Hansen entitled Tanker i en Skorsten (Thoughts in a Chimney), which was first published in 1948. These texts may illustrate that the concepts of ‘The North’ and ‘Europe’ are indeed seen as opposites in the Danish literary debate after the Second World War. They also provide an answer to the political and artistic question of why it took so long for Danish writers and citizens to feel at home in the ever closer union of the European nation states.

Invisible Europe The two main contemporary Danish reference works on the country’s literary history have no entries on ‘Europe’ or ‘European’: neither the index to the nine-volume Dansk litteraturhistorie (published in the mid1980s), nor the index to the fifth volume of Dansk litteraturs historie (published in 2006), contain any references to these key words. How can this be? Of course, the word ‘Europe’ existed in the 1930s, but its use differed radically from our contemporary understanding. It mainly referred to the Greco-Roman classical past of the continent, or it simply denoted a geographical territory. The word ‘Europe’ often also evoked Oswald Spengler-like connotations of the death of Western civilization,4 but it rarely indicated political concepts such as unification as a counterweight to nationalism. Although dreams of a unified Europe under either French or German leadership go far back in history, in Danish cultural life of the pre-war era people tended to associate the idea of political cooperation and possible unification with either the Communist Comintern or a form of political and economic cooperation between autonomous Scandinavian countries. This latter concept, also labelled skandinavismen (Scandinavianism), was not without difficulties, but even today some remnants of these early ideas of Pan- Scandinavian cooperation have survived. Examples of the still vivid cooperative ambitions of the Scandinavian countries are the cultural cooperation under the auspices of the Scandinavian Council of

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Ministers and the economic cooperation in the joint airline company of the Nordic countries (SAS). The way the Danes conducted themselves during the war was, arguably, unique in occupied Europe. In April 1940 German troops crossed the Danish border, but the two countries were at that point not engaged in war in the strict sense of the word (Hertel 2000, 55). In fact, the German authorities entrusted the management of the occupation to a large degree to the Danes themselves. Thus the government, parliament and judicial authorities basically remained in place and were kept intact during most of the occupation (Lund 2005, 89ff.). The official Danish government policy was to cooperate with the Germans in the interest of the country and its citizens. The main argument for holding on to this policy was that it would prevent the Germans from installing a Nazi puppet regime, and it would minimize Nazi influence on political, public and judicial institutions, keeping German policy more or less under control. Under the leadership of the charismatic social democrat Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning (1873–1942) this policy was coined samarbejdspolitikken (the policy of cooperation).5 How far the government was prepared to accommodate the Germans is reflected in the Danish government’s establishment of a political prison camp for Communists, and the public disapproval of sabotage and other activities by the resistance movement (Hardis 2003, 231). The borderline between right and wrong, between cooperating and collaborating with the Germans, between pragmatics and (passive) resistance, was fuzzy right from the start, and it is still subject to debate today.6 Not surprisingly, in German military circles Denmark was ironically known as der Schlagsahne Front, ‘the cream frontier’ (Hertel 2000, 55). The real question is whether Denmark’s relatively fortunate fate during the occupation was the result of Danish political tactfulness – with a high level of self- oppression and self- censorship – or a conscious German political strategy. In any event, the war (at least initially) was experienced in Denmark quite differently from in other European countries. A clear majority of the Danes turned out to be in favour of this policy, which became evident in March 1943 when general elections were held: the parties that supported the government and its policy won a clear victory (Hardis 2003, 230). A turning point in the history of the German occupation of Denmark, however, was 29 August 1943, when the Danish government finally resigned. After this date the Germans took more and more control of the country’s internal affairs. In reality the country was now ruled by high-ranking civil servants and by

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permanent secretaries in the governmental departments and offices, rather than by elected politicians. In the years immediately following the Second World War, many Danish intellectuals were attracted by Communism, just as elsewhere in Europe.7 During the first post-war years the intellectual debate was in danger of becoming limited to a dichotomy of only two poles of ideological orientation: on the one hand the Communist Party’s reasoning, which depended on decisions taken by the central committee of the leadership in Moscow; and on the other hand the conservative forces, which were badly organized but had the unmistakeable advantage of massive American support. Although Denmark was late in joining the ranks of the Western Allies in the war effort, it became one of the founding member states of NATO. For a number of reasons, however, it took almost three decades before the country became a member of the EC.8 This happened in January 1973, when Denmark, together with the United Kingdom and Ireland, joined up. However, the political movement of the opponents, which had been established during the 1972 referendum on accession, was not dissolved. On the contrary, this counter-movement became the most outspoken critical forum on European politics in Denmark. The name, which is still reminiscent of Communist rhetoric, is Folkebevægelsen mod EU (The Popular Movement against the EU). Since 1979 this pressure group has been represented in the European Parliament, with a significant number of delegates. Many intellectuals supported this popular movement, which resulted in a number of cultural events, literary texts and manifestos in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, Denmark is a small, but economically medium-sized, European country, often at the forefront of new developments. Nevertheless, most Danish intellectuals are still cautious about Europe, especially when issues involving the country’s sovereignty are at stake. For more than half a century many Danes hoped for the realization of a democratic political alternative to Europe by establishing some form of political cooperation with their Scandinavian neighbours. These hopes found hardly any support in real politics, but in the cultural domain Scandinavian cooperation is still deemed very important.9

Thoughts in a Chimney Naturally, the Second World War became an important literary theme in Danish post-war literature. For a number of authors it was their central

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theme,10 as witness the works of Martin A. Hansen. Despite his early death in 1955, his fame and stature are still unchallenged.11 Hansen’s book of essays, Thoughts in a Chimney, represents a tangible example of the efforts of an author who tried to find a ‘third-way aesthetics’, who wanted to keep clear of the dangers of propaganda – both right-wing and leftist – and who worried about the survival of traditional cultural values in the intellectual Armageddon of the Cold War. In the cultural turmoil in the aftermath of the Second World War certain old cultural values were disappearing and new, modern ones were taking their place. Thoughts in a Chimney is a collection of twenty essayistic pieces, a somewhat odd mixture of impressionistic reflections, contemplative memories and a few critical essays on literary topics. It is not easy to summarize its contents, but the somewhat sentimental essays about rural life and folklore – like the title essay, which is placed right in the middle of the book – are the most interesting and conspicuous texts. Quite a number of these pieces deal with issues related to national history, cultural heritage and the history of the ‘common people’, especially the peasantry. These themes actually pervade most of Hansen’s work in the post-war years, culminating in his chef d’œuvre, Orm og Tyr (Snake and Bull, 1952), and his posthumous history book Af Folkets Danmarkshistorie (From the People’s History of Denmark, 1957). Many essays in Thoughts in a Chimney treat folklorist artefacts, traditions, symbols and beliefs with profound respect, arguing that ordinary people should be more proud of their own roots and background, instead of discarding them as obsolete or ‘old-fashioned’ and replacing them by their modern, often superfluous and intellectualized, counterparts (Møller 1985, 131–2). This may sound as if Hansen is arguing in the same vein as the conservative critics of modernity had done in the years before and during the war. However, he is clearly aware of the fact that these topics and opinions could easily place him within the discursive framework of conservatism, and even could be understood as latent sympathies for the Nazi ideology. Although Hansen glorifies ‘authentic’ Scandinavian12 peasant culture, he also clearly dissociates himself from nationalism. It seems to be crucial for Hansen’s way of reasoning that traditions and cultural values are not primarily associated with the nation state or the church but that they are epitomized by certain individuals who embody these values. He does this, for example, in the essay ‘Vølven og Jomfruen’ (The Sibyl and the Virgin), in which he shows that modern perceptions of the Middle Ages, favouring pagan Viking warriors over Christian clergy, in fact reflect modern ways of

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reasoning instead of medieval reality (Hansen 1948, 54–8). For Hansen, these stereotypes still can be discerned in contemporary Scandinavian culture, and he emphasizes the differences between Scandinavia, which had been one the last areas in the periphery of Europe to become part of the Christian world, and the rest of the continent. ‘The North’, Hansen maintains, ‘became part of European culture in a later phase’ (p. 56). Therefore the Scandinavian cultural heritage represents something fundamentally different. Among the examples he mentions are the differences between the Roman and the northern European principles of law, the distinctive features of Scandinavian mythology and the magnificent literary monuments of the past, for instance the sagas and Edda. He also maintains that science was less widespread in Northern Europe in the past, which means that practice-based knowledge today still has high prestige in Scandinavia. Thus, ‘folklorist’ topics constitute the very essence of Thoughts in a Chimney. This is also the case in the first essay, entitled ‘Ploven’ (The Plough). Here the author dwells upon the historical evolution of one of the crucial tools in farming, and therefore one of the most important objects in the existence of every peasant and farmer in the world. When Hansen, in his overview of the historical development of the implement, arrives at modern ploughing (i.e. with a tractor) he maintains that this no longer represents progress in the sense of reaching better results in quality and quantity, but that it merely means that work is done in less time (Hansen 1948, 9). This opinion may appeal to today’s slow food chefs and ecological farmers, but it was definitely not widely supported in European society in the 1940s and 1950s. In those years mechanization of agricultural production was regarded as one of the undisputed advantages of modernity, providing the means to feed future generations. In the title essay, ‘Tanker i en Skorsten’, Hansen again praises the past by investigating the chimney and the fireplace as fundamental cultural icons in Scandinavian history and consciousness because of their vital role in heating the people of the north. The fireplace – just like the plough and the prehistoric stone axe – is important to Hansen because it reflects the lives of ordinary people and the undocumented history of everyday life. In fact, Hansen praises the authentic values of ‘the people’ in a way that is not dissimilar to the glory heaped on ‘the proletariat’ by supporters of Communism and other totalitarian ideologies. He also argues strongly in favour of ‘learning by doing’, clearly inspired by the anti-intellectualist approach of the popular thinker and educator N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). Hansen does, however, warn against

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unreflective, intuitive ways of acting, which, again, is an implicit critique of totalitarianism. Hansen’s criticism does not only aim at Communism and Nazism, but also focuses on modern consumerism, as becomes clear when he sneers at contemporary popular culture: ‘the pleasure of outdoor life in modern times, its worship of physical strength, its sport idols and snobbery about raw and naïve extroversion’ (Hansen 1948, 71).13 In short, Hansen turns against radical nationalism, Communism and ‘Americanism’ because they all rest on an insufficient respect for traditional human values. Eventually, all these ‘isms’ will end in the subjection and mental enslavement of the individual. Here Hansen shows some sympathy for post-war existentialist philosophy, about which, however, he was never very keen. The only way to keep clear of these international intellectual movements was to re- evaluate the Scandinavian past; to regenerate the cultural forces from within.14 Finally, it is significant that the title essay, ‘Thoughts in a Chimney’, indicates where Hansen expects to find alternative solutions for the dangers of ‘modernity’. He indicates this in a number of other essays, and in many of his contributions to the journal Heretica.15 Instead of looking at what was going on abroad, Hansen and the other editors of the journal turned inward. They focused on local philosophers and opinion leaders, and on the past, especially pre-modern Scandinavia. So, instead of looking ‘horizontally’ for solutions, Hansen looks at the centre of the traditional Scandinavian homestead, the location of the fireplace. And he looks upwards, to the sky, symbolizing his desire to find introspective solutions. The main tendency of the journal Heretica, which Hansen started to edit shortly after the publication of Tanker i en Skorsten, may well be called ‘metaphysical’.

Between Europe and Norden The closest Hansen and the initiators of Heretica came to a political position was the publication of an essay by the Swiss political philosopher Denis de Rougemont (1906–85) in the third issue of the journal, dealing with the political future of Europe.16 The essay, entitled ‘Europas Sygdomme’ (The Diseases of Europe), is a pamphlet advocating alternative ways of looking at Europe as a cultural and political community. De Rougemont’s description of the state of affairs in Europe immediately after the war is quite depressing. He argues that the only way out of the post-war trauma is to learn from it and to ban nationalism from political life altogether (De Rougemont 1948, 176). In his view the unification

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of Europe is not only a way to avoid future military conflicts between nations, but also a way to give sufficient latitude for ‘necessary forms of patriotism’.17 De Rougemont’s essay is significant in the documentation of the ‘prehistory’ of the European Union. In the context of this chapter its significance rests in the fact that it shows a degree of utopianism which De Rougemont shared with the authors who flocked around Heretica. They did not intend merely to adapt the model of the nineteenthcentury nation state, nor were they seeking refuge in the political safety offered by either the Soviet or the Western ‘bloc’. On the contrary, as De Rougemont’s essay and Martin A. Hansen’s essays in Tanker i en Skorsten show, they tried to imagine another way out. In De Rougemont’s case, he elaborated on a common European future, based on a voluntary and evolutionary political and cultural process, while Hansen put his trust in traditional peasant values and the idea of a pan-Scandinavian brotherhood. Later he would elaborate this theme in his popular history book Af Folkets Danmarkshistorie (Hansen 1957, 63). Instead of dealing with Europe, Danish writers in the post-war years were struggling with a fundamental state of shock. Political and artistic choices were forced upon them during the ideological confrontations in the early days of the Cold War. As with most other people in Europe, they simply hoped to return to some kind of normality, in political, artistic and personal terms (Rasmussen 2006, 44–5). Hansen’s friend and colleague, Thorkild Bjørnvig (1918–2005), articulated this in his essay ‘Begyndelsen’ (The Beginning) in 1948: ‘So, we shall start – right from the very beginning. [ ... ] European humanity must try to take root again’ (Bjørnvig 1960, 20).18 Many young intellectuals and writers felt that the authorities had been unmasked by the war, and that the European cultural and political elites had proven to be powerless against the radical attacks of fascism, Nazi ideology and Communism. In response, they looked inward and focused more on a common Scandinavian cultural heritage than on Europe. This trend has dominated the post-war Danish mentality. We have seen that ‘Europe’ is not a word that appears in the index of any Danish literary history. However, in recent years, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, things have started to shift. Contemporary Scandinavian writers, including many Danes, increasingly examine international and global themes. Nevertheless, the dominant neighbour in the south still preoccupies the new generation of Danish writers and intellectuals (Van der Liet 2007, 273–4). Germany and the Second World War remain the prism through which they often regard Europe or the European Union.

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Notes 1. There are three main elites in Danish public debate: 1. the socialist and social democratic parties, which became the most important cultural and political innovators in the early twentieth century; 2. the conservative nationalists; 3. the third – and most interesting – group, the so- called kulturradikale, that is, the cultural radicals. The latter expression may today cause some surprise, but it might be summarized as ‘intellectuals looking for the third way’. The difficulty is that those who were attracted to the concepts behind words ‘cultural’ and ‘radical’ did not primarily express themselves through political parties, but from the start chose to find other platforms to transmit their ideological and artistic ambitions. Newspapers, magazines, and other channels of cultural production became icons of the cultural radicals’ critique of authoritarian society, militarism, gender roles, the old-fashioned educational system, and so on (Hertel 2001, 257–311). 2. It is quite remarkable that the twentieth- century political connotation of the ‘The North’ is almost completely absent in Peter Davidson’s otherwise highly recommendable and well-informed book The Idea of North (2005). 3. Therefore it is not surprising that some of the most important cultural Nazi periodicals in Denmark during the German occupation carried names that referred to a common European future: Det nye Europa (The new Europe, 1940–2) and Europa-Kabel (Europe- Cable, 1943–4). 4. For example in a poem by the Danish author Nis Petersen (1897–1943), ‘Brændende Europa’ (Burning Europe), written in 1933. 5. In his book 25 statsministre the historian Søren Mørch lists a range of arguments in favour of the official cooperative policy. Among other reasons, he mentions the fact that Denmark came through the war more or less undamaged; that a very small number of Danish citizens were deported to German concentration camps, and that the Danish Jewish community survived the German persecution practically unharmed (Mørch 2004, 195–6; Hardis 2003, 130–1). 6. See, for Hans Hertel’s definition of cultural collaboration, Kirchhoff et al. (1994) [2002], 293–5; see also Barfoed (ed.) (2006); Hardis (2003), 80; and Lauridsen (2007). 7. The appeal of Communism in Western Europe was clearly supported by the role that Communists and the Soviet Union had played in the resistance movements all over Europe during the war. The fact that the Communist party offered a number of articulate ideological prospects for the future, as well as an appealing analysis of the past, was perceived as an interesting alternative after the ideological uncertainty and chaos of the 1930s and early 1940s. 8. It was after many years of negotiations, and after the death of the French president De Gaulle (who had opposed British membership), that the possibility of Danish admission was opened. In 1972 a referendum was held in Denmark, and the outcome was a clear majority in favour of EC membership. 9. Issues concerning the future of Europe, and the position of Denmark and Danish cultural life in a globalizing world, can be traced in numerous contemporary works of literature. In recent years Claus-Beck Nielsen, Gordon Inc and Merete Pryds Helle have produced several works that discuss (and criticize) global issues (Van der Liet 2007).

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122 Henk van der Liet 10. Among the best-known authors are: Martin A. Hansen, Hans Kirk, Hans Scherfig (1905–79), Erik Aalbæk Jensen (1923–97), Tage Skou-Hansen (1925) and more recently Knud Sørensen (1928), Klaus Rifbjerg (1931) and Kirsten Thorup (1942). Some relevant works are: Knud Sørensen’s En Tid (1997) and En befrielse (1999), Klaus Rifbjerg’s Hovedløs (2007) and Thorup’s Førkrigstid (2006). 11. In recent years a range of biographical, editorial and scholarly publications have come to light, which has also contributed to maintaining Hansen’s reputation. For example, Martin A. Hansen’s diaries and a large number of his letters were published and edited by Anders Thyrring Andersen (Andersen 2004). 12. The importance of the Scandinavian frame of reference to Hansen becomes particularly evident in the book’s two essays that deal with Norway and Sweden, depicting both countries in positive terms. The essays are entitled ‘Agterude’ and ‘Dalbytur’. In the first essay, on Norway, there might even be a hidden political statement referring to the heroic way in which the Norwegian military (in contrast to the Danes) had responded to the German invasion of their country in 1940. Sweden is presented in a rather different fashion and the description is limited to the southern province of Skåne (Scania), once part of Denmark. The main discursive feature in the essay on Sweden is the country’s ‘modernity’, or, as it is phrased in the text: Sweden is like ‘a grand, modern, well greased machine’ (p. 49). 13. ‘Den moderne Tids Glæde ved Friluftsliv, dens Dyrkelse af fysisk Kraft, dens Sportsidoler, Snobberiet for det raa og naïve, Udadvendtheden.’ 14. A repeat of how the Danes coped with losing the war against Prussia in 1864. 15. Martin A. Hansen edited Heretica in 1950 and 1951, together with the poet Ole Wivel. A feud concerning Ole Wivel’s supposedly too German-friendly early poetry erupted in an essay by Jørgen Hunosøe in the journal Nordica in 2000, which led to an avalanche of reactions, among others from Wivel himself, who vehemently denied the entire issue (Wivel 2001). The dispute over Wivel’s early poetry and presumed Nazism shows how difficult it still is to determine and discuss the nature of totalitarian influences in literary contexts. 16. At that time the journal was edited by Thorkild Bjørnvig and Bjørn Poulsen (1918–2000). Bjørnvig translated De Rougemont’s essay, entitled ‘Les maladies de l’Europe’, which originally had appeared in L’Esprit européen in 1947, and later was reprinted and translated into German by Alfred Andersch (De Rougemont 1994, 16–28). 17. De Rougemont’s ideas about a kind of united Europe made him one of the key figures in the establishment of the Union of European Federalists. 18. ‘Vi skal altsaa begynde – helt fra Begyndelsen. [ ... ] Det Europæiske Menneske er ved at prøve at slaa Rod.’ The essay was originally written in 1948.

References Andersen, A.T., ed. 2004. Kætterbreve. Martin A. Hansens korrespondance med kredsen omkring Heretica I-III. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Barfoed, N., ed. 2006. Samarbejde/Modstand – et stadigt dilemma. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

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Bjørnvig, T. 1960. Begyndelsen. Essays. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Dansk litteraturhistorie, vol. 9 [Noter og register]. 1985. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Davidson, P. 2005. The Idea of North. London: Reaktion Books. Hansen, M.A. 1948. Tanker i en Skorsten. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Hansen, M.A. 1952. Orm og Tyr. Copenhagen: Wivels Forlag. Hansen, M.A. 1957 [repr. 1959]. Af Folkets Danmarkshistorie. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Hardis, A. 2003. Æresretten. Dansk Forfatterforening og udrensningen af de unationale 1945-52. Copenhagen: Lindhardt & Ringhof. Henningsen, B., J. Klein, H. Müssener and S. Söderlind, eds. 1997. Wahlverwandtschaft Skandinavien und Deutschland 1800 bis 1914. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum/Jovis. Hertel, H. 2000. Besættelsens litteratur, litteraturens besættelse. Et forskningsprojekt og et livsprojekt. Kritik 145: 51–72. Hertel, H. 2001. Da kulturradikalismen gik under jorden. Den kulturradikale fløj mellem nazisme, kommunisme og den kolde krig. In Den kulturradikale udfordring, K. Rifbjerg et al., 257–311. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter. Hunosøe, J. 2000. Fuldkommenhedslængslen. Om Ole Wivels tidlige digtsamlinger set i relation til hans selvbiografiske værk. Nordica 17: 59–103. Kirchhoff, H., J.T. Lauridsen and A. Trommer, eds. 1994 [repr. 2002]. Gads leksikon om dansk besættelsestid 1940-1945. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag. Lauridsen, J.T. 2007. Over stregen – under besættelsen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Liet, Henk van der. 2005. Martin A. Hansens Heretica-breve i international belysning. In PS. Om Martin A. Hansens korrespondance med kredsen omkring Heretica, A.T. Andersen, ed., 69–82. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Liet, Henk van der. 2007. Über die Grenze. Identität und Identitätsverlust bei Claus Bech-Nielsen. In Grenzgänge der Skandinavistik. Festschrift für Heinrich Anz zum 65. Geburtstag, eds W. Behschnitt and E. Herrmann, 263–85. Würzburg: Ergon. Lund, J. 2005. Hitlers spisekammer. Danmark og den Europæiske nyordning 1940- 43. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Mann, K. 1949. Die Heimsuchung des Europäischen Geistes. In Heute und Morgen. Schriften zur Zeit, K. Mann, 317–38. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung. Møller, P.S. 1985. Nat uden daggry. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Mørch, S. 2004. 25 statsministre. 25 fortællinger om magten i Danmark i det tyvende århundrede. 3rd edn. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Petersen, N. 1933. En Drift Vers. Copenhagen: Vilhelm Prior. Rasmussen, M.B. 2006. Avantgarden efter Auschwitz. In Kunst og politik efter Auschwitz, J. Ladegaard, ed., 39–53. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitet. Rougemont, Denis de. 1948. Europas sygdomme. Heretica 1/3: 167–79. Rougemont, Denis de. 1994. Oeuvres complètes de Denis de Rougemont. Écrits sur l’Europe, III [vol. I 1948-1961]. Paris: Éditions de la Différence. Sørensen, Ø. and B. Stråth, eds. 1997. The Cultural Construction of Norden. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Thing, M. 1997. Hans Kirks mange ansigter. En biografi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Wivel, O. 2001. En ondskabsfuld Klodsmajor. Bemærkninger til Jørgen Hunosøe. Herning: Poul Kristensens.

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7 ‘Europe is the Country of the Spirit’: Albert Camus and Europeanism in France, 1944–7 Manet van Montfrans

From August 1944 until June 1947 Albert Camus was one of the most prominent contributors to Combat, an authoritative daily paper whose origins lay in the French Resistance movement. In his editorials and articles (165 in total) Camus expressed his views on the political and moral issues dominating post-war France. At that time Camus, like many others, cherished fresh hope that a peaceful and just ‘United States of Europe’ would soon be established. These ‘United States of Europe’ would not only achieve economic unity: they would also lay the groundwork for a socially just society in which human rights were to be scrupulously respected. It was a short-lived hope: the onset of the Cold War and the division of the continent into spheres of influence soon forced the adoption of much more modest objectives. In his Combat articles, Camus presents a vision of Europe which he had already set out before the war in the Algerian newspapers Alger républicain and Le Soir républicain, and which he had perhaps most succinctly formulated in his Lettres à un ami allemand (1943–4), when he had already joined the Combat Resistance movement. One cannot really understand Camus’ ideas about Europe without knowing something of their origin and context.1 Therefore, his pre-war attitudes and his Lettres à un ami allemand will first be discussed, against the background of the Europeanism of the French Resistance. In addition, the position of the Combat newspaper in the first three years after the war will be examined. Subsequently, an analysis will be offered of Camus’ ideas on Europe in the context of his reflections on events and trends in French domestic and foreign politics, as expressed in his articles in Combat.2 124

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Camus in Algeria: pre-war attitudes In 1940, at the age of 27, Camus moved from Algeria, the sunny country of his birth, to the sombre ‘suicidal’ Europe. By that time he had not only made his literary debut3 but also undergone a baptism of fire in the field of politics and journalism. The opportunism he encountered in the Algerian Communist Party, of which he was a member from 1935 to 1937, made him permanently immune to the appeal of Communism that was to captivate so many of his contemporaries.4 During the Spanish Civil War he gave his unqualified support to the Republicans – the non-interventionist policy of Léon Blum, socialist leader of the French Popular Front, was to Camus, whose mother was of Majorcan origin, a betrayal. During his time on the staff of the leftwing newspapers Alger républicain and Le Soir républicain – founded in 1938 and 1939 respectively – he published over 150 articles. He and Pascal Pia, the editor-in- chief of both papers, formed a duo that was to last until 1947, despite drastically changing circumstances. In a report on the miserable conditions in which Algerians lived, ‘Misère de la Kabylie’ (a series of eleven articles between 5 and 15 June 1939), Camus exposed the disastrous economic consequences of the colonial regime: mass unemployment, derisory wages, lack of infrastructure and schools, absence of health care, and water shortage (OC I, 653–68). ‘Misère de la Kabylie’ is not a polemical, anticolonial political pamphlet but an eyewitness report of the humiliation of an entire population. Camus called for reforms, not independence.5 A few weeks later, in an article on the arrest of nationalist protestors, he wrote: ‘the only way to curb Algerian nationalism is to remove the injustice which is its source’ (OC I, 750–2). In the autumn of 1939, just after the outbreak of the war, he wrote a number of articles discussing its causes and proposing ways of resolving the conflict. He referred to the responsibility of the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies had been strong enough to beat Germany, but not strong enough to prevent it from waging a new war. The plight of the German people had brought Hitler to power. Camus made a whole range of proposals: Do not humiliate, try to comprehend, allow everything that is fair and refuse that which is not, take away the basis for Hitler’s prestige, revise Versailles and respect Czechoslovakia and Poland [...], establish solidarity between the peoples and countries of Europe, gear states’ policies to an international economy: that is our position. (OC I, 778–80)

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Ten days later he again described the paths that could lead to a new international order and peace: ‘internationalisation of the economy, federalism, disarmament, mutual aid, peaceful solution to international conflicts and various other noble principles’ (1939 CC no. 3, vol. II, 644). As these quotations show, Camus, whose French father had fallen in the First World War, was still a pacifist. Yet he tried to join the army when war broke out in September 1939, but was turned down because he had tuberculosis. When Le Soir républicain was banned in January 1940 for trying to evade military censorship, Camus lost his livelihood and left for Paris, where he joined the editorial board of Paris-Soir.6

Lettres à un ami allemand: the Europeanism of the French resistance After the First World War nationalists and pacifists alike sought to prevent war and ensure peace, the former by achieving political and economic hegemony over Germany, the latter through detente and rapprochement between the peoples of Europe. Both strategies failed miserably, and from 1941 European resistance movements (including the French Resistance) sought a new, viable alternative. There seemed to be no easy solution. The Nazis had laid claim to the notion of Europe. French right-wing intellectuals such as Drieu la Rochelle, Alfred Fabre-Luce and Ramon Fernandez, who had taken over this idea earlier, between the wars, claimed that it was an extension of Briand’s plans for a European federation,7 albeit in their vision Nazi Germany would be at the helm. But as early as July 1942 Combat,8 the biggest Resistance movement in France’s Free Zone, published another vision of a united Europe in a manifesto entitled Combat et Révolution: The United States of Europe – a stage on the road to world union – will soon be a living reality for which we are fighting. Instead of a Europe which is not united but enslaved under the yoke of a powerintoxicated Germany, we and the other peoples will create a united Europe on the basis of liberty, equality, fraternity and the rule of law. (Lipgens 1985, 291–3) And on 17 February 1943 one of the editors of Résistance: Le nouveau journal de Paris, Maurice Lecroix, wrote: ‘It would be a tragedy if the Nazis’ odious exploitation of a sound idea, and the caricature of it in

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Goebbel’s propaganda, were to blind us to the necessity of a broad federation of European peoples’ (Lipgens 1985, 298–300).9 From these and other manifestos and articles in the underground French press incorporated by the German historian Walter Lipgens in his Documents on European Integration, it emerges that Resistance members of varying political hues – liberals, Christian Democrats and Socialists – advocated a federal Europe based on equality, freedom and other Republican values, in which the sovereignty of the individual states was to be restricted. The battle against National Socialism underpinned a number of common democratic values, and many members of the Resistance hoped that their Communist comrades would come to share this vision, or at least some of its underlying ideas. All called for more social justice after the war, to ensure not only states’ internal stability, but also international stability. On 11 November 1942 Camus noted in his Carnets: ‘Comme des rats’ (we are like rats) (OC II, 966). The trap had fallen shut: the Allied invasion of North Africa meant that he could not leave France in the foreseeable future to join his wife in Algeria. In the course of 1943 he joined the resistance movement Combat and became one of the editors of the eponymous paper. It was a risky position; some of Combat’s staff were arrested and shot, like the poet René Leynaud, or deported, like the editorial secretary Jacqueline Bernard. Camus was later to remark: ‘At the beginning of the war I was a pacifist; by the end I was a Resistance fighter. This inconsistency, because that’s what it is, has made me more modest.’ In Lettres à un ami allemand,10 dedicated to Leynaud, Camus has a conversation with a fictitious ‘German friend’, not ‘par- dessus la mêlée mais dans la mêlée elle-même’ (not above the mêlée, but in the mêlée).11 It is a justification for his joining the Resistance. He describes the battle that he has to wage with himself in order to accept the realities of war and violence in a world in which a religious or moral purpose is hard to find. The nihilistic Nietzschean friend counts himself lucky that, in a meaningless, ‘absurd’ world, devoid of transcendental values, he has found a purpose in life in the fight for his fatherland and is prepared to sacrifice everything for it. The answer that Camus gives him in the first letter contains one of the principles to which he would always hold fast: No, I do not believe that one must subordinate everything to the goal that one sets oneself. There are means that cannot be justified. And I want to be able to love my country while holding fast to that which

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is right. If the grandeur of my country has to be paid for with blood and lies, then its grandeur is not my goal. I want justice – and thus my country – to flourish. (OC II, 9) Nevertheless, Camus considers the use of violence as inevitable, claiming that every individual possesses certain inviolable characteristics that must be defended. This causes the breach with his German friend, who places patriotism above everything else. In the third letter Camus looks beyond national Resistance efforts to the wider question of Europe. His opposition to National Socialism is informed not just by love of justice and of his country, but also by an unshakeable belief in a Europe that stands for civilization, justice and beauty. In an article published in 2001, John Oswald analyses how the Europeanism of Combat takes shape in the lyrical rhetoric of Camus (Oswald 2001, 483–93). Camus seeks to purge the vision of Europe from its Nazi taint by contrasting it with his own: The most painful thing of all is to see a travesty of that which you love. And if we are to preserve in our hearts the pristine strength of the idea of Europe – an idea that you have stolen from the best of us and given your own revolting interpretation to – we must deploy all the strength of a well- considered love. (OC II, 21) The Nazis, according to Camus, saw Europe as a territory to conquer and dominate, a reservoir of soldiers, raw materials and factories, a coloured area annexed on provisional maps. He contrasts this barbaric vision with the noble ideal of a European civilization: But for us, Europe is the country of the spirit. It is the theatre in which the marvellous adventure of the human spirit has unfolded over twenty centuries. It is that privileged arena where the Occident’s battle with the world, with the gods and with itself has reached its peak. (OC II, 21) Looking back on his journey through Italy and Central Europe in 1936, Camus seems to have forgotten the negative impressions he attributed in 1939 in La Mort heureuse to Merseult, the protagonist and his alter ego, who finds Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria) gloomy and oppressive, and regains his vitality only in the lovely, sunny Italy, on his way back to Algeria. In 1944 Camus proclaims his unconditional love of European culture and his belief in its beauty and

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invincibility. Just as spring returns every year, so Europe will rise again from the ashes. The questionability of this notion of twenty centuries of unbroken European progress was of no matter to Camus in the context of this letter, written in 1944. If Europe was to be purged of the Nazi virus, extreme rhetorical means were called for. In the spring of 1944 the Geneva conference of resistance fighters from nine countries, organized by the authors of the Ventotene Manifesto (Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli) among others, produced a famous document declaring that a federal union of the European nations was an indispensable condition for future progress. In response to this pamphlet Camus founded, with other members of the resistance in southern France, the Comité Français pour la Fédération Européenne (CFFE) in June 1944 (Lipgens 1985, 348, 668–93). In March 1945 he presided over the first congress of this European Federalist Movement in Paris.

Combat After the liberation of Paris, Combat (now subtitled De la Résistance à la Révolution) became a leading daily.12 Camus, who had already established a solid literary reputation with L’Etranger (May 1942; OC I, 141–204) and Le mythe de Sisyphe (October 1942; OC I, 209–305), continued his involvement with the newspaper until June 1947. However, in September 1945 he ceased writing editorials, and in November 1945 he withdrew temporarily from the editorial board due to uncertainties about the political course of his successor. After that he confined himself to writing articles under his own name.13 His trenchant, beautifully written pieces provoked a huge response among readers; every week Camus received thousands of letters. Combat occupied a special position among the newspapers that emerged from underground or from an eclipse of many years following the liberation of Paris in August 1944. The left-wing papers Le Franc Tireur and Libération, also products of the Resistance, engaged with the Communists. Le Monde, founded in December 1944, targeted the Catholic and Protestant bourgeoisie, maintaining close links with the political establishment. As the newspaper of a social and cultural elite, Le Monde had more affinity with the conservative, right-wing Le Figaro than with Combat. The staff of Combat were comparatively young; many had been in the Resistance and were atheists or agnostics. They were left-wing but pointedly independent of all political parties and movements.14 They saw it as the task of the press to correct and encourage political parties, while confining their power within bounds. Combat

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shunned sensationalism, reported facts accurately and devoted a good deal of space to background articles. Its connection with the Resistance and the blood shed in the cause of freedom gave it authority and its staff licence to take the moral high ground. However, the euphoria of the first few months after liberation gradually died away and the paper’s tone became more muted. The leap from ‘resistance to revolution’ was not made. In October 1944 De Gaulle disbanded the Communist patriotic militias, making democratic recovery incompatible with social revolution. Combat chose the side of democracy. There might not be a revolution, but there could be reform. Combat approved the nationalization of the major banks and insurance companies, and the introduction of a social security system. After 1944 De Gaulle guided foreign policy into more traditional waters. He pursued a policy of national ‘grandeur’, seeking a ‘third front’ that would occupy a neutral space between the two superpowers, and a classic balance between nation states. He sought French hegemony over a divided Germany and violently opposed any notion of a supranational organization. The wish of the Resistance leaders to found a federally based community of peoples did not have the hoped-for direct effect. These and other developments were a source of disillusionment to Combat. The articles show a growing reserve towards the influential Communist Party – by the end of 1945 clearly in thrall to Moscow – as well as suspicion of the Socialists, who had not sufficiently resisted Pétain and were now flirting with the Communists.15 Nor did the philocommunism of the Personalists, as expressed in the magazine Esprit, find favour. Moreover, Combat’s criticism of the Vatican’s attitude to Nazi Germany and Vichy alienated the paper from its Catholic readership, and its circulation gradually declined. After the radical rejection of Communism and fierce disagreement within the editorial board about whether or not to remain politically independent, Pia, Ollivier and Aron chose the side of De Gaulle and his RPF (Rassemblement du Peuple Français) in 1947. They left the paper, as did Camus, staunch in his refusal to choose political sides. Combat was taken over by Frenay and Bourdet, its Gaullist founders. Aron became a columnist for Le Figaro.

Camus in Combat Camus’ editorials and other contributions reflect the turbulence of those early post-war years. The issues on which he felt most strongly were the

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restoration of the rule of law in France; the relationship between morality and politics; the right, duties and role of a new press; the construction of a new Europe; colonial politics in Indochina and particularly in Algeria; the fate of the Spanish Republicans; and, of course, the Cold War. There is a very noticeable difference between the early articles, which were written in the enthusiasm and hope of the last months of the war, and the later ones, which show disenchantment. Camus’ open criticism of the Vichy regime is particularly striking. While De Gaulle was sweeping everything under the carpet in the interests of national unity, Combat cried out against Vichy’s disastrous collaboration. Camus called Pétain and Laval ‘those men who rationed everything except shame’. And it was Combat that published the first eyewitness accounts of the survivors of concentration camps (7 September 1944). The bitter dispute with François Mauriac in the autumn of 1944 about the purge of collaborators is well known. Initially strongly in favour, Camus soon came to distance himself from the summary trials and executions advocated by certain leftwing intellectuals. The report with which he returned in May 1945 from a three-week tour of Algeria was intended to clear up French ignorance concerning north Africa; it was a follow-up to ‘Misère de la Kabylie’, published in 1939 (CC no. 8, 497–534; OC II, 617–20). Camus also tried to draw attention to the discriminatory treatment of Algerians fighting on the side of the French (Combat, 28 November 1944).16 Six articles – four dating from 1944 and two from 1945 – were directly devoted to the construction of a new Europe. In each case Camus noted an event – Allied intervention in the domestic politics of a number of countries, talks between De Gaulle and Stalin on a Franco-Russian alliance, a speech by Churchill about the repression of the Greek Communist partisans by the British and government troops – and then raised the question to a more general, European or even global level (Combat, 29 November 1944; 3, 9, 18 December 1944; 16 February 1945; 17 August 1945). In this way, problems in Belgium, Poland, Italy and Greece were used to justify Resistance demands on governments returning from exile or the conditions that the Allies imposed on the formation of new governments. It was a roundabout way of raising the question of existing or potential conflicts in France, but also of presenting the various Resistance movements as a European movement: ‘The European Resistance [...] expresses the hopes and demands of the European peoples’ (Combat, 29 November 1944). Liberation alone was not enough; it had to be followed by the establishment of a new, just society throughout Europe.

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The talks held between De Gaulle and Stalin in early December 1944 moved Camus to hope that their success would inspire the negotiators to look beyond an essentially unholy policy of alliances and power blocs, and to consider the economic interdependence of all European countries. If it proved possible to set up an economic federation, the basis for a political federation would already have been laid: ‘If France and Russia could be the first to speak the words that all right-minded people on the continent have been waiting for years to hear, then we would have grounds for confidence and pride’ (Combat, 3 December 1944).17 On 18 December 1944, when the text of the Franco-Russian pact had been published, Camus stressed the wish expressed by both parties to foster international security through a global organization that could reconcile the interests of all countries (Combat, 18 December 1944). In an article on the Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945) and talks on the organization of the United Nations, Camus opposed the grant of veto power to the five major powers (Russia, the US, Great Britain, France and China) as members of the UN Security Council. He saw this as incompatible with international democracy, on the grounds that the world would in fact be governed by a directoire of five states. Their power of veto would give them a freedom denied to the other members of the UN. Camus rightly saw this as a first step towards carving the world up into power blocs (Combat, 16 February 1945). On 17 August 1945, following the San Francisco conference in June (where the Charter of the United Nations was elaborated) and the capitulation of Japan, Camus painted a sombre picture of a Europe which, still divided and mauled between the Slavic and Anglo- Saxon worlds, would be the arena of future conflicts. If the European countries, under Anglo- Saxon influence, allowed their peoples’ just quest for far-reaching social reforms to be curbed by reactionary politicians, he wrote, the Soviet Union would intervene. If, on the other hand, Soviet influence caused Europe to introduce such radical social reforms as to curtail all freedom, the United States would intervene. Europe faced the urgent task of achieving a synthesis between freedom and social justice that would satisfy both East and West (CC no. 8, 576–9). The contours of the Cold War can already be seen in these articles. The Cold War basically spelt an end to the Europe envisaged by Camus and Combat during and shortly after the war. In a series of eight articles published in Combat (19–30 November 1945) under the title Ni victimes ni bourreaux (OC II, 436–56), Camus distances himself from

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current events and explains why he refuses to opt for one of the two power blocs. He reflects on revolt, revolution and violence and comes to the difficult conclusion that violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable. He is at his most virulent in his rejection of Marxism, which he renounces once and for all. It is an ideology that Camus regards as anachronistic, useless and dangerous in a rapidly changing world.18 The future ideal of a harmonious, classless society can never justify the systematic eradication of nonconformists. And with Voltaire-like irony he notes that the death of millions is too high a price for the hypothetical happiness of the rest. Such an apocalyptic means really cannot justify the ends (OC II, 447). With these and other polemic pronouncements he incurred the wrath of left-wing France. His rejection of Liberalism alienated him from political thinkers such as Aron. In place of Marxism, Camus proposed ‘modest political doctrines devoid of all Messianic tendencies and nostalgia for an earthly paradise’ (Combat, 20 November 1946).19 He called on the French Socialists to abandon Marxism and to invest their energy in gradual social reform, and he repeated his plea for a new, democratic international order. Camus ended this series of articles with the following words: ‘I have always thought that people who hoped to improve the human condition were mad, but that those who despaired of doing so were cowardly. And from now on all our credit must lie in maintaining that formidable wager that will in the end decide whether words are stronger than bullets’ (Combat, 20 November 1946). Eight months later, on 3 June 1947, Camus left Combat. Seven days later La Peste was published, the novel on which he had worked since 1942 and which is set in a city ravaged by the plague. Given Camus’ fierce opposition to Marxism, it would seem that his allegorical portrayal of a Europe trampled by the Nazis might admit of a more general interpretation, an interpretation corroborated by L’Homme révolté (1951), the philosophical essay that sealed his expulsion from the Parisian left-wing community. It will be clear that Camus’ ideas concerning a unified Europe evolved under pressure of circumstances. In 1939 he expressed the unrealistic hope that it would still be possible to divert Nazi Germany from its belligerence by a revision of the Versailles Treaty. The solutions he proposed were internationalization of the economy, federalism, disarmament and mutual aid. Camus might have been inspired by Briand’s proposals of 1929, but it is equally possible that he was just echoing the solutions proposed by pacifists in the late 1930s.

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In the Letters to a German Friend, written when he was a member of the Resistance group Combat, Camus contrasted the barbaric, materialist Nazi vision of Europe as a reservoir of natural resources with the idea of a spiritual Europe: a Europe that had its origins in the civilization of ancient Greece, where, so he thought, respect for human rights and social justice were leading principles. There would be no place in such a Europe for Nazi Germany. However, as the post-war articles in Combat show, Camus was rapidly losing faith that a new, just, internationally oriented society would take hold in Europe. Confronted with nationalistic politicians, the harsh reality of the Cold War and the schism in Europe, Camus refused to accept either liberalism or Marxism as the way forward. But, just as this French author was, at least for a while, retiring from the public debate, other Frenchmen, such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, were waiting in the wings, ready to put into action their concrete and practical plans for European unification, focusing on the economic integration of ‘the country of the spirit’.

Notes 1. The study of the idea of Europe in Camus dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s. See, for instance, Guérin (1985) 57–70; (1993) 189–222; Smets (1991). More recently John Oswald has analysed the evolution of Camus’ Europeanism in three texts: the posthumously published novel La Mort heureuse (1939), the Lettres à un ami allemand (1943–4) and L’homme révolté (1951) (Oswald 2001; 2003). 2. The articles by Camus in Alger Républicain and Le Soir Républicain are collected in Cahiers Albert Camus no. 3 (Lévi-Valensi and Abbou (eds) 1978); those in Combat in Cahiers Albert Camus no. 8 (Lévi-Valensi (ed.) 2002). Most of these articles are also included in Albert Camus, Oeuvres complètes, Vols I and II (Gallimard, 2006). References to the edition of 2006 are given after quotations in the text as OC (I or II), to the Cahiers Camus as CC (no. 3 or no. 8). 3. With two collections of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit (OC 1937 vol. I, 39–98) and Noces (OC 1939 vol. I, 101–28). 4. The Communist Party initially recruited its members among Muslims fighting for independence, but in 1937 it changed course, seeking to combat fascism rather than Colonialism. Although Camus did not support the Algerian militants’ struggle for independence, he did show solidarity with them, and was consequently expelled from the party. 5. Camus never accepted the idea of an independent Algeria. He believed in the virtues of republican assimilation. As a child of European immigrants, he could not imagine an Algeria without Europeans. In the 1950s, when the Algerian War led to French military repression and Algerian terrorist tactics, he refused to participate any longer in the public debate. 6. For an overview of Camus’ journalistic activities, see Guérin (2007), 79–92.

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7. Briand proposed his project of a European federal union to the Assembly of the League of Nations in September 1929. But in May 1930 his Mémorandum sur l’organisation d’un régime d’union fédérale européenne met with a complete lack of comprehension from most of the ministers and diplomats of the various European governments, unable as they were to think outside the categories of national sovereignty. 8. Combat was set up in 1941 by Henri Frenay, a Catholic army officer. The Resistance paper of the same name (a rejoinder to Hitler’s Mein Kampf ) appeared from December 1941 and was printed in Lyon. Initially, the movement was not hostile to Pétain so much as to the politicians surrounding him. It was not until May 1942 that Combat openly distanced itself from Pétain and, in a communiqué drawn up jointly with Libération in 1943, both movements recognized De Gaulle as leader and symbol of the French Resistance. The Resistance movement Combat became part of Mouvements unis de résistance (Combat, Libération and Francs Tireurs), finally being subsumed in the umbrella organization Mouvement de libération nationale. In De Gaulle’s shadow cabinet in Algiers, Frenay was appointed Minister for Prisoners of War and Deportees, a post which he was also to hold as member of the temporary government of 1944–5. 9. For the ‘European idea’ elaborated by the Resistance movements see also Frank (1997), 71–81. 10. The first two letters were written in July and December 1943 and published in underground periodicals: the Revue libre no. 2, and the Cahiers de Libération no. 3. The third one, written in April 1944, was published in Libertés, no. 58, 1945, and the last one, from July 1944, with the three others, by Gallimard after the war. They are included in OC II, 9–29. For a complete résumé see Guérin (2009), 476–80. With these open letters Camus places himself in the tradition of epistolary exchange between French and German intellectuals, such as the exchanges between Ernest Renan and David Friedrich Strauss during the 1870 war, and between Romain Rolland and Gerhart Hauptmann during the First World War (see Amossy 2004, 25–39). 11. Camus alludes here to a series of critical essays published by the pacifist Romain Rolland in the Journal de Genève (August–December 1914), collectively published in 1915 under the title Au- dessus de la mêlée. 12. As an underground paper Combat had a circulation of up to 300,000. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944 its circulation was 200,000. In no. 65 the members of the editorial board were presented to the readers: ‘Pascal Pia, Albert Camus, Henri Frédéric, Marcel Gimont, Albert Ollivier rédigent actuellement Combat après l’avoir rédigé dans la clandestinité.’ Other regular contributors were Raymond Aron, Henri Calet, Roger Grenier and Maurice Nadeau. (On Combat between 1944 and 1947 see Martin 1990, 5–21 and Guérin 1990, 21–52. For an overview of Camus’ political and social engagement see Guérin 1993.) 13. Between 21 August 1944 and 3 June 1947 Camus wrote 138 editorials and twenty-seven articles. 14. In 1944 Camus, Ollivier and Aron were close to the Socialists, but they broke with the SFIO (French Socialist Party) when that party accepted a return to the political system of the Third Republic.

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136 Manet van Montfrans 15. In October 1944 Camus still rejected anti- Communism, considering it the announcement of a dictatorial regime (CC no. 8, 237–41; Combat, 7 October 1944). 16. At that moment the North African soldiers were fighting in North-East France. The humiliations suffered by these soldiers in the French Army and the unfair financial treatment of the overseas war veterans were denounced in Les Indigènes (2006), a film directed by Rachid Bouchareb. 17. In the autumn of 1946 Camus discussed the role of Marxism with Sartre, Malraux and the Jewish authors Arthur Koestler (Hungarian) and Manès Sperber (German). These discussions can be considered as a prelude to L’Homme révolté (1951), the essay that would lead to a definite rupture between Sartre and Camus (see Judt, 1998, 93–6; Todd 1995, 573–81). 18. Cf. his pessimistic comments on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Combat, 8 August 1945. 19. In this article occurs an expression often erroneously attributed to Raymond Aron: ‘la fin des idéologies’ (OC II, 443).

References Amossy, R. 2004. Dialoguer au cœur du conflit? Lettres ouvertes francoallemandes, 1870-1914. Mots 76. Les langages du politique. Guerres et paix. Débats, combats, polémiques: 26–33. Camus, A. 2006. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, 1931–1944; vol. II, 1944–1948. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Frank, R. 1997. Images de l’Europe et des Européens chez les Résistants pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. In Le rôle des guerres dans la memoire des Européens, eds A. Fleury and R. Frank, 71–81. Bern: Peter Lang. Guérin, J., ed. 1985. Camus et la politique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Guérin, J. 1990. Le premier combat ou l’aventure d’un intellectuel collectif. In Camus et le premier Combat, ed. J. Guérin, 21–52. Brussels: Editions de l’Espace Européen. Guérin, J. 1993. Camus, Portrait de l’artiste en citoyen. Paris: Editions François Bourin. Guérin, J. 2007. Camus the Journalist. In The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. E.J. Hughes, 79–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guérin, J. 2009. Dictionnaire Albert Camus. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont. Judt, T. 1998. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Valensi, J. and A. Abbou, eds. 1978. Fragments d’un combat 1938-1940, Alger Républicain. Le Soir-Républicain. Cahiers Albert Camus, no. 3, Vols I, II. Paris: Gallimard. Lévi-Valensi, J., ed. 2002. Camus à Combat, éditoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus 1944-1947. Cahiers Albert Camus no. 8. Paris: Gallimard. Lipgens, W. 1985. Ideas of the French Resistance on the Post-war International Order. In Documents on the History of European Integration, Vol. I, Part IV. Berlin: De Gruyter. Martin, M. 1990. Combat et la presse de la libération. In Camus et le premier Combat, ed. J. Guérin, 5–21. Brussels: Editions de l’Espace européen.

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Oswald, J. 2001. Reappropriating Europe: Albert Camus’s Wartime Europeanism. Modern and Contemporary France 9/4: 483–93. Oswald, J. 2003. Camus et la multiplicité de l’Europe. In Albert Camus et les écritures du XXe siècle, ed. S. Brodziak et al., Artois: Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Artois Presses Université. Smets, P.F. 1991. Le pari européen dans les essais d’Albert Camus. Brussels: Bruylant. Todd, O. 1995. Albert Camus, une vie. Paris: Gallimard.

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Part III Visions: Plans for a New Europe after World War II

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8 The Ventotene Manifesto: the Crisis of the Nation State and the Political Identity of Europe Matthew D’Auria

The island On 5 November 1926, the Fascist Government of Italy voted a number of restrictions on citizens’ rights, wiping out the last vestiges of the political freedom that had survived the first years of Mussolini’s rule. Measures included the disbanding of all non-Fascist political parties, trade unions and democratic organizations, the suppression of the free press, restrictions on travel abroad and, last but not least, ‘mandatory residence’ for political and ideological reasons. The latter, known as confino politico, allowed authorities to forcibly relocate political dissidents to secluded places for a given period of time and under the eye of local authorities. Although not unknown to previous Italian governments, ‘mandatory residence’ had yet to be used on such a scale and at the total discretion of the authorities; paradoxically, the vagueness of the decree made clear its real purpose: ‘mandatory residence’ could be inflicted on all ‘who have committed or have manifested the deliberate intention of committing’ deeds with the purpose of violently unsettling the social, economic or national order of the state (Ghini and Dal Pont 1971, 35). A few days after the decree was enacted, the newly appointed head of Police, Arturo Bocchini, embarked on finding a number of places to which the regime’s enemies could be exiled; the choice fell on the barely inhabited islands of Lipari, Lampedusa, Ustica, Tremiti, Ponza and Ventotene. Bocchini, the Ovra – Mussolini’s secret police – and the new Tribunale Speciale then started their campaign against the state’s political enemies. Within just a few weeks Antonio Gramsci, Carlo Rosselli, Francesco Fausto Nitti, Emillio Lussu and many other anti-Fascist 141

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leaders were arrested and condemned to ‘mandatory residence’; in less than a month, as Bocchino boasted to Mussolini, almost 600 confinati had already been banished to the islands and were no longer a threat to the Fascist party (Dal Pont 1975, 41). From then onwards, up until the coup d’état of July 1943, hundreds of political dissidents poured into the colonie di confino. One important – and unexpected – outcome of the confino politico was that, by forcing socialists, anarchists, liberals and Communists to live side by side on an inhospitable island, the Fascists created the ideal conditions for a seminal commerce of ideas, which was livelier than anywhere else in the peninsula; such an outcome was also a consequence of the fact that many of these leaders were refined intellectuals, for whom devoting their time in internal exile to studying and meditating upon the horrors that Italy and the rest of Europe were then experiencing was only natural. Once on the islands, they immediately set up libraries and schools, using part of the sustenance money granted by the regime to buy books through relatives and friends on the mainland (Delzell 1961, 191; Longo 1947, 37–9); they ran classes and seminars on history, philosophy and economics (Gramsci 1968, 25) and debated books on warfare – which proved useful to many future partigiani (Secchia 1959, 77). Clearly against the intentions and interests of the Fascist regime, the confino thus became a place of intellectual stimulation. For similar reasons, the confino politico also fostered a sense of unity in the struggle against Fascism. By isolating their opponents in the colonie di confino, the authorities removed them from society but at the same time hardened their wills against the injustices inflicted upon them. In 1938, ordered by Fascist authorities to use the Roman salute, many, despite threats, refused, and a bitter but rather bizarre battle of wills began with the police, one that ended only when a magistrate unexpectedly sided with the confinati – a curious anomaly for a totalitarian state – by reminding the authorities that their duty was merely to maintain surveillance on the confinati and not to re- educate them (Dal Pont 1975, 117ff.; Ghini and Dal Pont 1971, 113ff.; Spinelli 1999, 258–9). An important consequence was that from then onwards, while in the rest of Italy everybody used the Fascist salute out of conviction, convenience or mere conformism, this was not the case on the islands of Tremiti, Ventotene, Lampedusa and Ponza. Only there, on the islands to which Mussolini had banished his enemies, could Fascism openly – and even ‘legally’ – be fought (Spinelli 1968, 30). In this world of unwavering anti-fascists, intellectuals and activists, who never lost hope in spite of the tragedies sweeping Europe,

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Ventotene, in the words of the Communist leader and confinato Luigi Longo, was the ‘capital’. For Longo, Ventotene was not only one of the islands of confinement; it was, above all, ‘a centre for political formation of the confined and of organization for peace and freedom within the country’ (Longo 1947, 38). Of the many places of exile used by Mussolini’s government, Ventotene held its most recalcitrant and relentless enemies. The future President of the Republic Alessandro Pertini, the Communist ideologues and leaders Umberto Terracini and Giorgio Amendola, the leader of Italian Communist youth Pietro Secchia, the socialist leader Lelio Basso – to name but a few – all spent years confined to the island. A few miles off the shores of Naples, Ventotene was close enough to the coast to ensure its control and yet far enough to isolate the dissidents from the rest of Italy; even its history confirmed its aptness as a colony of detainment, since it had already served a similar purpose under Bourbon rule.1 In his memoirs, Altiero Spinelli, one of its best known confinati, thus described Ventotene: The island is less than two kilometres long, between two hundred and eight hundred meters wide, only slightly undulated and bereft of any trees, so that the winds may sweep it without restraint. Usually all around it you would see only the sky and the sea, but when the horizon is free from mist, some windows of the houses of Gaeta would glitter reflecting towards us the rays of the sun at dawn, almost reminding us that ‘the continent’ – as it was then called – in which, from Gaeta to Canton, a terrible game was deciding the fate of humanity, was not after all so far away. (Spinelli 1999, 262) On this inhospitable patch of land, both so close to and yet so far from the horrors of war, Spinelli found his ‘vocation’ (261). It was there, under the eye of Fascist authorities and in a difficult and sometimes even impossible dialogue with liberals, Communists and socialists, that Spinelli conceived a radically new understanding of Europe; developing one of the most far-sighted and innovative ideas inspired by the fight against Fascism and from the tragedy of war, he thus tied his name, and that of Ventotene, to the project of a European federation. Most of the ideas that accompanied Spinelli throughout his life were outlined in the Ventotene federalist writings: ‘The Manifesto for a Free and United Europe’, written with Ernesto Rossi, and the less famous and yet equally important ‘The United States of Europe and the Various Political Tendencies’ and ‘Marxist Politics and Federalist Politics’. Although in the years following his confino, Spinelli repeatedly

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changed his standpoint – as one may see in his Diario Europeo (Spinelli 1989–92) – his ultimate aim always remained the same: the project of European federation. This chapter will try, on the one hand, to highlight the originality of Spinelli’s and Ernesto Rossi’s federalist approach with its breaking away from pre-war internationalist thought and, on the other, to analyse the relationship they depicted between the ‘crisis of the nation state’ and their vision of a united Europe.

The men The son of a small entrepreneur and of a primary school teacher, Altiero Spinelli was born in Rome on 31 August 1907.2 His first encounter with political theory was at the age of fifteen, when his father, a fervent socialist, gave Altiero a series of books by Marx, Lenin and Lasalle, which had a deep impact on him; soon these became his ‘most important intellectual food’ (Spinelli 1999, 51), slowly moving him to quite radical standpoints. Two years later his growing fascination with Lenin’s theory of revolution and Trotsky’s internationalism led him to join the clandestine Italian Communist party. Soon proving his intellectual as well as his practical capacities, 3 he was appointed general secretary of the Communist youth of central Italy, an office he kept until his arrest in Milan in 1927. Sentenced by the Fascist authorities to sixteen years of imprisonment for confessing to being a Communist (Paolini 1996, 101–11), Spinelli was sent from the prison of Lucca to Viterbo, to Civitavecchia, to the colonia di confino of Ponza, and finally arrived in July 1939 on the island of Ventotene. Unlike his arrival on the island of Ponza, where he had been cheered and saluted by many of his old Communist companions (Spinelli 1999, 227–9), Spinelli’s welcome on Ventotene was lukewarm – in some cases even antagonistic. The hostility he met was a consequence of the party’s decision to evict Spinelli for ‘ideological deviance and petit-bourgeois presumption’ (Coletti 1978, 68–71; Spinelli 1970, 424); the verdict, following a long discussion among the party leaders (Paolini 1996, 182–4), was caused by Spinelli’s questioning the theoretical convictions of Marxism as well as political decisions made by the European Communist movements, ranging from the flaws he saw in Communist economic theory to the assumed primacy of structure over superstructure, and to the blindness of the German Communist party to Hitler’s rise to power. The news of Stalin’s persecutions and of the ruthless trials set up by the dictator against his opponents finally convinced Spinelli that all totalitarian regimes, including the Soviet

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one, were far worse solutions than the problems they were trying to solve (Spinelli 1970). The writings of Marx, Lenin and Kautsky being no longer available, Spinelli delved into the works of Kant and Hegel, Croce and Marshall (Spinelli 1999, 145); in hoping to ‘find the truth of communism’ (Spinelli 1968, 131), he was forced to open his mind to those ideas which would finally rid him of most of his Communist beliefs. What is sure is that, after the doors of the prison closed on him in 1927, a new world opened before him; this was the beginning of his personal long ‘monologue on liberty’ (132), during which he discovered that in communism ‘all that which seemed certain and rational truth couldn’t hold out against critique, but simply was a collection of dogmas which demanded to be believed’ (130). Seeking new answers to the problems of Italy and Europe, in the belief that freedom, above all, had always to be safeguarded and social progress achieved without destroying liberty, Spinelli finally decided to turn to democracy. His need to understand and to appreciate fully the democratic principles, unknown to him both in reality as much as intellectually, inevitably posed a series of conundrums: ‘having reached the doors of the democratic city,’ he wrote later, ‘which once I had considered an enemy city, of which I had therefore spied and learned the weaknesses, contradictions and hypocrisies, and which I now choose as my ideal homeland, I long stayed to contemplate it, without entering, with diffidence towards people and things, watched with equal diffidence by those with whom I would now have to dwell, asking myself what I was going to do there’ (Spinelli 1999, 257). Abandoned by his old comrades, Spinelli soon found himself in the unenviable position of an idealist in search of an ideal (Spinelli 2006b, 118–30). Like Hans Castorp on the Zauberberg, on the island of Ventotene Spinelli came across one of the most prominent figures of the liberal opposition to Mussolini’s Fascism, a man with whom Spinelli would share the rest of his stay on the island and with whom he was to start his struggle for a European federation; a man with whom, above all, he was to enjoy a lifelong friendship (Spinelli 1999, 301). The son of an army officer and of a doting mother who strongly influenced his personality, Ernesto Rossi was born in Caserta in August 1897.4 The fourth of seven children, in adolescence he was traumatized by the suicide of two of his sisters, his mother’s infidelity, and his father’s subsequent attempt to murder her. At the outbreak of the Great War, Rossi was a neutralist, embracing an internationalism inspired by Mazzini’s view of a ‘Europe of Nations’ mixed with a sort of ‘utopian’ socialism

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for which solidarity among nations was a noble value to cherish even above one’s own patria. A ‘non-interventionist intervened’ (Fiori 1997, 19), and in November 1916 he enlisted as a volunteer in the infantry, moved by a sense of duty towards his friends and his brother Mario, who were fighting on the front lines. After a rapid training course for reserve officers, he was dispatched to the front and fought against the Austro-Hungarians in the Alps. In May 1917 he was badly wounded; his injury was so severe that both his comrades and the surgeons had lost all hope of saving him (Fiori 1997, 29–30). After a lengthy operation, Rossi was not fully recovered before the armistice, so, in spite of his willingness, he never returned to the battlefield. The tragic experience of the war, its consequences for Italian society, and above all the contemptuous attitude of most political parties towards veterans, prompted Rossi to embrace the nationalistic movements that fed on the resentment of those who had fought on the front line. In 1919, Rossi started working for the Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper founded and directed by the young Mussolini (Fiori 1997, 42–6). Nonetheless, this collaboration only lasted up to 1922, when, under the growing personal influence of the liberal historian Gaetano Salvemini, Rossi finally turned against fascism. The friendship with Salvemini, whom Rossi had met at a conference on Italy’s claims over Dalmatia, grew stronger, as did their mutual intellectual esteem. Slowly the historian’s liberal views, tempered by a strong concern for social justice, influenced the young journalist to the point where they became decisive for Rossi’s political inclinations. Had he not met Salvemini, Rossi later wrote, he surely would have joined the Fasci di combattimento (Rossi 2001c). In June 1924, after the murder of the socialist leader Matteotti and with the growing violence of the Fascist squads, Rossi decided to join the opposition to Mussolini’s regime. With other young intellectuals he created one of the first anti-fascist clandestine movements – L’Italia libera – while the following year, along with Salvemini and the jurist Piero Calamandrei, he edited and distributed the series of pamphlets Non mollare! His growing anti-fascism forced him briefly into exile in France, where in 1929 he helped found the famous Giustiza e Libertà (GL), a movement opposed to fascism and seeking a third way between socialism and liberalism. Back in Italy, Rossi began teaching law and economics in a high school in Bergamo, where he continued his underground activities against the regime until 1939, when he was finally arrested. Sentenced by the Tribunale Speciale to twenty years’ imprisonment, Rossi spent some time in the penitentiaries of Pallanza, Piacenza

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and ‘Regina Coeli’ in Rome, where he shared a cell with Riccardo Bauer, Vittorio Foa and Massimo Mila – all members of GL. Following a series of general amnesties, his conviction was modified to mandatory confinement, and Rossi was transferred to the island of Ventotene in midNovember 1939 (Fiori 1997, 102–67). Thanks to Salvemini and the other members of GL, Rossi came across the theory of federalism (Malandrino 2006). A staunch advocate of federalist reform of Italy, Salvemini insisted, in fact, on the need for reorganizing the state on the basis of the principle that political authority stemmed from local communities and that ‘centralization’, which had been inherent in the Italian state since its unification, always was a usurpation of authority; this view, drawn from the teachings of Carlo Cattaneo, saw federalism as a ‘theory of freedom’, based on the principle of local autonomy and granting a fundamental role to comuni and regioni as sources of political legitimacy (Biagianti 1986, 198–247). Salvemini’s view was also shared by other members of GL and shaped the ideas of Emilio Lussu, Andrea Caffi and, not least, its leader Carlo Rosselli. In their view, the only possible solution to Europe’s and Italy’s predicament was a combination of federalism and socialism, the former assuring political freedom, the latter guaranteeing social justice. If this background, with its mix of Risorgimento liberalism and strong socialist inspiration, was one of the political ingredients of Rossi’s idea of Europe, his concerns with the more economic and institutional aspects were instead inspired by an equally formative influence: that of Luigi Einaudi. While teaching economics between 1926 and 1933, Rossi contributed several articles to Critica Sociale, a journal founded and run by Einaudi – at the time a prominent liberal professor of economics (Armani 1982, 151–61; Marcucci 2002, 235–44; Rossi 2001a). A lifelong correspondence sprang up between the two, and the relationship slowly cemented a lasting intellectual and personal bond, which continued throughout the war and until Einaudi’s death in 1961 (Einaudi and Rossi 1988). European federalism had been one of Einaudi’s main concerns right from the beginning of the Great War, when, under the pseudonym of ‘Junius’, he wrote several letters published by the Corriere della Sera, in which he harshly criticized the project of the League of Nations and advanced the idea of a European federation (Einaudi 1948). Basing his critiques on the theories of Hamilton, Jay and Madison and on the implications of their comparison of confederation and federation, Einaudi clearly foresaw that the League of Nations was doomed to fail. His prediction was based on the assumption that the division of Europe in sovereign states was in itself a threat to peace and an

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obstacle to social and economic progress. To avoid the risk of future wars, a supranational organization was not enough; it was necessary to create a Federal Union. Only by this means would it be possible to overcome both protectionism and imperialism, thus ensuring peace and free trade. Combining the considerations of an economist with those of a far-sighted politician, Einaudi’s federalism was clearly the coherent completion of his own specific liberalism. Although Rossi never fully shared these views, his understating of federalism was heavily indebted to the ‘Junius letters’. The socialist elements underpinning the GL ideology and the focus on local autonomy on the one hand, and the economic and institutional aspects stressed by Einaudi on the other, were mainstays of Rossi’s federalist ideas. Remarkably, these were also the basis of a project for European unity drafted in 1937, before meeting Spinelli, and which in part he used for the famous Manifesto (Braga 2008, 37–72; Levi 1998). Even more significantly, they founded the intellectual basis on which Rossi and Spinelli started their discussion on Europe.

The ideas In the autumn of 1939, from Ventotene, Ernesto Rossi wrote to his friend and mentor Einaudi asking him to send anything he could find on European federalism, including, of course, the Junius letters (Einaudi and Rossi 1988, 48). Einaudi gladly complied, and the arguments set forth in the letters, eagerly read by Rossi and Spinelli, soon ‘started to fructify’ in their minds (Spinelli 1999, 307). Other works soon followed, including Lionel Robbins’s Economic Planning and International Order.5 This work, already admired by Rossi (Rossi 2001b, 705), also impressed Spinelli thanks to the clarity of its arguments. The Junius letters and Robbins’s essay soon became the basis of Rossi and Spinelli’s own federalist view; both works – like the Manifesto – saw in the growing economic international interdependence the driving force for overcoming the division of Europe into nation states, and both – again like the Manifesto – considered the creation of a supranational federation the only possible route to follow. Furthermore – and along the lines of the Manifesto – the works of Einaudi and Robbins rejected the ‘smoky and contorted’ federalist ideas of Mazzini’s federal republicanism and Proudhon’s socialism (Spinelli 1999, 307), which, nonetheless, had been central to Rossi’s 1937 project for a European federation.6 One idea that struck Rossi and Spinelli was the assumption put forward by both Einaudi and Robbins that the incapacity of the nation

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state to control and govern the complexity of an economy that was constantly expanding beyond its own borders was the actual cause of the growing tensions among European nations (Einaudi 1948, 28–30; Robbins 1937, 246ff.). The discrepancy between the space of economics and the space of politics caused the rush to new markets, the struggle for new colonies and the continuous rise of custom tariffs and import duties; the inevitable consequences were ever more destructive wars. In order to prevent such danger, argued Robbins and Einaudi, a federation capable of governing an expanding economy was needed. In other words, the dimension and the capacities of the state had to be adapted to the needs of its growing economy. This need could be satisfied either through war or through a peaceful federation. Focusing on the political perversion caused by economic needs and offering a sound federalist alternative, such arguments became one of the premises of the Ventotene Manifesto (Levi 1963, 73), yet Rossi and Spinelli took them a step further. The starting point of their reasoning was the ongoing conflict, its tragedies and the desperate urge to avoid future wars. All other concerns – equality, social justice and even freedom – were to be secondary while this sword of Damocles hung over Europe. ‘What is the deep evil undermining European society is clear to everyone [wrote Spinelli]. It is total modern warfare, prepared and conducted by all social energies existing in each country. When it flares up, it destroys men and wealth; when it broods under the ashes, it oppresses all other activities as a tiring nightmare.’ The myth of the short, heroic and ‘refreshing struggle’ of war had been shattered by the destructive capacities of modern technology and the barbarizing of spirits. ‘The men of today, who in the main have already experienced such scourge, know all the nonsense of that myth, and realise that the permanent risk of armed conflict among civilized people must be radically removed, if one doesn’t want that all we care about the most be destroyed’ (Spinelli 2006a, 39). According to both Rossi and Spinelli, understanding the cause of war required a shift of focus from the social, economic and political situations of each single nation to a system of international relations tying states to one another. Following the ideas of Einaudi (1948, 22–34), the two reached a quite radical conclusion: war was not a consequence of imperialism, fascism, capitalism or even nationalism; war was the inevitable result of the existence of sovereign and independent states (Rossi 1999, 32ff; Spinelli 2006a, 39-73; Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 11–12, 16). The principle on which modern Europe had been built – the right of each nation freely to determine its political existence – was now seen as the source

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of Europe’s misfortunes. Because they were free, all states lived in a condition of actual or potential bellum omnium contra omnes, where peace was nothing more than a truce. The authors of the Manifesto believed that the consequences of such a situation compelled states to concentrate their efforts on protecting their independence from the threats posed by neighbouring states. Such an urge was even more pressing in the smaller states, which, to protect their freedom, had to maintain relatively larger armies and try to acquire vast markets and colonies for self-sufficiency. In this situation, survival of the state was an objective to pursue at all costs, even against the interest and the freedom of its citizens. ‘The state, from being the protector of the liberty of its own citizens, has become the master of subjects bound to servitude’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 12–13). A paradoxical outcome was that in order to guarantee the formal independence of the state – ‘formal’ because, de facto, the growing economic interdependence had sapped this principle of its meaning – each state was ready to sacrifice the freedom and the lives of its own citizens. The consequences were obvious. At best, states lived in perpetual mutual distrust, condemning their citizens to a wretched existence in fear of war; at worst, unrestrained violence would finally erupt. On the basis of this insight, the authors of the Manifesto went so far as to claim that, if fascism were the immediate cause of the present war, fascism itself was actually the result of the existence of independent nation states. The condition determined by the principle of national sovereignty, which ensured the independence and the freedom of any society constituting itself as a state, also explained why some states – the smallest and the weakest – turned to fascism. International anarchy, in fact, not only allowed but even fostered the birth of totalitarian states because these were ‘the most apt organism’ for facing such a situation, since they sought ‘the most coherent unification of all forces, thus achieving the greatest degree of autarchy’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 13). Far from being simply a moral disease and a ‘civic dejection’ stemming from the ‘intoxication of the First World War’ (Croce 1963, 361), fascism was, on the contrary, the inevitable outcome of international anarchy. The reasoning Rossi and Spinelli expounded was a definitive break from classic internationalism. Socialism, Marxism and liberalism – although evidently in different ways – all, in fact, considered the birth of supranational organizations as an objective to pursue only once social justice, class equality or the guarantee of individual rights had been attained within each state. The unification of Europe, then, was a consequence of the realization of the reforms that such ideologies proposed.7

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By focusing on the system of relations existing among European states, the Manifesto overturned the principles of classic internationalism by claiming that the internal situation of a state was strongly influenced – and in some cases even determined – by international anarchy; a logical consequence of this was to claim that the end of independent sovereign states in Europe was the necessary precondition – not the consequence – of all social, political and economic reforms and of infra-national federalism (Bordoni 1994, 727; Rossi 1999, 27–8; Spinelli 1993, 116). This could only be attained once there ceased to be a risk of war. From this standpoint, Rossi and Spinelli had found a comprehensive explanation of war and fascism, overcoming the classic distinction between internal and international politics. Coherently, the solution – the only possible one – was the institution of a federation in which the independence of member states was yielded to a supranational government. Reasoning on the League of Nations, which modern ‘democracies had been so proud of and which had failed so miserably’ (Spinelli 1999, 307), they soon understood that the reason for its failure was that the League was merely a collection of states still retaining their integral independence. As a result it only functioned inasmuch as the interests of all members were compatible with one another – obviously quite a rare occurrence. What Wilson and the other promoters of the League of Nations failed to see was precisely that the fleeting nature of the interests of member states caused the weakness of their union, dooming it to failure. In contrast, Rossi and Spinelli called for the creation of a federation, similar in many aspects to the American one, in which all member states ceded their power to a central authority. Based on a sort of domestic analogy, their reasoning was quite straightforward; just as the Leviathan had avoided the risk of the continuous war of all against all within its borders, it was now time to overcome the ‘state of nature’ in the international arena. The new Leviathan, the European federation, was first and foremost the necessary condition for durable peace; yet, importantly, it was also the precondition for the realization of any social and economic improvement, since only after the risk of war had been definitively averted would it be possible to decide freely the social and economic reforms to undertake in the unified continent. Rossi and Spinelli’s analysis of the causes of war and fascism delineates a new paradigm through which internal and international politics had to be understood and in which, contrary to classical internationalism, they could not be considered as two separate spheres. The two main assumptions of the paradigm were, first, that nation states were no longer capable of governing the economic forces that transcended

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national boundaries and, second, that international anarchy inevitably kept all countries in a situation of perpetual conflict. What Rossi and Spinelli were proposing was nothing less than the elimination of the nation state as the basic building block of the European system. Coherently with this, they also argued that the divide between the advocates of the European federation and the supporters of the nation state would become the dividing line of all political struggle, since what the war and fascism had proven was that, until international anarchy decided the life of Europe, all other struggles for equality or freedom would only yield fleeting and uncertain results. In a well-known passage, which caused much ‘scandal’ even before the circulation of the Manifesto (Spinelli 2006c, 154), the two went as far as to maintain that The dividing line between progressive and reactionary parties no longer coincides with the formal lines of establishing more or less democracy, or the pursuit of more or less socialism, but the division falls along a very new substantial line: those who conceive the essential purpose of struggle as being the traditional conquest of national power [ ... ] and those who see the main purpose as the creation of an international state, which will direct popular forces towards this goal. (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 28) If this drastic parting from internationalism clearly represents a first momentous innovation in the way Europe’s future was being imagined, an equally important and original element needs to be considered. The Manifesto was not only an interpretation of Europe; it was also a specific project for the realization of a European federation; in other words, Rossi and Spinelli’s project was to turn federalism into something more than a mere ideal by establishing a close link between a theoretical declaration and a precise political program (Pistone 2004, xii). Federalism now had to be actively pursued: ‘it is necessary, as from now, to lay the foundations of a movement capable of mobilizing all the forces to create the new organism which will be the greatest and most innovate ever in Europe’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 28–9). Endorsing such an appeal was not merely the idealistic urge of the two authors – as important as this might be. On the contrary, the ‘federalist revolution’ of Rossi and Spinelli could be envisaged in terms of a precise project only because the war had created the opportunity for overcoming the division of Europe. The war, it was argued, by proving to all the folly of nationalism and of fascism, had definitively paved the path to the federalist idea. If war was interpreted as the climax of the crisis of the nation state, it was also

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its turning point; for this reason, the idea of a European federation – a mere utopia just a few years before – had become ‘an aim within arm’s reach’ (Colorni 2006, 7). Such an understanding was also reinforced by the assumption that the ongoing conflict had shaken the structures on which states were based and which fostered the ideology of nationalism, thus leaving a void which federalism could fill. Spinelli and Rossi admitted that traditional forces within the nation state were likely to attempt to restore the status quo ante by appealing to nationalism and to the masses, who, never having considered any political ideal other than that of the nation, were more inclined to listen to such calls. In the event that the masses responded to such appeals, then politics would fall back once again into the obsolete and restricted field of the nation state and the potential war of all against all would decide once more the future of Europe. Only by preventing traditional states from reorganizing themselves on the pre-war model would it be possible to avert such risk. Spinelli still insisted in a 1945 letter to Albert Camus – himself a fervent federalist – on the need to grasp the opportunity war had produced by stressing that the struggle for the federation, which in the past was nothing else than the propaganda of idealists, can and must become today a concrete political fight. This favorable opportunity won’t last long. If we miss out on it, if political existence were to fall once again in the old track, then the European Federation would became once again a humanitarian utopia with no relation to political reality. (quoted in Paolini 1996, 492) The war, then, created an unprecedented opportunity for Europe’s destiny, and this reflection was central to the Manifesto. Presumably because its authors had been among the victims of fascism, the Manifesto was suspicious of the way democracies work in times of social and political upheavals.8 Above all, it claimed that, in a time in which new political institutions needed to be created, democracy showed all its shortcomings. When people are in greater need of guidance, they ‘don’t know precisely what they should want and what to do’; unable to direct themselves, inevitably they ‘break up into a number of factions and fight one against the other’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 22). The greatest danger – to be avoided at all costs – was that people might fall back into the trap of nationalism, siding with the conservative forces that still clung to the principle of national sovereignty. Therefore, people

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needed guidance, which, in Spinelli and Rossi’s view, could only come from Europe’s intellectual and political elites. History soon confirmed how grounded such fears actually were, for the nation was and remained the ‘natural given’ to which all hopes were entrusted. Spinelli and Rossi’s gross underestimation of the force of nationalism is the main limitation of the Manifesto – in a sense a ‘sociological’ limitation. Not only was nationalism not diminished by the tragedy of war but, in many cases, its virulence was increased by the pain the people of Europe had inflicted on each other. Furthermore, at a time when all certainties were crumbling, the only ideal many could appeal to remained the imagined belonging to a common nation. Even then the elites, on which Rossi and Spinelli counted so much, were still enslaved to the nationalistic way of thinking. While partisan movements were mushrooming all across Europe, most of them were fighting for the freedom of their own nation and for gaining power and setting forth the reform programmes inspired by their ideology at home. While fighting the same enemy clearly strengthened the feeling of belonging to a single Europe, only for a few partisan movements was a European federation something worth fighting for, and then it was only a secondary aim. So even the strong elitism of the Manifesto, the result of distrust towards mass democracy, had proved far too optimistic, wrongly assuming that enlightened elites would see what the masses could not. If underestimating the strength of nationalism was a first fundamental mistake, a second equally important limit of the Manifesto lay in the assumption that the allies would withdraw from Europe once the war ended. ‘We believed [Spinelli later wrote] that the Second World War would have ended as the first one, with the opening of a phase of revolutionary crisis in all of Europe’s countries in the same moment, during which the impossibility of restoring the old pre-fascist democracies and the conviction of proceeding towards the creation of a European federation would have become obvious. Instead, the end of the war was completely different’ (quoted in Humonda 1963, 67–8). The Manifesto was written in the summer of 1941, before the USA had entered the war and when the future role of the USSR was quite unclear. The gap between the scenarios in summer 1941 and spring 1945 undermined their predictions. Although its limitations proved that the strategy of the Manifesto could not be followed – and it was replaced by the more pragmatic Tesi Federaliste as early as 1945 – its values and analysis remained the ideological basis of the Movimento Federalista Europeo (Graglia 1993, 40–1). Even so, the more theoretical

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aspects of the Manifesto did suffer from several flaws, which, precisely because they did have a strong influence on federalist ideology long after the war, help to explain how Europe was envisaged by many advocates of its unification (Graglia 2008, 153). Among such flaws might be that, although the assertion that the disappearance of the nation state would end all wars is quite logical, the question remains of other kinds of conflicts. Another shortcoming pertains to the relationship between international anarchy and democracy. According to the Manifesto, federating the states of Europe would enable them to allocate fewer forces to defence, thus allowing democracy to flourish; that appeared unlikely, given the global situation. Further, the Manifesto, in adopting a markedly ‘institutionalist approach’, has little to say about the role of the individual in the integration process or about his place within the federation. Equally ignored, furthermore, are the aims the European Federation should pursue, and which social and economic reforms it should undertake (Chiti-Batelli 1989, 113–14). The question remains whether two minds as brilliant as those of Spinelli and Rossi failed to see such limitations. A possible answer is that the Manifesto was precisely that: a pamphlet meant to inspire men across Europe to take action against the dogma of nationalism and work for a European federation. Nonetheless, because of its fundamental innovations, it has remained the theoretical basis for many of the claims still made by federalist thinkers in Italy and across Europe. This dual nature might help explain its limitations. Its ‘institutionalist’ approach is evidently due to the assumption that the easiest path to follow was to ‘drop from above’ the European unity and foster, thanks to its institutions, a ‘federal behaviour’ only at a later stage;9 at the same time, the need to avoid specifying social and economic policies may have been motivated by a desire for consensus.10 Even the issue of the relationship between international anarchy and democracy had to be left aside for practical reasons. In a way, the Manifesto balances a Kantian and a Machiavellian perspective, thus faithfully mirroring Spinelli’s own view of politics (Spinelli 1993). Furthermore, the way in which federalist movements developed reflected a wedlock of idealism and pragmatism, a successful blend that has allowed the federalist movements all across Europe to survive many defeats and adapt to new and unfavourable situations. If, as Spinelli wrote, ‘the greatness of an idea is not measured by its success, but by its capacity to be born anew after each defeat’ (Spinelli 1999, 348), then this quality can definitively be ascribed to the ideas expounded in the Manifesto; and perhaps in this blend of pragmatism and idealism, of ‘daily and nightly language’ (Spinelli 2006b)11 demanding to pursue a

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great and yet unattainable aim, lies the greatest merit of the Ventotene Manifesto.

Notes 1. Ironically, the island was so safe that after the fall of Fascism the new authorities wanted to confine Mussolini himself there (De Felice 1990, 1: 405). 2. On Spinelli’s life see Graglia (2008); Paolini (1988); Santarelli (1994). 3. Gramsci himself praised the work of the young Spinelli (Paolini 1996, 35). 4. On Rossi’s life see Fiori (1997) and Braga (2007). 5. Spinelli later wrote that his federalism was heavily influenced by ‘the sharp and precise thoughts’ of the English federalist (Spinelli 1999, 308); in fact, at the time he drafted the Manifesto, his reading was limited to the two works of Robbins sent by Einaudi; only later did he read Lothian, Beveridge and the other British federalists. This is confirmed by Spinelli himself, who kept a list of the books he read and the month in which he read them; the list is in Spinelli (1993), 502–33. 6. The claim made by Antonella Braga that the paternity of the Manifesto should mainly be ascribed to Rossi – a claim based on the similarities between the 1937 project and the Manifesto itself – needs to be played down, given that the ‘Mazzinian’ and socialist penchant of the project is absent from the Manifesto (Braga 2008). 7. Remarkably, even Einaudi believed that a European federation should only include liberal democracies (Einaudi 1948, 33). This clearly marks the distance of Rossi and Spinelli’s ideas from the main source of their inspiration. 8. The reasons for such skepticism are in Spinelli (1993), 423–65. 9. The idea of ‘federal behaviour’ would be later developed by Mario Albertini, himself an important member of the Movimento Federalista Europeo (Albertini 2000). 10. In a letter to Salvemini, Rossi admitted that the content of the Manifesto, at least the social aspects of it, was quite similar to the GL programme (Rossi and Salvemini 2004, 17). 11. On this side of Spinelli’s complex personality, see Angelino (2006) and Rossolillo (1984).

References Albertini, M. 2000. Il federalismo. Il federalista 2: 89–115. Angelino, L. 2006. Introduzione. In Spinelli 2006b, 5–66. Armani, G. 1982. L’incontro di Ernesto Rossi con Luigi Einaudi. Il Ponte Jan–Feb: 151–61. Biagianti, I. 1986. Il federalismo di Salvemini. In Gaetano Salvemini tra politica e storia, ed. G. Cingari. Rome: Laterza. Bordoni, G.S. 1994. Federalismo europeo e federalismo infranazionale: l’eredità di Altiero Spinelli. Storia contemporanea XXV/5: 715–28. Braga, A. 2007. Un federalista giacobino. Ernesto Rossi pioniere degli Stati Uniti d’Europa. Bologna: il Mulino.

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Braga, A. 2008. Il contributo di Ernesto Rossi all’elaborazione del Manifesto di Ventotene. Eurostudium 6/January/March: 37–72. Chiti-Batelli, A. 1989. L’idea d’Europa nel pensiero di Altiero Spinelli. Rome: Lacaita. Coletti, A. 1978. Il governo di Ventotene. Milan: La Pietra. Colorni, E. 2006. Preface to Spinelli and Rossi 2006. Croce, B. 1963. Scritti e discorsi politici (1943 – 1947). Vol. 2. Bari: Laterza. Dal Pont, A. 1975. I lager di Mussolini. Milan: La Pietra. De Felice, R. 1990. Mussolini l’alleato. Vol. 2, Crisi ed agonia del regime. Turin: Einaudi. Delzell, C.F. 1961. Mussolini’s Enemies. The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Einaudi, L. 1948. La guerra e l’unità europea. Milan: Edizioni Comunità. Einaudi, L. and E. Rossi. 1988. Carteggio (1925-1961). Turin: Einaudi. Fiori, G. 1997. Una storia italiana. Vita di Ernesto Rossi. Turin: Einaudi. Ghini, C. and A. Dal Pont. 1971. Gli antifascisti al confino. 1926-1943. Rome: Riuniti. Graglia, P. 1993. Introduzione. In Spinelli 1993, 25–81. Graglia, P. 2008. Altiero Spinelli. Bologna: Il Mulino. Gramsci, A. 1968. Lettere dal carcere. Turin: Einaudi. Humonda, A. 1963. Il manifesto di Ventotene. I quaderni della crisi 3: 67–72. Levi, L. 1963. Considerazioni da una recente lettura del Manifesto. I quaderni della crisi 3: 73–6. Levi, L. 1998. Ernesto Rossi e il Manifesto di Ventotene. Il federalista 3: 219–31. Longo, L. 1947. Un popolo alla macchia. Milan: Mondadori. Malandrino, C. 2006. Il federalismo europeo in Ernesto Rossi. In Il federalismo tra filosofia e politica, ed. U. Collu. Rome: Aracne. Marcucci, G.F. 2002. Rossi ed Einaudi, due vite in dialogo. In Ernesto Rossi. Economista, federalista, radicale, ed. L. Strik Lievers, 235–44. Venice: Marsilio. Paolini, E. 1988. Altiero Spinelli: appunti per una biografia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Paolini, E. 1996. Altiero Spinelli, Dalla lotta antifascista alla battaglia per la federazione europea 1920-1948: documenti e testimonianze. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pistone, S. 2004. Introduction to Il Manifesto di Ventotene, by Spinelli and Rossi, ix–xxiii. Turin: Celid. Robbins, L. 1937. Economic Planning and International Order. London: Macmillan. Rossi, E. 1999. L’Europa di domani. Napoli: Guida. Rossi, E. 2001a. In ricordo di Luigi Einaudi. Discussioni nei Campi Elisi. In Un democratico ribelle, 231–8. Milan: Kaos. Rossi, E. 2001b. Nove anni sono molti. Lettere dal carcere 1930-39. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Rossi, E. 2001c. Salvemini Maestro ed amico. In Un democratico ribelle. Cospirazione antifascista, carcere, confino, 251–63. Milan: Kaos. Rossi, E. and G. Salvemini. 2004. Dall’esilio alla Repubblica. Lettere 1944-1957. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Rossolillo, F. 1984. Spinelli, «uomo dell’opera». Il federalista 2: 138–45. Santarelli, E. 1994. Altiero Spinelli. Belfagor 3: 291–306. Secchia, P. 1959. La resistenza: organizzazione o spontaneità. Il movimento di liberazione in Italia: rassegna di studi e documenti 55/2: 58–81.

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158 Matthew D’Auria Spinelli, A. 1968. Il lungo monologo. Rome: Dell’Ateneo. Spinelli, A. 1970. Contributo ad una storia del PCI. Il Mulino 209: 420–6. Spinelli, A. 1989–92. Diario Europeo. 3 vols. Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, A. 1993. Machiavelli nel XX secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, A. 1999. Come Ho tentato di diventare saggio. Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, A. 2006a. Gli Stati Uniti d’Europa e le varie tendenze politiche. In Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 39–96. Spinelli, A. 2006b. Il Linguaggio notturno. Genova: Il Melangolo. Spinelli, A. 2006c. Politica marxista e politica federalistica. In Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 97–161. Spinelli, A. and E. Rossi. 1993. Lettere federaliste dal confine. In Spinelli 1993, 89–157. Spinelli, A. and E. Rossi. 2006. Il manifesto del Ventotene e altri scritti. Milan: Mondadori.

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9 Max Kohnstamm’s New Europe Annemarie van Heerikhuizen

After the Second World War European ideology was still closely linked to transatlantic thinking. Many people, especially those born at the beginning of the twentieth century, had been inspired and influenced by the ideas and politics of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among them was Jean Monnet, whose career had started with Wilson’s League of Nations and who had many friends in America – including President Eisenhower. The Dutch historian and diplomat Max Kohnstamm, a great admirer of Roosevelt’s New Deal, was to become one of Monnet’s most trusted assistants and colleagues over several decades. He was Secretary to the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in the 1950s, and before that had been a private secretary to the Dutch Queen. This chapter explores the views and attitudes of this man, who worked so closely with Monnet, but who was initially far more interested in American politics than in those of Europe. Nevertheless, Europe was to become by far his most important field of action, on which he would have a significant impact. The question posed here concerns the extent to which Kohnstamm’s Europe, which he laboured, together with Monnet, to create after the war, was one attuned directly to the problems and issues of Europe, or whether it was more affected by his earlier and continuing impressions of United States politics. Was his Europeanism connected to the political problems and realities of the European countries, or, at least to some degree, to the politics of America? Kohnstamm’s Europe, in the first place, was influenced by his war experiences. In the Netherlands, where he was born (Amsterdam 1914) and where he lived, he was imprisoned in 1942 by the Nazis, and so developed strong anti- German feelings. Nevertheless, after 159

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the war, the misery in Germany shocked him and led him to become a supporter of the idea that Germany had to be built up, and should be integrated into Europe. Of major importance for Kohnstamm’s ideas was the coming of the Organization for European Economic Co- operation (OEEC) in 1948, which guaranteed American involvement in European politics, and economic help for European countries, including Germany. But the ECSC, launched by Robert Schuman in his famous Declaration on 5 May 1950, was an even more important event for Kohnstamm, despite the fact that it came as an unexpected surprise for him, or, as he put it, ‘like a bolt from the blue’ (Harryvan and Van der Harst 2001, 90). He was inspired by Schuman’s memorable words: Europe will not be made at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age- old opposition of France and Germany. (Schuman Declaration, 1950) In Kohnstamm’s writings – letters, articles and memoirs – the Europe he had in his mind was almost synonymous with peace, unity and common action. At the end of the 1950s his ideas were given momentum by a prodigious new technology: atomic energy. More than ever Kohnstamm thought that common action was a necessity, but that action on atomic energy would have to be taken in collaboration with the Americans.

The new society To understand Kohnstamm’s ideas on Europe, it is of importance to go back to the years 1938–9, when he first visited America as a student. From the letters he sent to his family in the Netherlands we learn that, as with so many tourists today, he immediately fell in love with New York. After his arrival by boat, on 30 October 1938, he wrote enthusiastically to his father: We entered New York harbour very late at night on the 25th. And what a magnificent entry it was. A fairy tale, the skyscrapers rising up into the dark night, defined by their illuminated windows. It was impressive. [...] New York also has something friendly about it,

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something welcoming. [...] There is a feeling of openness that Paris and London lack. (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 11) He was to stay nine months in America, and already during his first weeks he had the feeling of living in another part of the world, far away from the problems of Europe and the threat of a new war. A ‘New Society’, one inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal, was growing up there, and it made life fascinating. To his father he wrote: Where is Europe? Is there nowhere anything familiar? This could be Mars. What is happening here is indescribably important and incomprehensibly new. I live among people who are superbly educated and, with an unprecedented courage and unprecedented power, are building a state that bears as little resemblance to our capitalist society as Russia does. [...] The difficulties are enormous, the dangers are great, but the commitment to the struggle makes life here more fascinating than anywhere else in the world. The New Society, if it is to be built anywhere, will be built here. (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 15) Kohnstamm was impressed not only by the revolutionary character of the New Deal – the activism, the dynamics, the enthusiasm – but also by the problems the government had to cope with: the power of the pressure groups, the opposing factions, labour versus capital, farmer versus big business. The knowledge he acquired in America gave him a better insight, he wrote to his father, into ‘the social forces at play’, and released him from a heavy burden: that of ‘post-Munich hopelessness’. What he learned was that the only way open for democracy appeared to be the ‘slow, difficult and gradual changing of old and deeply rooted habits through schooling and persuasion. [...] The question arises with everything I see here: to what extent is it possible within the existing system to introduce changes little by little?’ (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 54–5). Kohnstamm met various New Dealers, Democrats and Republicans, and also people from the Far South, who, according to him, seemed to live in the Middle Ages. America definitely had its dark side. This observation is illustrated in one of his letters: In Chattanooga I was a guest at a very interesting dinner hosted by George Fort Milton and his wife. He is one of the outstanding southern New Dealers. A typical Washington liberal, moderate

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humanitarian [...]. Wealthy, hospitable, a lovely house – and appalling Negro shacks outside the door. A first-rate raconteur but, in the end, despite the charm and despite the lively, intelligent and attractive wife, powerless in his epicurean wisdom and a doomed man if the realities of life were ever to strike next door to his peaceful home. (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 52) Yet Kohnstamm was fascinated by America, and for the rest of his life would continue to admire that country. When he sailed back to Europe, after several requests from his father to come home, he wrote: ‘There is so much here that I will always look back upon with nostalgia: the space, the openness, the youthfulness and the ease of living.’ But there was also his ‘hunger for a deeper dimension, for people who not only do things but also can and want to excel by thinking deeply’. Ironically, as we will see below, this was the only thing he could do in the first years after his return to Europe. Homesickness also made his goodbye to America easier: ‘There is my hunger for music and painting and the secure, settled life. The moist air of August in Holland – the farms among the trees with their little flower gardens – and the dahlias blooming again.’ Unfortunately for him, there would be no secure and settled life in the Netherlands in the near future, no freedom to enjoy nature. His father had already warned him before he came home: ‘... while the month of August will be brightened by your return, internationally there are many dark clouds’ (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 90–1).

Reflection For many individuals the war was a time of reflection. It certainly was for Max Kohnstamm, although not by voluntary choice. As a student with open anti- German feelings, he was arrested in 1942 and imprisoned for a long time. First he was held as Strafhäftling in the Polizeiliches Durchgangslager in Amersfoort. He suffered the hardships of a very cold winter and was badly treated during his imprisonment. After some months he was released (on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1942), but he was soon arrested again and kept prisoner as a civilian hostage in Haaren, and then, until September 1944, in the Sint-Michielsgestel camp. Civilian hostages’ lives were at risk when illegal acts were committed; some hostages were indeed put to death, though most of them survived the camp. For Kohnstamm it was not the severe cold in SintMichielsgestel he found most difficult to cope with, but the insecurity

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and the isolation from the outer world. Besides, life in prison was tedious, even though there were opportunities to study, read and talk with the other hostages – many of whom belonged to the Dutch political elite. However, as he wrote to his family, ‘Maybe we will be needed after the war, and we will be mentally and physically fit and longing for action then’ (Kohnstamm 2005, 28). So there was time to read, and one of his favourite books was E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939). It was a remarkable preference, because he was also highly interested in Clarence Streit, who in many ways contradicted Carr’s ideas about international problems in the twentieth century. Both authors were to have a deep impact on Kohnstamm’s thinking about post-war Europe (Harryvan and Van der Harst 2001, 83). During his stay in America his father had advised him to read Streit (Kohnstamm and Kohnstamm 2003, 70), the author of Union Now, also published in 1939. Streit was through and through a liberal, and stressed the importance of founding a Federal Union to defend the principles of democracy and freedom in the world (Lebbing 1996, 38–41). The future was the responsibility especially of people in democratic countries: the United States, the British Commonwealth, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. These countries, so Streit argued, ‘include the world’s greatest, oldest, most homogeneous and closely linked democracies’. Geographically they have ‘the enormous advantage of being all grouped [...] around that cheap and excellent means of communication, a common body of water’ (Streit 1940, 130). They also shared a common history, and a common concept of the state, based on principles of freedom, equality and representation. Together they should set up a powerful union. The future, according to Streit, was in their hands: If we [the democratic countries] cannot unite, the world cannot. If we will not do this little for man’s freedom and vast future, we cannot hope that others will; catastrophe must come and there is no one to blame but ourselves. But the burden is ours because the power is ours, too. If we will Union we can achieve Union, and the time we take to do it depends only on ourselves. (Streit 1940, 60) E.H. Carr, to whom Kohnstamm frequently refers in his letters to his family, seems far away from this utopian way of thinking. Carr was very close to Keynes, and stressed the importance of politics and power, the realities and the facts of life. In a letter to his father, Kohnstamm wrote: ‘You don’t like Carr, do you? But I am very impressed by his book, and

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think we can learn a lot from it’ (Kohnstamm 2005, 84). According to Carr, the failure of the League of Nations and the liberal economic system had made clear that liberal thinking was over, that it was something of the past. The real problems were those between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ among the powers in the world. Priority number one was international cooperation, including with Germany, the international outlaw after the First World War. International conciliation was directly connected to successful economic reconstruction. In accordance with Keynes, he argued: ‘Not for the purpose of earning profit, but for the social purpose of creating employment, and so sound politics.’ The welfare of all countries – including the defeated ones – was at stake. ‘This too is “utopian”,’ he admitted, but ‘it stands more directly in the line of recent advance than visions of a world federation or blueprints of a more perfect League of Nations.’ ‘Those elegant superstructures,’ Carr concluded, ‘must wait until some progress has been made in digging the foundations’ (Carr 2001, 219). Kohnstamm liked Carr’s analysis of international politics, but, at the same time, he had great difficulty with the latter’s lenience towards Germany. Therefore he wrote to his father that he was of the opinion that Carr was right in his analysis of pre-war politics, especially in his criticism of utopias, but that he underestimated Germany’s lust for power. He concluded that what ‘we’ needed after the war was ‘a very strong Anglo-American hegemony’. ‘This will bring order in the first place, not yet order based on law. Simply order’ (Kohnstamm 2005, 87–8). Kohnstamm would eventually come to accept Carr’s point of view regarding Germany, but not without an intense struggle. Naturally, prison is not the ideal place to engender love of the enemy. ‘It’s a sort of a comfort,’ he wrote, full of bitterness, ‘to realise when you fall asleep that also for thousands of German families joy in life has again been destroyed this day.’ In another letter he wrote that since that cold winter in 1942 it had become difficult for him to accept a German as a fellow man. It was as if he had ‘nothing in common with him, and that he was simply a creature from another planet’ (Kohnstamm 2005, 140, 160). Nevertheless, it was soon after the war that he changed his opinions regarding Germany and seemed completely to accept Carr’s way of reasoning. This U-turn was the result of a visit he paid to Germany in 1946, when he could see with his own eyes what happened to a defeated country: the human misery, children living on the streets, a damned country. Kohnstamm, who came to work for the Dutch government after the war, was one of the first to plead in favour of German

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participation in a united Europe. His views on Germany can be learned from the so- called ‘Hirschfeld nota’, published in 1947 and named after his superior, E.H. Hirschfeld. This note, which we know was drafted by Kohnstamm (Harryvan and Van der Harst 2008, 115), was a plea, without any reservations, for the integration of Germany into Europe. Europe would profit both economically and politically and would become more secure. After the launch of the Marshall Plan in 1947, Kohnstamm became an ardent supporter of the idea of Europe as one common market, and to that end, of countries having to curtail their national sovereignty (Kohnstamm 1949, 656–70). Streit had pointed in that direction, and Carr had taught him that it had to be a union based on politics (so with Germany), not on a utopia. The Marshall Plan, offered to defeated Germany, did not seem a utopia. Besides, Kohnstamm had seen from very close range a smoothly functioning common market, in the United States. Kohnstamm’s biographers, A.J. Harryvan and J. van der Harst, are therefore of the opinion that his ideas for post-war Europe had been born in the United States (Harryvan and Van der Harst 2008, 53). However, it was the realities of the Cold War that limited his ideas to Western Europe, and made the common market a Western affair.

Action now: the United States of Europe Two European plans had a great impact on Kohnstamm: the Stikker Plan and the Schuman Plan. The Stikker Plan (1950), named after the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dirk U. Stikker, stressed the necessity of liberalizing the European market functionally, that is, by removing quotas and tariffs, sector by sector. Some lines of industry were ready to liberalize; others would have to wait. As Stikker put it in his article ‘The Functional Approach to European Integration’, ‘unification must be carefully planned and carried out step by step [...]. The program cannot be constructed by analogy from antiquity or the Middle Ages, nor even from the impressive example of the United States. It must fit the particular circumstances of the Continent’ (Stikker 1950, 439). Kohnstamm joined the Department of Foreign Affairs after the war as a civil servant, helped to prepare the plan and learned to understand the specific European economic and financial problems. It was not possible simply to copy the American economic model; moreover, it became clear after the launch of the Stikker Plan in the OEEC that the European countries were not yet willing to take majority decisions towards creating a real common market.

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The Schuman Plan came as a major surprise to Kohnstamm, and he immediately believed in its potential for success. The ECSC was to pave the way to a fully integrated, federal Europe. ‘Wir bauen eine neue Stad’ was the title of a popular song in his youth (from Hindemith’s charming Kinder Oper of the same name) (Hofland and Keller 2003). Monnet was now the architect, the founder of that new city, which would, Kohnstamm hoped, soon include Great Britain, alongside France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux. In the years when he was working for Monnet – from 1952 Kohnstamm was his secretary – a special relationship developed between the two men. Kohnstamm lost his father in 1951, and considered himself the ‘son’ of Monnet; he fully supported Monnet’s pragmatic approach, which was so close to his own functionalist ideas (Van Heerikhuizen 2007). Monnet, in his turn, appreciated Kohnstamm because of his loyalty, and because of his skills. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘Kohnstamm was able to understand the French, the Germans, and the British in their own languages [...]; he was also familiar with their literature and their press. The misunderstandings to which we were liable owing to ignorance of each other’s customs held no pitfalls for him: he was an invaluable intermediary. Everyone was impressed by his great open mindedness and his deep moral qualities. I found in him a colleague and a friend, unshakeably and permanently loyal’ (Monnet 1978, 376). After the failure of the European Defence Community, Kohnstamm followed Monnet, who had left the ECSC ‘in order to be able to take part with complete freedom of action and speech in the achievement of European unity’ (Monnet 1978, 399). Their attention was directed especially towards political parties and trade unions, in order to achieve the support of the ‘social forces at play’. Monnet founded the ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’, and Kohnstamm became his vice-president. This committee, a select group of politicians and union leaders, had all the characteristics of a real ‘coupe de cadre’, and presented itself as something totally new, far from old-fashioned politics and national divisions (Fontaine 1974, 54). The Action Committee’s aims directed towards atomic energy were clearly future- oriented: The development of atomic energy for peaceful uses opens the prospect of a new industrial revolution and the possibility of a profound change in living and working conditions. Together, our countries are capable of themselves developing a nuclear industry. They form the only region in the world that can attain the same level as the great world Powers. Yet separately they will not be able to overcome their

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time-lag which is a consequence of European disunity. (Monnet 1978, 419) A happy coincidence for Monnet and Kohnstamm was the fact that, during the Eisenhower administration in America, secrecy in matters of atomic energy was replaced by openness. Eisenhower, in his famous ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech, delivered on 8 December 1953 to the UN General Assembly, had made it clear that his country was willing to promote and share atomic know-how for peaceful purposes.1 ‘My country,’ Eisenhower stated in simple terms, ‘wants agreements, not wars [...] my country’s purpose is to help us to move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light.’ In his speech Eisenhower proposed an international atomic energy agency, the responsibility of which would be to devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world. [...] The United States would be more than willing – it would be proud to take up with others ‘principally involved’ the development of plans whereby such peaceful use of atomic energy would be expedited. (Chernus 2002, xviii) One such plan was the Monnet Plan for a European atomic community. France and Britain had great difficulties with Monnet’s atomic community (they preferred bilateral cooperation), but American support took Kohnstamm once again to the United States. This time it was not as a mere student who just wanted to get to know more about American politics, but as the trusted colleague of Jean Monnet, charged with setting up, together with three European atomic specialists or ‘wise men’, a programme for the production of atomic energy in Europe, and with talking with prominent American leaders. Monnet sent several letters to his old friends in America (old ECSC connections) to prepare their visit. Among them were the bankers John McCloy and Donald Swatland, Gerard Smith (Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy), Robert Bowie (Head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department) and John Foster Dulles. Pascaline Winand, in her monograph on Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe, writes, ‘Monnet took special care to introduce Kohnstamm [...] as “a very intimate friend of his”.’ Writing to Dulles’s secretary, Monnet asked that

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Kohnstamm’s phone calls be treated as his own in the past, and that they should be directly connected through to Dulles. Monnet also wrote to Dulles himself that he could trust Kohnstamm fully (Winand 1993, 96). As a result of Monnet’s letters, Kohnstamm and the ‘wise men’ were given direct access to the White House and to President Eisenhower. So Kohnstamm, while working for the future of Europe, did very important business in America, a country indispensable, in his opinion, to Euratom’s success (Segers 2008, 152). With the help of Monnet he succeeded in keeping alive a network of European friends – American ‘Europeanists’, as Winand calls them. Together with these ‘friends’ he prepared the hotly discussed report ‘A Target for Euratom’. It sketched a doom scenario if Europe, subsequent to the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Nasser, failed to set up Euratom, which was to produce 15 kW installed nuclear capacity by 1967. It was no longer ‘atoms for peace’ but ‘atoms for power’. In a way Suez worked as a catalyst on European thinking and politics (Segers 2008, 164). Kohnstamm, in a conference speech at Columbia University in 1957, cited from the report: Thus without nuclear power, Europe’s dependence on the Middle East is bound to increase. The Suez Crisis has given us a warning of what this could mean. As the quantity of oil imported from the Middle East increases, there will be a corresponding increase in the political temptation to interfere with the flow of oil from that region. A future stoppage could be an economic calamity for Europe. [...] The European economy must be protected against an interruption of oil supplies, by finding alternative sources of energy [...]. Only nuclear power, providing Europe with a new source of energy, can achieve this. (Kohnstamm 1957, 147) However, most importantly, according to Kohnstamm, Euratom could give the people its confidence back. ‘The rich past of our nations has kept us spellbound for many decades.’ Europe is ‘at last turning toward the future’ (Kohnstamm 1957, 149).

Conclusion In the end Euratom was not a great success, and for Europe the most important goal became a common market. But, rather than discussing European integration politics, the question posed in this chapter concerns the extent to which Kohnstamm’s European vision in the 1950s

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was coloured by American influences, as opposed to what might be called a specifically European Europe. The conclusion must be that, from Kohnstamm’s point of view, there was no exclusively European Europe. Behind the scenes of the ECSC and Euratom, and later on the EEC, there was a unique network of Americans and Europeans working closely together to promote the European integration project. Kohnstamm also participated in the Bilderberg conferences, which were secret meetings – the first one taking place in 1954 – to protect European–American relations against growing antiAmericanism. We have seen that Kohnstamm had already ‘discovered’ America and the Americans in 1938, when he first visited the country. He was fascinated by Roosevelt’s New Deal politics, which had much of what was lacking in European politics, such as enthusiasm, activism and dynamics. It was during the war, when Kohnstamm was held prisoner by the Nazis, that he became highly interested in international politics and the particular problems of Europe. One can even pose the question of what Kohnstamm’s Europe would have looked like if there had been no Camp Amersfoort, no Sint-Michielsgestel and therefore no E.H. Carr, and no necessity to find a solution for post-war Germany. The European problems definitely had a deep impact on him; without them his post-war ideas and activities cannot be properly understood. It was in the ‘Hirschfeld nota’ that Kohnstamm was one of the first to plead for the reconstruction of Germany. Thanks to the Cold War, many people came to support this idea, although they had to acquiesce in the loss of East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe – a loss which Kohnstamm himself had to accept, and which transformed his European ideas into West European ideas and made him a supporter of West European plans. However, some plans were more promising, in his view, than others. One of the reasons why he so easily exchanged the OEEC for the ambitious project of Jean Monnet must have been his strong preference for functionalist politics, with the ultimate goal of founding a federal Europe. Only by that route could the old world become something like that beautiful country on the other side of the ocean: a unified continent, a dynamic society, a New Europe.

Note 1. See the chapter by Menno Spiering in this collection.

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References Carr, E.H. 1939 (2001 edn). The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chernus, I. 2002. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Fontaine, P. 1974. Le Comité d’Action pour les États-Unis d’Europe de Jean Monnet. Lausanne: Centre de Recherches Européennes. Harryvan, A.G. and J. van der Harst. 2001. Een sneeuwveld in 1942. Vraaggesprek met drs. M. Kohnstamm. In Voor Nederland en Europa. Politici en ambtenaren over het Nederlandse Europabeleid, 1945-1975, eds A.G. Harryvan, J. van der Harst and S. van Voorsts, 80–119. Amsterdam: Boom. Harryvan, A.G. and J. van der Harst. 2008. Max Kohnstamm. Leven en werk van een Europeaan. Utrecht: Spectrum. Heerikhuizen, A. van. 2007. Max Kohnstamm and the Future of Europe. Interview. Amsterdam. Hofland, E. and H. Keller. 2003. De eeuw van Kohnstamm. Tegenlicht, http:// www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/13908120/ (accessed 2 February 2010). Kohnstamm, M. 1949. Europese economische samenwerking. Wending. Maandblad voor Evangelie en Cultuur 4: 656–70. Kohnstamm, M. 1957. Europe and Atoms for Power. In Atoms for Power. United States Policy in Atomic Energy Development, 140–9. New York: Columbia University Press. Kohnstamm, M. 2005. Brieven uit ‘Hitlers Herrengefängnis’. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Kohnstamm, M. and D. Kohnstamm, eds. 2003. Still no War. A Correspondence Between Two Dutchmen – Son Max and Father, Philip Kohnstamm 1938-1939. London: Athena Press. Lebbing, T.S. 1996. Atlanticism. The Rise, Development and Realization of an Idea. Amsterdam: Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam. Monnet, J. 1978. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday. Schuman Declaration. 1950. http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm (accessed 4 April 2010). Segers, M. 2008. De Europese dagboeken van Max Kohnstamm. Augustus 1953september 1957. Amsterdam. Stikker, D.U. 1950. The Functional Approach to European Integration. Foreign Affairs 29: 436–44. Streit, C.K. 1939 (1940 edn). Union Now. A Proposal for Federal Union of the Democratic North Atlantic. London: Butler and Tanner. Winand, P. 1993. Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Mankind entered the ‘atomic age’ in August 1945 when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs, finally bringing an end to Japanese belligerence. At that time the theory of atomic power, and the effects of radiation, had been known for years, but the massive energy release of the first bombs inspired many to believe that life would never be the same. A new, atomic age was upon us. Judging by the texts that first employed the phrase, the future was viewed with trepidation. The Oxford English Dictionary reports: ‘1946. It is already clear that the arrival of the “atomic age” has brought in its train the possibility of outbursts of destruction on an incomparably greater scale.’ It was widely expected that the future would bring more nuclear explosions, more fallout, more death and destruction, threatening the very existence of man and even planet earth. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) was only one of the many dystopian novels that predicted complete, nuclear annihilation. If the atomic age spelled disaster for the world, it was the West Europeans who had to be particularly concerned. On the one hand, the old rivals Britain and France became embroiled in their own nuclear race. Britain exploded its first nuclear device in 1952; France followed in 1960. On the other hand, it was widely expected that Western Europe would form the theatre of the final shoot- out between East and West. The development of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ opened the prospect of the superpowers meeting on a battlefield, rather than destroying each other’s cities through intercontinental missiles. The fear that Europe would be the victim of the atomic age was expressed in many articles and pamphlets, or in works of fiction such as the English novel Europe After the Rain (1965), or the German novel Keiner kommt davon (1958), whose subtitle reads Bericht von den letzten Tagen Europas (‘A message from Europe’s last days’). 171

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The prophets of atomic doom employed a discourse that was already in place before the explosion of the first nuclear devices. Pictures of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the horrific effects of radioactive fallout, sparked a world-wide fear of the atom, but as such these fears had been expressed for many years, ever since the first experiments with radioactivity in the 1890s and with nuclear fission in the 1920s and 1930s. This negative discourse centred on the perceived special, and perhaps magical, properties of the atom. Radioactivity is the by-product of the transmutation of one element into another, and the energy release caused by nuclear fission involves the conversion of matter into pure energy, as described by the famous E = MC2 formula of Albert Einstein. No wonder that the atom acquired a sinister aura in the popular imagination. Traditionally transmutation was the realm of alchemists and magicians, of arrogant humans upsetting the natural God-given order. The stories of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or of Faust showed what interfering with the natural order could lead to. Could Satanic forces perhaps be hidden in the atom? How else could one explain the hellfire of nuclear explosions? In the first decades of the twentieth century a plethora of horror stories was published about atomic death rays, atomic fires and atomic diseases (Weart 1988). The first atomic bombs make their appearance in the novel The World Set Free, written by H.G. Wells in 1913. In this book Wells darkly predicts that in man’s fumbling hands atomic power will soon be the instrument of infernal warfare. Set in 1958, the book predicts a world war between ‘the Central European Powers’ and ‘the Allies’, consisting of Britain, France and ‘the Slav Confederacy’. In an attempt to outflank the Central Europeans, the British invade Holland, but this provokes the first nuclear battle in history. The Central Europeans destroy all Dutch dykes with atomic bombs, drowning most of the population. After the real bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945, all the negative connotations of the atom would forever be expressed through one image: the mushroom cloud. To this day ‘the Cloud’ embodies all that is dangerous and sinister about atomic power. Close second is the Radiation Warning Symbol, which is a trefoil representing a radiating atom. It was designed in 1946 for professional use, but since then it has also been widely used by the anti-nuclear lobby. But then, in the 1950s, a shift in the perception of the atom occurred. Alongside the negative atom discourse, positive voices were increasingly heard. A new Renaissance was predicted, for instance by the British author Julian Huxley. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he claimed

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that the ‘Atomic Era’ had brought man to ‘the threshold of a greater and more revolutionary age’ (Huxley 1959, 402). Clearly, his future vision was by no means as dark as the one painted by his brother, Aldous Huxley, in his famous novels Brave New World and Ape and Essence. The atom had, quite suddenly, been promoted to a thing of beauty and promise. The shift in opinion about the atom was heavily aligned with the American ‘Atoms for Peace Campaign’ launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953, Eisenhower declared he wished to ‘hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of the people’. ‘Against the dark background of the atomic bomb, the United States does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace.’ The hopeful message was more than once couched in Christian, evangelical terms: The whole book of history reveals mankind’s never- ending quest for peace, and mankind’s God-given capacity to build. [...] So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well being. In this quest, I know that we must not lack patience. I know that in a world divided, such as ours today, salvation cannot be attained by one dramatic act. (Eisenhower 1953) The political aims of this campaign were threefold. Firstly, it was a propaganda drive to influence public opinion, which was increasingly turning against the nuclear experiments of the USA after this country had exploded the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. Secondly, Atoms for Peace was a weapon in the Cold War. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953, Eisenhower invited the Soviets to contribute fissile material to a depot to which all nations would have access to conduct research, for instance in the medical applications of radioactivity. As expected, the Soviets eventually declined, giving Eisenhower the opportunity to expose them as the enemies of mankind.1 Finally, the campaign aimed to export American nuclear power plants, thus making third parties dependent on American know-how. The Atoms for Peace campaign was conducted with great zest. Speeches were made, brochures, books, films and a travelling exhibition were commissioned, and two conferences were held in Geneva in

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1955 and 1958. A key role was assigned to the Disney Studios, which produced an animated film entitled Our Friend the Atom, and commissioned Heinz Haber to write the accompanying book The Walt Disney Story of our Friend the Atom in 1956. In Disneyland itself work was undertaken on a spectacular ‘atomic submarine experience’ in the Tomorrow-Land section, which was opened by Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1959. Our Friend the Atom was translated into many languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. According to Disney, the atom is a force for the good. Transmutation is not to be associated with alchemy or black magic, but with awesome creation. Portraying in large colour plates the atom as the Genie in the Bottle of fable’s fame, Disney suggests that it can be coaxed to be the servant of man. In many ways Our Friend the Atom may be seen as the Holy Writ of the Atoms for Peace message. Following Eisenhower’s lead, Disney’s narrative contains a good many religious overtones. It is an evangelical message about the Good Atom, Our Friend and Our Saviour, bringing energy and well-being for all. The medical applications of radioactivity will relieve ‘the suffering of man’ (Haber 1956, 149). As is the case in Eisenhower’s speech, the word ‘quest’ is used more than once, thus linking the mystery of the atom with the Holy Grail (Haber 1956, 11). In the Biblical tradition, Our Friend the Atom opens with a story of choice. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, having unlocked the secrets of the atom, man can go down one of two roads. The one leads to destruction, the other to bliss. The last page of the book shows a vision of the atomic city of the future. It appears to float in the heavens, carried by strange ethereal clouds of atomic energy. Just as the post-war negative appreciation of the atom relied on an existing discourse, so Disney’s evangelical Atoms for Peace message was not in itself new. In 1908 Frederick Soddy, who, together with Ernest Rutherford, discovered the principle of radioactive transmutation, prophesied: A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. [...] Such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden. (Soddy 1909, 251) Decades later this holy vision was taken quite literally by Muriel Howorth, the founder of the British ‘Institute of Atomic Information for the Layman’. In 1953 she persuaded Soddy to become patron of the institute, and in 1955, after Atomic Terminology and Atom in Wonderland, she published a remarkable booklet called Atom and Eve. The introduction

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is by Lady Helen Nutting: Muriel Howorth pierces the Iron Curtain of ignorance to show us ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ where undreamed of wonders are performed by man with an invisible agent – the Atom. (Howorth 1955, 3)

Figure 10.1

Atom and Eve, by Muriel Howorth, 1955

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Atom and Eve is illustrated by Howorth herself (See Figure 10.1). In chapter 9 (it might have inspired Disney) the Atom is portrayed as a kind genie casting cancer-curing rays at a smiling young patient (Figure 10.2). On the last page of the book we are invited to join in a prayer: Atom, immortal, atomic immortality for all. Atom, holder of the mind, container of the soul, radiating it into Eternity. Peacemaker and messenger of the Creator; Unseen but all-pervading; Unfelt but always contacting; Unheard but always being vocal. To ye of today and the vast Forever, See what a subtle, magnificent treasure is brought to you! Drawn from its hiding, to blazon a golden trail, Here is the flower of the protyle of all the Creator’s Creation. (Howorth 1955, 69) For various reasons the Atoms for Peace Campaign and its message about the Good Atom were well received in Western Europe. Britain and France welcomed any positive atomic news, as they were also conducting tests with heavier nuclear devices. In addition they were experimenting with nuclear power plants, which proved expensive and

Figure 10.2

The atom as a kind genie (Howorth 1955, 49)

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inefficient, and sometimes leaked radioactivity into the environment. Secondly, Western Europe had grave concerns about its energy supplies. The 1956 Suez crises showed the vulnerability of the oil supply routes, and, in any case, it was expected that the world’s oil reserves would soon be depleted. Western Europe, with its limited natural resources, would be the first and worst affected by the looming energy crisis. Thirdly, the Europeans were in the midst of rebuilding their countries after the disaster of the Second World War. The positive story of the atom, centring on ‘creation’ and the promise of prosperity for all, naturally resonated with the European mood of optimism and the wish to look ahead. Finally, there happened to be many similarities between the American pro-atom discourse and the pro-Europe discourse which the integrationists were in the process of developing in the 1950s. After the barbarity of the atomic bomb, the Atoms for Peace campaign attempted to portray atomic power as a force for the good. After the barbarity of the Second World War, the Europeans attempted to portray themselves as peaceful and cooperative. Just as Disney and his companions contrasted the bad with the good atom, so the Europeanists contrasted the bad with the good European. Clearly there was synergy between the proatom and pro-Europe lobbies. A slogan of the pro-atom lobby was ‘One World or None’. The European Movement proclaimed ‘One Europe or No Europe’. Disney’s promise that the atom would lead mankind to the Holy City was echoed by the Europeanists’ prediction that the atomic age would bring the Eden of unification. According to the 1956 German science fiction novel Project Atlantropa, atomic power would inspire the Europeans to undertake huge joint projects, which, in turn, would lead to an ever- closer union. (The proposed project in this particular case was the draining of the Mediterranean.) The idea that joint atomic projects would foster European union was, of course, also part of the Euratom Treaty, signed by six West European states in 1957. It can easily be argued that Euratom was in fact a platform for intra-national strife, of ‘miscalculation, disappointment or unfulfilled expectations’ (Scheinman 1967, 59), but that is not the point. It was presented as, and by many happily embraced as, the pathway to European integration. A majority of the resolutions of Jean Monnet’s ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’ focused on creating an atomic community (Scheinman 1967, 9). The preamble of the Euratom Treaty states that ‘nuclear energy constitutes the essential resource [...] for effecting progress in peaceful achievement’ (emphasis added). According to a 1958 Euratom advertisement in the German magazine Stern, the ‘Future of Europe’ lies in the shared exploration

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of atomic energy: EIN VEREINTES EUROPA IST STÄRKER (‘A United Europe is Stronger’). The message is enhanced by a large image of the atom as a mini solar system, with electrons circling around a nucleus. This atomic model was originally suggested by Niels Bohr, but was superseded by better models as early as 1931. Nevertheless, the ‘solar model’ has remained the favoured representation of the Good Atom to this day. Suggesting harmony and a link between macro and microcosm, it is the opposite of the sinister mushroom cloud and trefoil symbol. The image of little balls circling around a common nucleus was propagated widely by the Atoms for Peace campaign, and proved irresistible to Europeanists looking for ways to depict the common interest of the nation states. The logo of Euratom has changed over the years, but circles based on the solar model of the atom have always been part of it. Figure 10.3 shows a logo from 1966 depicting European stars and electrons circling in unison around a common core. The 1958 world exhibition in Brussels, called ‘Expo 58’, provides a good illustration of how the pro-atom and pro-Europe narratives had become intertwined. Expo 58 centred on two themes. On the one hand, the story of the Good Atom could be heard and seen everywhere. The exhibition in the International Palace of Science was structured around four themes: the cell, the molecule, the crystal and the atom. ‘All this shall testify to the inevitable fact that science is a single discipline, that there is no division between the atom and the cell. They are one and

Figure 10.3 Euratom logo (Communauté européenne de l’énergie atomique 1966)

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the same, for a Spaniard as well as a Canadian’ (Achtenvijftig 1957, 29: 18). The Palace of Science also housed a working nuclear reactor of very low power. It replaced the ‘swimming pool reactor’ which had originally been planned. This larger reactor had been on display with great success during the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva in 1955. It ‘uses enriched uranium as a fuel and utilizes a large pool of ordinary water as a shielding medium. When the reactor is in operation, fission actually takes place and radio-active isotopes are produced. Basically its primary audience appeal lies in the blue-glow visible in the bottom of the pool’ (Kint 2001, 116). Unfortunately for the Expo organizers, the Americans had sold this crowd-puller to the Dutch after it had been on display at an Atoms for Peace exhibition in Schiphol. In the American pavilion a large section was dedicated to a display on ‘atoms serving society’. Among other things, it showed the irradiation of corn, and a chicken fed on the result. The animal was allegedly stronger and healthier than its non-atomic fellows, and was said to produce superior eggs. The Soviets, while focusing mainly on their recent Sputnik successes, promoted the peaceful atom with models of their industrial nuclear reactors and the nuclear icebreaker Lenin. The Belgians made great display of the large uranium deposits in the Congo, and the British put in their bid by showing models of their nuclear power stations at Sellafield and Dounreay. They were ‘world leaders’ and ‘proud of [their] scientists who made the atomic age possible’. ‘British industry is ready to bring the benefits of these new discoveries to the world’ (Kint 2001, 278, 136). The French, not to be outdone, exhibited the plans for their first nuclear power station, due to start operations in 1959, and pointed out that the atomic age had actually started in France, as radioactivity was first discovered by a Frenchman, Henri Becquerel, in 1896 (Kint 2001, 139). However, most of all the Good Atom dominated the exhibition in the shape of the mighty Atomium. Built and intended to stand only for the duration of the exhibition, the Atomium, which represents an iron crystal consisting of nine atoms enlarged 165 billion times, soon acquired world fame. It was saved from demolition, and the 102-metrehigh construction, which was restored in 2006, is now one of Brussels’ most distinctive landmarks. The other theme of Expo 58 was international, and in particular European, cooperation. The International Section was dominated by a large building of the European Coal and Steel Community. Inside the visitors were treated to a banner reading ‘Building Europe is the Path to Well-being and Peace’, enormous photographs of the ‘Fathers of Europe’, and the originals of the Coal and Steel, Euratom and EEC

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treaties. Of the five buildings in this section, two others were dedicated to European cooperation. These were the ‘Benelux Building’ and the ‘Pavilion of Europe’, housing exhibitions about the Organisation for European Economic Co- operation, the Council of Europe and a fullscale reproduction of the European Parliament’s hemicycle. The other buildings in the International Section, the Hall of World Co- operation and the pavilion of the United Nations, appeared small in relation to this display of European solidarity. The large roof of the pavilion of Europe was especially significant. Its architect, Karl Schwanzer, designed it as a ‘a symbol of the co- operation of common interests, just as the tenants of a house come together underneath one roof that protects them from nature’s inclement weather’ (Tousignant 2008, 103). Additionally, Expo 58 boasted a European Garden and an Avenue de L’Europe, which was the main road of the International Section, leading the wanderer straight to the Atomium. The Avenue was enlivened with five large iron sculptures of abstract, cheering figures designed by local artists Jean Heylen and Luc Claus (Achtenvijftig 1957, 31: 15–17). Given the political developments of the 1950s, this marked focus on Europe was not surprising, but it was also actively promoted by the city of Brussels, as in 1958 the EEC member states were getting ready to decide whether the capital of their Europe would be Strasbourg, Luxembourg or Brussels. The European Movement, in any case, was well pleased with the focus of the Brussels Exhibition. In a rave review it proclaimed that the International Section could well be rebranded the ‘European Section’ (Europese Beweging 1958, 4). Most buildings of Expo 58 were demolished soon after the gates closed in October 1958. The European theme, however, still lingers on in a pleasure park called ‘Mini Europe’ at the foot of the Atomium. Being the two main focal points of the exhibition, a link between atomic and European power was suggested by default at Expo 58, but in many cases the idea of such a connection was also actively promoted. The Good Atom and European unity were praised in similar terms. It was a story of peace, progress and a radiant future for all. The Atomic age and the European age appeared to be one and the same. The interconnection between the pro-atom and pro-Europe discourses finds strong expression in the monthly Achtenvijftig (‘Fifty-Eight’), which was published by the organizers of the Brussels World Fair between March 1955 and April 1958 (Figure 10.4). Articles on the might of the atom and on international and European cooperation abound, routinely reminding the reader that he is on the threshold of a new wonderful era of both atomic and international fusion. On the one hand, the magazine states

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that the Atomium must dominate Expo 58, since ‘the atom defines the new age’ (1955, 2: 12). In an article called ‘The Atom and International Co- operation’ the Atomium is hailed as the ‘symbol of building a better world together’. Atomic power, it is once again predicted, will ‘make deserts fertile’. The article matches Eisenhower’s and Disney’s evangelicalism with a direct reference to Matthew’s account of Christ’s deeds of mercy: the Atom will ‘feed the hungry and clothe the naked’ (1957, 24: 8). On the other hand, Achtenvijftig advertises the idea that Expo 58 must function as an ‘aureole’ of the great and new European institutions. ‘Although experts think the realization of a united Europe will take a period of 10 or 15 years, the year 1958 will undoubtedly already reveal some great achievements of Euratom and the Euromarket’ (1957, 25: 17). It is seen as ‘essential to familiarise’ the visitors with the international ‘revolution’ and ‘renewal’ that are taking place ‘in Europe more than anywhere else’ (1956, 18: 10). In the Atomium the discourses of the Good Atom and European integration were most visibly intertwined, not least because both the Americans and the Soviets had declined the offer to contribute to the exhibitions that were planned in four of the nine spheres. The space was limited, and in any case the superpowers preferred to promote their atomic exploits in their own national pavilions. Consequently, visitors to the Atomium were treated to exhibitions about Europe, European industry and the wonders of atomic energy. Scale models of atomic reactors were on show, as was, of course, Disney’s animated film ‘Our Friend the Atom’ (Humo 2005, 164). A golden future seemed to lie ahead for both Europe and atomic power. The motto of the Atomium exhibitions was: ATOM = HOPE. The American input in post-war European cooperation is well known and has often been studied. The focus tends to be on the Marshall Plan and the resultant Organisation for European Economic Co- operation, the begetter in many ways of today’s European Union. However, the influence of the American positive atom discourse on European integration also deserves attention. The propaganda generated by President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Campaign was exported successfully to Western Europe, where it supported and even inspired the pro-Europe discourse of the 1950s. Jean Monnet reasoned that ‘the conquest of a new form of energy could be the great collective enterprise of Europeans desiring to live better and live independently’ (Monnet 1976, 494). Consequently, three European ‘wise men’ (Louis Armand from France, Franz Etzel from Germany and Francesco Giordani from Italy) visited the United States to prepare the Euratom

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Figure 10.4 Cover of Achtenvijftig (1957, 33), celebrating ‘the atom’ as a flower of harmony and prosperity

project in 1957 (Winand 1996, 97). They were greeted by an enthusiastic Eisenhower, who told them that ‘European nations had to learn the Biblical precept that to save their lives they must lose them. If the European nations did not join together deterioration and ultimate disaster were inevitable’ (Hewlett and Holl 1989, 431). They were treated to tours of atomic plants and welcomed by an article in the Washington Post entitled ‘Atoms for Europe’ (2 February 1957). This same phrase,

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‘Atoms for Europe’, was embraced by the European Movement, for instance as the title of one of their Dutch booklets, which concludes: An opportunity is being held out to us – one that will not speedily return. [...] If Euratom fails, the peoples of Western Europe, who did not seek to grow closer to one another and had no wish to unite, will be doomed by a fatal tendency to continue down a path that offers very few prospects, becoming yet more separated and yet more alienated from one another. (Atomen voor Europa 1957, 32) Reporting back after their trip to the United States, the three wise men were in no doubt that the ‘atomic era’ would enable the Europeans to boldly go where they had not gone before: While endeavouring to define this objective, we have been aware of the unique chance which the advent of nuclear energy offers our countries. [...] If our countries, guided and stimulated by Euratom, make the necessary effort they will in future command – as the New World does now – abundant and cheap energy supplies, enabling them to enter boldly into the atomic era. (Armand et al. 1957, 13) As indicated earlier, in many ways Euratom was no different from the other European treaties of the day. It was a political deal, aimed as much at benefiting the member states as at promoting the European Idea. The French in particular were anxious not to allow international cooperation to interfere with their national nuclear weapons programme. Consequently, Euratom suffered from the usual wrangling over special conditions, exceptions and national priorities. Yet it was also the product of an unusually optimistic mood in Western Europe. Many Europeans were positively inspired by the Atoms for Peace campaign and ready to apply its evangelism to their own situation after the Second World War. Expo 58, promoting ‘Our Friend the Atom’ as the saviour of international and, in particular, European cooperation, was a huge success. More than 18 million people visited the site in only 186 days (Piette and Pluvinage 2008, 155). The expectations they took home were of a radiant future for the war-battered continent: Atom = Hope = Europe.

Note 1. The Soviet Union soon launched its own propaganda campaign with the slogan ‘Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier.’ See Josephson (1999) and Schmid (2006).

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References Achtenvijftig. 1955. Europa op de Tentoonstelling, 2: 12–13. Achtenvijftig. 1956. De wereld heeft Europa nodig. Europa heeft de wereld nodig, 18: 10–12. Achtenvijftig. 1957. Het atoom en de internationale samenwerking, 24: 8–11. Achtenvijftig. 1957. Europa op de Tentoonstelling, 25: 17–19. Achtenvijftig. 1957. Het internationale paleis voor de wetenschap, 29: 18–19. Achtenvijftig. 1957. Kunstwerken voor de Europalaan, 31: 15–17. Armand, L., F. Etzel and F. Giordani. 1957. A Target for Euratom: Report Submitted at the Request of the Governments of Belgium, France, German Federal Republic, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. May 1957: 13–40. http://www.ena.lu/ report-wise-men- euratom-1957- 020000679.html (accessed 1 March 2010). Burns, A. 1965. Europe after the Rain. London: John Calder. Eisenhower, D. 1953. Speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. 8 December 1953. http://www.eisenhower. archives.gov (accessed 1 March 2010). Europese Beweging. 1957. Atomen voor Europa. Brussels: Weissenbruch. Europese Beweging. 1958. Nieuw Europa 11: 6. Haber, H. 1956. The Walt Disney Story of our Friend the Atom. New York: Simon Shuster. Hewlett, R.G. and J.M. Holl. 1989. Atoms for Peace and War 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission. Berkeley: University of California Press. Howorth, M. 1955. Atom and Eve. London: New World Publications. Humo. 2005. Frans Cools bouwde het Atomium, 3,373: 163–5. Huxley, J. 1959. The Future of Man. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 15/10: 402–4. Josephson, P.R. 1999. Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today. New York: Freedman. Kint, J. 2001. Expo 58 als belichaming van het humanistisch modernisme. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010. Kirst, H.H. 1958. Keiner Kommt Davon: Bericht von den letzten Tagen Europas. Wien: Kurt Desch. Monnet, J. 1976. Mémoires. Paris: Fayard. Piette, V. and G. Pluvinage. 2008. Discovering the World: Visiting Expo ‘58. In Expo 58: Between Utopia and Reality, ed. G. Pluvinage, 155–75. Brussels: Racine. Scheinman, L. 1967. Euratom: Nuclear Integration in Europe. International Conciliation, 563: 7–23. Schmid, S.D. 2006. Celebrating Tomorrow Today: The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union. Social Studies of Science 36: 331–65. Soddy, F. 1909. The Interpretation of Radium. New York: Putnam. Stern. 1958. 11/27. Tousignant, N. 2008. Geopolitics and Spaciality at Expo ‘58. In Expo 58: Between Utopia and Reality, ed. G. Pluvinage, 95–118. Brussels: Racine. Unna, W. 1957. Atoms for Europe. The Washington Post and Times Herald, 2 February: 7.

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Weart, S.R. 1988. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Wells, J.E. 1956. Projekt Atlantropa. Zukunfts-Roman. Balve/Wesf: Hönne. Winand, P. 1996. Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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11 Before Self-Reflexivity: Imperialism and Colonialism in the Early Discourses of European Integration Wolfgang Schmale

Introduction With the wisdom of hindsight we can say that Europe had lost much of its dominance in the world by the end of the First World War; by 1945 there was no longer any room for doubt. France, the proud grande nation, had fallen into dependency on the US in the military and economic fields, whereas less than three decades previously, in 1918, she had taken a seat in the front row of the victors, ending the war with the largest and mightiest army on the continent. In 1945 France’s political position was weak, and she could only achieve her goals with the UK and the US, but not against or without them. Her colonial empire was showing many signs of decline. The same was true of the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal, though they began decolonization only after the end of the Second World War. Germany had lost its colonies, while fascist Italy’s new colonial adventure was in ruins. One might see the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth as an exception, but it, too, was obviously weakened. Since the October Revolution and the foundation of the Soviet Union, Russia was no longer really considered to be a genuine part of Europe, and for many intellectuals the ancient real or imagined divide between Europe and Russia had been revived. In 1945, Europe lay in ruins – politically, economically and psychologically – a shadow of the former proud continent which had considered itself the first among the world’s civilizations. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, more than sixty million people had 186

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been displaced or expelled from their native soil. The genocide of the European Jews was construed as a part of modern totalitarianism that was rooted, for Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in modern European civilization (Levy and Sznaider 2001). Without massive American support the economic reconstruction would have taken much longer. There is a debate about the real impact of American economic aid, and especially the European Recovery Program, but it cannot disguise the overall dependency of the European rescue process on the US in the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. The extermination of the Jews signified the disappearance of a huge social European collective that had managed cultural transfers throughout the whole of Europe. The ideology of nationalism precipitated the expulsion of millions of people. The German case, with its propaganda of the Vertriebenenverbände, was by no means alone. As Tony Judt remarked in his book on Europe after 1945, Europe now consisted of nation states that were ethnically homogeneous to an extent that had never been reached before (Judt 2006, 44). To put it in another way, Europe had reached the lowest degree of European unity in its history. In this context, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that many politicians and intellectuals found it hard to distance themselves from European colonialism and imperialism and the idea of Europe’s mission civilisatrice. But, surprisingly, Europeans continued to build European identity on colonialism and on a colonial rhetoric. It is perhaps more understandable if one considers that in post- conflict situations it can seem easier to reconstruct what was previously in place than to invent something new. How far, then, did European colonial identity reach, and why was it so strong in the first decades of the post-war period? Putting the issue in this way indicates that this chapter will problematize research on the relationship between European integration and decolonization. Thomas Moser has summed up current research hypotheses in his thesis on European integration, decolonization and Eurafrica (Moser 2000). In the Treaty of Rome by which the Six created the European Economic Community, European integration and decolonization were merged through articles 131 to 136. ‘Eurafrica’ constituted only one aspect among many more inherited from colonialism and imperialism. It was closely related to France, and to a less important extent to Belgium, with its roots in a myth, which arose in the late nineteenth century, that there was a special economic constellation tying together Europe and colonized Africa. The EEC members probably benefited more from the Eurafrican Community than African countries did. In a global context, this strategy hindered Communist

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countries from rapidly extending their influence over African countries, or indeed over the whole continent. The question that has been raised less often is whether colonial and imperialist thinking continued to shape European identity, and whether strategies of decolonization like the creation of Eurafrica or, much later, the ‘Barcelona process’ are to be included in this particular tradition of an international European identity. ‘Imperialism’, in this chapter, refers mainly to an enduring European mentality after World War II, which heavily influenced conceptions of European identity in this period. One might ask whether it is appropriate to call it ‘imperialism’. Factors that plead in favour are the feeling of European cultural superiority, the asymmetric conception of economic and political relations, the goal of making a united Europe the third global power between or alongside the USA and the Soviet Union, and the asymmetric nature of thinking inside Europe: for ‘the Six’ usurped the Europe label for themselves, and were consciously taking on the role of representing the ‘true’ Europe. Are we able, even today, to leave behind us the remnants of colonial and imperialist thought? I have recently argued elsewhere that the EC Member States entered a phase of self-reflexivity, which included their identity policy, only in the 1980s (Schmale 2008, chapter 12). Self-reflexivity explicitly refers to a shift in European identity policy, a shift towards the citizens. The Commission and the heads of state and government became aware of the gap between the citizens and the European Community; the problem was no longer Europe’s international identity, but how citizens could identify with the European project.

The interwar period 1918–39 During the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1918, soldiers from Senegal, Madagascar, Morocco and Vietnam served in the occupation army. Although the numbers of these soldiers who came from the colonies were reduced when the Versailles Treaty came into force, a vivid and hatred-filled debate had started not only in Germany but also in Italy, Britain and other countries. Against a background of racism, people considered the presence of these ‘black’ men – they drew little distinction between black Africans and those coming from North Africa or Asia – as a humiliation not only of Germany but also of the whole of Europe. Some made prophecies about the colonization of Europe by ‘the black’, and this fear was enhanced

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by the fact that more than 650,000 soldiers who served in the war were non-Europeans, and another 400,000 were used as workers in the factories. For the first time European superiority was being questioned in Europe itself. This was a propagandist and racist discourse, but its far-reaching consequences should not be underestimated. American citizens of German origin organized, in February 1921 in the USA, a demonstration against this ‘black shame’, which was attended by 12,000 people (Mass 2009). And, as in former comparable situations, such as the ‘Ottoman threat’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the existence of a perceived external danger served the purpose of profiling European self- consciousness, and its identity. Europe, or the Occident, the Abendland, to use the ambivalent German expression (Faber 1979), was in danger and it was essential to come to its defence (Dorowin 1991). This opinion was shared not only by rightwing political parties and movements, but also by a wider range of conservatives. The mainstream opinion was probably best expressed by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of Pan-Europa, which was to become a Europe-wide movement. In his book of the same name, first published in 1923, he included a map of the world showing the five principal political and economic areas in the world: the British Commonwealth, ‘Panamerica’, ‘Paneuropa’, East Asia and the Soviet Union. The British Commonwealth area covered the colonies in Africa and Asia, while the Pan-European area excluded the UK but included African, South American and Asian colonies. So one of the leading and influential representatives of the numerous European movements, associations and initiatives of the interwar period, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, apparently did not see any reason to end colonialism and colonial thinking. He spoke explicitly of ‘the European continent and its African colonial empire’ (Coudenhove-Kalergi 1926, 21). Some paragraphs later, he argued that ‘Europe has definitely lost its global hegemony – but at the same time not its independence nor its colonial empires, nor its culture, nor its future’ (23). Although these few remarks cannot claim to provide a representative picture of European political opinions after World War I, they do show that the idea of Europe was not restricted to geographic Europe, but was extended to include the colonies. The relationship between the European continent and the colonies continued to be one of asymmetry. Europe’s plans for its future usually reckoned on the continuation of a colonial relationship; independence was rarely foreseen. Although

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Eurafrica may have been a special case (Moser 2000), the asymmetric European perspective, growing from Europe’s conviction of its superiority, dominated the colonial discourse.

European resistance movements, colonial and imperialist thought Resistance movements during World War II also produced many plans for European unity, and, although these movements generally adopted democratic positions when discussing Europe’s prospects, they too avoided abandoning colonial rhetoric. The anti- colonialism of resistance movements (Moser 2000, 67) was not necessarily identical with non- colonial thinking. How much does the idea of reconstructing a great and powerful Europe owe to colonial and imperialist discourses? A choice of quotations taken from Walter Lipgens’ anthology of resistance movement documents gives an impression of an enduring discourse inherited from colonialism and imperialism.

Belgium In the first issue of La Voix des Belges (10 August 1941) the Mouvement National Belge argued: In 843 Europe was broken in two at Verdun. In 1916 – such are terrible lessons of history – the descendants of the warriors of Louis the German and Charles the Bald fought a fierce battle at Verdun to decide who should possess a fragment of Lothair’s ancient kingdom, Alsace-Lorraine. What a fine thing it would be if, in 1943, at Verdun, Europe were to come to its senses and re- establish a unity that would be the foundation of its future greatness and power! (Lipgens 1985, 1: 224; emphasis added) The text establishes a close link between ‘unity’ and ‘greatness and power’. It apparently did not occur to the writer to link ‘unity’ with goals other than ‘greatness and power’, for example prosperity and freedom for Europeans. La Wallonie Libre (no. 161, probably June 1944) published an article on ‘France as an element of European reconstruction’: The reconstruction of a free and united Europe would have seemed an impossible task if there had not been found among the ruins a

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corner-stone massive enough to serve as a foundation for the edifice of the future. [...] This first, too brief, summary of French recovery shows that Europe can rely once again on the nation devoted to humanity and reason which for a thousand years has generously expended its efforts in advancing civilization (Lipgens 1985, 1: 238; emphasis added). La Wallonie Libre is thus compliant with France’s consciousness of its global mission civilisatrice.

France With regard to the future Europe of the Six, the French case holds special interest. According to Lipgens, ‘in 1942 a socialist-republican resistance group was formed in Toulouse with support from the large colony of Italian anti-Fascist and Spanish republican exiles’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 289). The movement published an underground journal entitled Libérer et Fédérer. In the first number, which was tellingly dated 14 July 1942, the group claimed: ‘A revolution which, like that of 1789, will stir the people to its uttermost depths and bring forth new élites, a new mystique, a fresh vitality: which will again place France in the vanguard of civilization, freedom and justice’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 291). This view was rooted in the traditional, if not classical, French conviction that France was obliged to accomplish a mission civilisatrice. Similarly, Combat, the ‘leading organization of the resistance in the Southern Zone’, with Henri Frenay, Georges Bidault and Pierre-Henri Teitgen among its members, echoed the same sentiments in July–September 1942 when it stated: ‘The revolution that we bear within us is the dawn of a new civilization’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 291, 293). In April 1943, Paul Bastid, a former minister and a radical socialist, who was to join the Conseil National de la Résistance, seemed to distance himself from traditional colonial rhetoric when he wrote: Europe, the nurse of civilization, the wider homeland of all Frenchmen, this privileged corner of the earth which the superior races of mankind must unite to organize and defend – all these slogans have an alluring sound. They make us think of the United States of Europe [...] or the European federation [...]. Some would extend the bounds of our tiny continent across the Mediterranean and turn it into Eurafrica. (Lipgens 1985, 1: 301)

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But he then went on to discuss alternative future solutions in the cause of world peace, and concluded: ‘Europe is still the nerve- centre of the globe, and the world situation depends on security in Europe’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 303). Daniel Villey, a professor of political economy at Poitiers University and member of the French Resistance, was invited in July 1943 by the Comité Général d’Études, an arm of the Conseil National de la Résistance, to contribute to the debate on the coming peace. Villey, too, seemed to be distancing himself from colonial views, but in reality, as the following quotation demonstrates, he was unable to imagine a world without colonies. On the one hand, he argued: ‘It is unthinkable that nations should remain sovereign in economic and customs matters.’ On the other hand, he advocated, in the interests of the ‘maintenance of the national existence and political independence of small countries, the present distribution of colonial empires despite its economic irrationality, [and] frontiers that respect the nationality principle’, but he added that ‘all these are only tolerable if the importance of economic frontiers is systematically reduced.’ He further argued: ‘The economic exploitation of colonies should be put on an international basis, and international trade should be regulated not by the nations concerned but by a single body, in the sole interest of the world as a whole and the exploitation of its resources’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 308). He was thus proposing reform of the system of exploitation but not the abolition of colonies. In view of many of those who also belonged to the Conseil National de la Résistance and to later governments in various functions, the idea of ‘Eurafrica’ should be maintained. French mission civilisatrice and colonialism are not necessarily two sides of the same coin: one of the main resistance groups, LibérationSud, made a clear distinction between the two. In the journal Libération. Organe des Mouvements Unis de Résistance, it published a leading article on 1 September 1943 condemning imperialism: ‘Imperialism in all its forms must die, whether it be military, economic, colonial or racist.’ In the following sentence, however, it supported the leading French role in the world: ‘We repeat, France’s greatest victory will not be won by armies but by ideas. God grant that, as we proclaimed to the world the Rights of Man in 1789, we may this time bring to it the new gospel of the Rights of Nations’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 311). René Courtin, professor of political economy at Montpellier University, was the rapporteur for economic questions at the Comité Général d’Études. In the summer of 1943, he was preparing a report on post-war economic policy for the Committee. It was first distributed

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clandestinely (in November 1943), and then printed in Algiers in 1944. Courtin wrote: Perhaps it can be safely suggested that France might explore the possibility of forming an economic union with the West European countries viz. Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg and if possible Switzerland. Our colonies and those of the Low Countries would be economically integrated with the bloc thus formed. [ ... ] We should be chary of accepting the idea, frequently put forward, of an open- door regime for the whole of Africa, as we should then risk losing not only economic but political control of our colonial empire. Moreover, goods produced by countries outside the continental bloc would tend to be nationalized in the colonies and re- exported thence so as to avoid paying customs duty. There would have to be strict import controls in the colonies and in France itself, and this would have vexatious effects on our trade with foreign countries and the empire. (Lipgens 1985, 1: 327–8) Finally, the historian Joseph Hours, who contributed to Témoignage Chrétien and to Les Cahiers Politiques, wrote in January 1944 in the latter journal that ‘a European federation could not exist without an economic base that can only be provided by union with Africa. France is better able than any other nation to solve these problems by her example and by contribution of her colonial empire’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 338). Hours did not call into question the endurance of that empire.

Italy In his ‘The United States of Europe and the various political trends’ of 1941–42, Altiero Spinelli wrote: ‘Given Europe’s predominance in the world, even today, as a centre of civilization, and the fact that its quarrels have always made it the epicentre of world conflict, the final pacification of our continent under federal institutions would be the greatest step towards world peace that could be taken at the present juncture’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 486; emphasis added). In the first issue of L’Italia Libera (January 1943), the new Partito d’Azione, a bourgeois–democratic party, published its program under the title ‘Seven Points’. It was stated that there ‘should be a juridical community of states, with the necessary organs and means to set up and apply a system of collective security, the international protection of minorities and a fairer, more progressive application of the colonial mandate’ (Lipgens 1985, 1: 493; emphasis

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added). The party proposed a modification of colonialism, but not its abrogation. This list of quotations could be continued, but its aim in the context of this chapter is simply to illustrate that core elements of a colonial discourse were not automatically discharged from the discourse of European unity. So it should not come as a surprise that politicians and intellectuals were, even after the Second World War, convinced that Europe’s ‘predominance was given in the world’, and that it remained the ‘centre of civilization’.

The ‘rescue’ of colonial and imperialist thought in the 1940s and early 1950s On 14 May 1947, in London, the socialist Victor Gollancz referred directly to Europe’s civilizing mission in a speech on European matters, which was delivered to an audience of 8,000. That mission, he said, consisted mainly of persuading the world to practise liberty. Did Europe, in 1947, enjoy enough standing in the world to justify such a statement? Another renowned Europeanist, Henri Brugmans, at the famous The Hague Congress of European Federalists, said in May 1948 that Europe should re- conquer independence in the world and play the role of a global mediator. To do so, Europe should and must unite (Noack 1986, 229–30). In Rome, in November 1948, on the occasion of the second congress of the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes, the same Brugmans repeated that ‘humanity counts on Europe to give an example for an inner revolution and for a just and free social order.’ ‘This is our raison d’être, this is our mission.’1 The Belgian European PaulHenri Spaak, future first president of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, wrote in 1948 in a Belgian review that Europe must unite unconditionally; otherwise it would lose what remained of its former reputation and greatness. He predicted the decline of European civilization if Europeans did not unite (Brückner et al. 1993, 32). In May 1950, the French socialist party, the SFIO, held its fortysecond congress. The French socialists considered European unification a precondition for a new leading role for Europe in the world (Becker 1986, 255–6). Robert Schuman, in his famous declaration of 9 May 1950, announced that ‘The contribution which an organised and active Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.’ He then proposed the ‘pooling’ of French and German coal and steel production, a pooling which would become the European Community for Steel and Coal (ECSC). Common production,

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he continued, ‘will be offered to the entire world, without distinction or exclusion, as a contribution to raising living standards and promoting world peace. Europe, with her resources thus increased, will be able to pursue one of her essential tasks: the development of the African continent’ (Harryvan and Van der Harst 1997, 61). This refers to particular French political and economic interests, but also to ‘Eurafrica’ and other generally recognizable European topics. In 1953, in a longer academic article published in Europa-Archiv, Raymond-Jean Guiton, professor of law and political sciences at the Sorbonne, argued that the European integration process could not be limited to the continent; only when extended to the colonial territories could Europe expect a ‘hopeful future as a world power’ (Guiton 1953, 6,094). On 21 January 1955, the fifth congress of the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes was received at the Paris Town Hall. In his speech, Bernard Lafay, President of the Paris Conseil Municipal, wondered whether this Europe, which for 400 years had advanced the world’s material civilization, could preserve ‘cette place au soleil de l’histoire’ when it had already lost its global leadership.2 In the resolution adopted by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Member States of the ECSC at the Messina conference of 1–2 June 1955, it was stated that ‘They [the ministers] consider that it is necessary to work for the establishment of a united Europe by the development of common institutions, the progressive fusion of national economies, the creation of a common market and the progressive harmonisation of their social policies,’ and that ‘Such a policy seems to them indispensable if Europe is to maintain her position in the world, regain her influence and prestige and achieve a continuing increase in the standard of living of her population’ (Harryvan and Van der Harst 1997, 92, emphasis added). The last sentence links with and gives equal emphasis to an internal European question, that of increasing the standard of living, and Europe’s position and role in the world. Of course, the rhetoric of these statements is not that of the imperialist age: it has been moderated. However, the core argument, of Europe’s cultural superiority, and that the world would not continue without Europe’s contribution, has been safeguarded. The tradition of this mode of thinking was too strong. The results of World War II obviously moderated the imperialist rhetoric, but the step towards self-reflexivity had not been taken, and that meant no decolonization of the imperialist rhetoric. These early examples can be taken as representative of an average position regarding the relationship between post-war Europe and the

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colonies, or the world’s need for the European, and in particular for French, civilization. This position is confirmed by the discourse of those 600 European deputies who were members, between 1949 and 1957, of the European assemblies then in existence: the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Common Assembly of the ECSC, the socalled ‘Assembly Ad-hoc’ that had a brief in 1952–3 to prepare the planned European Political Community, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Western Union (from 1955). All these assemblies held their sittings at Strasbourg; they included among their deputies many former ministers and prime ministers. One of the main problems discussed by these deputies was that of European decline. The benchmark was the leading position of Europe in the world in 1900; in comparison to that happy situation, the late 1940s and the early 1950s did indeed represent a decline. This analysis had a direct impact on European identity: Europe would need to marshal all its forces to halt the decline and recapture a leading position. It was evidently thought unimaginable that Europe should accept a role as a less important political force with reduced influence, unable to maintain its colonies, and ceasing to continue to Europeanize the world as it had done for four and a half centuries (Trunk 2007).

Enduring racial constructions of ‘the European’ Imperialist and colonial discourses were supplemented by others on the ‘nature’ of European mankind (Schmale 2001), which reached back to antiquity. The argument was drawn up mainly along typical self-andother lines, with a European self clearly differing from non-European others. A frequently cited example is the Histories of Herodotus, who described the differences between Greeks and Persians, and posed a picture of a Greek civilization superior to the Persian. The superiority of a given civilization was also grounded in climate and, closely tied to climate, in the ‘natural’ competences of people living in a certain geographic area. So climate and geography played an important role when writers explained why the Greeks made better warriors than others. The fundamental structure of this discourse about the Greeks was safeguarded by later generations of commentators. The Middle Ages added some elements, as did the early modern period. In the eighteenth century, the scientist Carl Linnaeus began to refer to Europeans as homo europaeus. His descriptions of Europeans, Africans, American Indians and Asians included comparative racial components; eighteenth- century anthropology was establishing a racial discourse on human beings. The nineteenth century added a racist ideology, which

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largely served imperialism, and which was merged with Christianity. Therefore, twentieth- century Europeans did not need to invent racial or racist discourses, but they did radicalize them. Any expectation that such discourses would disappear after the end of the Second World War and Nazi anti-Semitic racism would be disappointed. Since the early modern period, then, ideas on European identity included or were based on a conception of the homo europaeus. Did racial discourses, and the distinctions they established between Europeans and non-Europeans, continue to shape European identity after 1945? Racial discourses still dominated anthropology. In Europe – and beyond – a handbook published in the interwar period by Eugen Fischer, Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz introduced the division of mankind into three groups: the ‘Europides’, the ‘Negroides’ and the ‘Mongolides’, with an implication of Europe’s superiority. Even UNESCO, which issued several anti-racist statements from 1950 to 1967, did not delete the word ‘race’ but maintained it in a biological sense ‘as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens’ (Lipphardt 2009, 167). The international discourse took account of between three and five of those ‘groups of population’. In the early 1950s the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes established a Commission Internationale Europe Outre-Mer, which studied, among other things, the aptitude of Europeans for living and working in tropical zones. The discussion was related to the ‘Assembly Ad-hoc’ and the project of a European Political Community, as well as to debates directed by the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Italian Paolo Vittorelli was charged with assembling a report on the ‘movements of persons between the metropolitan and overseas territories of the European political community’. This report was submitted to and discussed by the Commission in spring 1954.3 During the 1940s and 1950s, those European federalists constituted a real pressure group, whose aim was a European federation or federal state. Their influence on the ongoing process of European integration slowly declined after the ECSC had been founded, but it remained an important intellectual movement that regained force and influence with the 1989 realignment in Europe’s affairs. There is no racism in that report of 1954 or the discussions around it, but its raison d’être was based on the presumption of biological qualities that are specific to Europeans or the ‘white race’ (Vitorelli 1954, 3). In principle, the report states, the liberty of movement of persons applied to both directions, from Europe into the overseas territories and vice versa. Nevertheless, the report only dealt with movements of Europeans

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from Europe into the colonies (the expression ‘colony’ is avoided and replaced by ‘overseas territory’ or even ‘European overseas territories’). There is no developed reason offered for this approach except that it was not expected that an influx from the colonies to Europe would constitute a problem in the near future; therefore only reasons why Europeans might be motivated to move are discussed (unemployment, demographic growth, etc.). After the introduction, the report continues with a first chapter entitled ‘The Theories’. The author quotes ethnological, colonial and geographical studies from the US, Australia and various European countries, published in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s. Vittorelli quotes a longer passage in a memoir written by Fred Van der Linden and presented on 15 June 1953 to the ‘Section des Sciences Morales et Politiques de l’Institut Colonial Belge’. Van der Linden assumes that the whites are predominant, and enjoy a technical superiority over the indigenous. He asks how to preserve the prestige of the Europeans (in tropical and subtropical colonies) under difficult social and racial conditions (Vitorelli 1954, 4). Later, Vittorelli quotes another study carried out by an Australian scholar, Sir Raphael Cilento, who attributed the ‘degeneration of the Whites’ in Australian Queensland to hygienic conditions and to ‘promiscuity with the indigenous population’. Cilento argued that the reduction of that promiscuity had contributed to a considerable augmentation of the production of sugar in 1922 in comparison to 1905–6 (Vitorelli 1954, 12). Vittorelli then deals with the problem of racial segregation, an instrument that he fully rejects. Between the lines, and sometimes explicitly, one can read about the superiority of the Europeans or the whites. Where the indigenous population capitulates because of the unfavourable circumstances, the white or European is driven to success because he enjoys taking risks or because he occupies a higher cultural level (Vitorelli 1954, 23). Indigenous cultures appear as underdeveloped, even if that expression is avoided. The significance of indigenous or local traditions is not raised, and neither is the question of whether the indigenous civilizations have the same right to be respected as Western cultures. The European or Western model of civilization is not questioned. The European’s assumed character (for example, taking risks) is taken as a mark of a superior civilization. That the European Community of the Six, in becoming a European Political Community, should encompass overseas territories is not doubted. The report was written in the same spirit that underpinned the Union française in those years.

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When the plans for a European Political Community fell through, this ‘Commission Internationale Europe Outre-Mer’ stopped its work, but was not dissolved. In 1958, the Secretary General of the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes, J.C. Demachy, asked the commission to give its opinion on a declaration prepared by Germain Desbœuf, a member of the Union. Desbœuf thought it necessary to declare that all races, civilizations and nations were equal, and that Europeans would contribute in a spirit of equality to the evolution of all of them. He advocated a clear- cut break with colonialism.4

Conclusion The European post-war discourse merged traditional patterns of colonial and sometimes imperialist thinking with the concept of Europe as a third force between the US and the Soviet Union. Walter Hallstein, the first President of the Commission of the EEC, repeated as often as possible that the Community should play an eminent role in the world, and that it had to accomplish a mission with regard to developing countries. The Commissioner Hans von der Groeben (1958–70) called this Europe’s destiny. In 1964, Hallstein explained what the world and mankind owed to Europe. Europe had contributed to making the world more noble and more human, thanks to its philosophy, its sciences, its poetry and fine arts, its technical knowledge, its political philosophy and practice, its values such as liberty, human dignity, individual responsibility, and the right to national self- determination. He presented the EEC as a universal model for a coming international order. Hallstein alleged all this because he was listing good reasons for European unity (Rochard 2003). In Europe’s relations with the rest of the world, Europe’s cultural and moral superiority is a leitmotif in Europe’s discourse on European unity and European identity. Hallstein’s discourse was that of the Enlightenment. To put it another way, he went beyond imperialism, but not beyond the Enlightenment’s deep conviction that European civilization was superior, and the most developed in the world. The turning point in this discourse was represented by the ‘Declaration on European Identity’, issued by the Conference of Heads of State or Government held in Copenhagen on 14 December 1973. As far the nine member states were concerned, decolonization had been accomplished, at least on a formal and legal level, notwithstanding the cases of the British Commonwealth (Rhodesia became independent in 1980, Belize in 1981, and various Caribbean isles and states) and the special status

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of Greenland (which became autonomous in 1985). The declaration stated that the ‘Nine member countries of the European Communities have decided [...] to define the European Identity.’ It was further stipulated that ‘defining European Identity involves [...] assessing the extent to which the Nine are already acting together in relation to the rest of the world and the responsibilities which result from this.’ Thirteen of the twenty-two paragraphs by which European identity is defined are devoted to the EEC’s relations with the ‘rest of the world’. Now the key phrases are ‘international obligations’, ‘contribute to ensuring that international relations have a more just basis’, ‘share prosperity equitably’, ‘promote harmonious and constructive relations with third countries’, ‘long-standing links’, ‘historic links’, ‘fruitful co- operation’, and the like (Kreis 2009). This 1973 document can be seen as one of self-reflexivity regarding the relationship between European unity, European unification, European identity and the global context. Self-reflexivity, in this context, meant that the EC had drawn the necessary consequences from World War II; it meant the definition of new coordinates for European identity and the part played in European identity by the former colonial world.

Notes 1. Archives of the European Union, Florence, UEF 100/1, twelve typewritten pages, here p. 1. 2. Archives of the EU, Florence, UEF 104/2: Réception à l’Hôtel de Ville du Ve Congrès de l’Union Européenne des Fédéralistes le Vendredi 21 Janvier 1955, à 17 heures 45, Discours de M. Bernard Lafay, Président du Conseil Municipal, three typewritten pages, here p. 2. 3. Archives of the EU, Florence, UEF 170, report Vittorelli: UEF 170/3 (in French, thirty-four typewritten pages). Cited hereafter as Vitorelli 1954. 4. Archives of the EU, Florence, UEF 170/3, ‘Projet présenté par Germain DESBOEUF’, two typewritten pages.

References Becker, J.-J. 1986. L’opinion de gauche française et les débuts de l’Europe. In Histoire des débuts de la construction européenne (mars 1948- mai 1950), ed. Raymond Poidevin, 241–59. Brussels: Bruylant. Brückner, M., R. Maier and A. Przyklenk, eds. 1993. Der Europa-Ploetz. Freiburg: Ploetz. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R.N. 1926. Paneuropa. 4th edn. Vienna: Paneuropa. Dorowin, H. 1991. Retter des Abendlands: Kulturkritik im Vorfeld des europäischen Faschismus. Stuttgart: Metzler.

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Faber, R. 1979. Abendland. Ein ‘politischer Kampfbegriff’. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. Guiton, R.-J. 1953. Die Französische Union und die Einigung Europas/Das Kolonialproblem als Aufgabe der Europaforschung. Europa-Archiv 20.11.1953: 6089–97. Harryvan, A.G. and J. van der Harst, eds. 1997. Documents on European Union. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Judt, Tony. 2006. Geschichte Europas von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Beck. Kreis, G. 2009. L’émergence de la notion d’identité’ dans la politique de la Communauté Européenne. Quelques réflexions autour la Déclaration du sommet de Copenhague de 1973. Relations Internationales 140: 53–72. Levy, D. and N. Sznaider. 2001. Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter. Der Holocaust. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lipgens, W., ed. 1985. 1. Documents on the History of European Integration. Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lipphardt, V. 2009. Von der ‘europäischen Rasse’ zu den ‘Europiden’. Wissen um die biologische Beschaffenheit des Europäers in Sach- und Lehrbüchern, 19501989. In Der Europäer – Ein Konstrukt. Wissensbestände, Diskurse, Praktiken, eds L. Bluche, V. Lipphardt and K.K. Patel, 156–86. Göttingen: Wallstein. Mass, S. 2009. Weißer Mann – was nun? Ethnische Selbstverortung zwischen kontinentaler Solidarität und nationaler Identifikation nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. In Der Europäer – Ein Konstrukt. Wissensbestände, Diskurse, Praktiken, eds L. Bluche, V. Lipphardt and K.K. Patel, 57–72. Göttingen: Wallstein. Moser, T. 2000. Europäische Integration, Dekolonisation, Eurafrika. Eine historische Analyse über die Entstehungsbedingungen der Eurafrikanischen Gemeinschaft von der Weltwirtschaftskrise bis zum Jaunde-Vertrag, 1929-1963. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Noack, P. 1986. Der Einfluss der Intellektuellen in der Frühphase der Europäischen Bewegung. In Histoire des débuts de la construction européenne (mars 1948 – mai 1950), ed. R. Poidevin, 225–40. Brussels: Bruylant. Rochard, B. 2003. L’Europe des commissaires. Réflexions sur l’identité européenne des traités de Rome au traité d’Amsterdam. Brussels: Bruylant. Schmale, W. 2001. The Making of Homo Europaeus. Comparative European History Review 1: 165–83. Schmale, W. 2008. Geschichte und Zukunft der Europäischen Identität. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Trunk, A. 2007. Europa, ein Ausweg. Politische Eliten und europäische Identität in den 1950er Jahren. Munich: Oldenbourg. Vitorelli, P. 1954. Archives of the European Union, Florence, UEF 170, report Vittorelli: UEF 170/3 (in French, thirty-four typewritten pages).

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Part IV Shoah, War and European Civilization

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12 Holocaust Literature and the Shaping of European Identity after the Second World War: the Case of Jorge Semprún Karen-Margrethe L. Simonsen

Notre heritage européen n’a de signification vitale que si nous sommes capables d’en déduire un avenir. [...] c’est dans les camps nazis que s’est forge la première ébauche d’un esprit européen. (Jorge Semprún in Semprún and De Villepin 2005, 84, 96) War is radical conflict. Therefore the notion that it can become the root not just of one-sided identity (us against the enemy) but also of a common identity (us and the enemy) is apparently paradoxical. Yet this is not a new idea. In 1828 Goethe speculated that the Napoleonic wars, which had split Europe, might create a new basis for a common European spirit. Presumably, this common spirit would be created because of the war and not despite the war. In many accounts of the meaning of the two World Wars of the twentieth century, it is presupposed that the wars destroyed a previously existing ‘European’ spirit and humanism. As Tony Judt has stated, ‘evocations and memoirs of pre-World War I typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart’ (Judt 2008, 3). While World War I was perhaps a greater shock, World War II exceeded the first war in loss of lives and cruelty. Considering the enormity of losses (of lives, homes and stability) and the radical nature of the enmity the war aroused, the post-World War II period was surprisingly optimistic and infused with a constructive sentiment. Under the heading of ‘Never again!’ politicians gathered to build the legislative foundation for a new, collaborative 205

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Europe. However, this new Europe had a long and complex road ahead of it. In his book Europe. A Cultural History, Peter Rietbergen explains this situation in the following terms: When the history of Europe had run its course to and through the Second World War, a climate of liberation and reconstruction and the demand for peace and unity followed. Yet, a new divisive element quickly became manifest: the estrangement between, on the one hand a group of basically democratic states in western Europe and, on the other hand, a number of countries in central and eastern Europe which had been brought under the totalitarian power of communist regimes, resulting, soon, in a new war, the ‘Cold War’. In that situation in ‘the west’ a ‘dream of Europe’ developed, perhaps even had to develop. But while most politicians viewed this new Europe primarily as a political and military necessity for which economic reconstruction was a prerequisite, many also felt that to win over the citizens of their states an appeal to old, partly forgotten images and ideas might prove helpful. (Rietbergen 1998, 479) There are three important points to be made here. First, despite the common goal of creating a new and peaceful Europe, European unity was always divided internally, not just between the East and the West but in numerous other ways. The dream of a unified Europe should not be seen as hovering above the muddle of cultural and national differences; rather, it should be seen as constructed by these differences. Just as the division of Europe into East and West was determined by a global situation, Europe’s identity today cannot be understood independently of its constant interaction with the world. Europe is not ‘one’ and it is not ‘isolated’. Second, in the immediate post-war situation, while economic and political collaboration was seen as the most important means of creating lasting peace in Europe, the necessity of a common cultural identity was already acknowledged at this stage. Political unity and cultural unity might be two different things which are difficult to integrate, but it is impossible to grasp the complexity of European unity if politics and culture are not seen as interwoven. Third, Rietbergen states that the strategy for creating a common cultural identity in the immediate post-war period was to restore ‘old’ European values, mainly ideas (such as human rights) drawn from the age of Enlightenment, thereby ‘bypassing’ the devastating experience of the war and deliberately omitting the question of the consequences

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of the war for the old European ‘images and ideas’. However, the building of the new Europe was not a pure restoration of former European civilization. It has to be understood as a response to the traumatic experiences of war. The question is what specific role the war experiences played for the foundation of this new Europe. To what political uses can war experiences and narratives about war experiences be put? In order to address this question, it is necessary to understand the relationship between memory and history, that is, to understand how different individual stories can inspire the construction of collective identity. This article outlines two different approaches to this issue. First, however, a brief comment on the specific role of the Holocaust is appropriate. The Holocaust is what makes the Second World War so different from other war experiences. Today, it seems impossible to understand the development of Europe without reflecting on the significance of the Holocaust. It is, in the words of Habermas, a moral obligation for all of us to keep remembering, for ‘even those born later have grown up in a form of existence in which those things were possible’ (Habermas 1988, 43–4). According to Habermas, we are not linked by accident to the Holocaust, we are ‘linked inwardly’ (44). But, at the same time, doubt has been cast on the very possibility of ‘remembering the Holocaust’. The Holocaust was such a devastating experience that it appears ‘to resist incorporation into public historical memory, into our shared public narrative of the past’ (Buckler 1996, 1). There seems to be a strong tension between the ethical imperative and the radical impossibility of collective remembrance. This tension is so fundamental and strong that it does not seem possible to resolve. However, while we are caught up in general consideration of this dilemma, history may resolve it for us. The further we get, historically, from the event of the Holocaust, the more obvious it becomes that the event is not outside history, but that it is or will eventually become – whether we like it or not – part of history and will be interpreted to serve even the most specific political aims. This does not mean that we have moved beyond the ethical dilemma of how to remember and represent the Holocaust, but it does mean that we have to consider the significance of historical contexts for interpretations of the Holocaust and what pragmatic goals the remembrance of the Holocaust may serve. This is perhaps not obvious yet. In a recent book, Tony Judt writes that the twentieth century is on the path to ‘becoming a moral memory palace’ or ‘a serviceable Chamber of Horrors’ (Judt 2009, 4). There are plenty of memory sites (museums, monuments, etc.),

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but, according to Judt, this ‘lapidary’ form of representation rests too much on the difference between ‘now’ and ‘then’. Therefore it does not ‘bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it’ (Judt 2009, 4). Today, we seem to be in the paradoxical situation that while memories (in words, pictures, monuments, etc.) accumulate at high speed, historical consciousness and the desire to learn from history are growing considerably smaller. There are even critics and historians of the Holocaust who think it is offensive to ask about the ‘future of the Holocaust’.1 But remembrance severed from historical development risks turning into oblivion for the next generation.

Out of the memory palace: the Holocaust as a new beginning Whereas the reconstruction of Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War built on the code words of ‘never again’, some of the new ‘uses’ of the Holocaust do not only say this, but also that the experience of the Holocaust itself can constitute a positive building block in the new Europe. The Holocaust is not just the ‘end of all modernity’. It is the beginning of a new kind of modernity. For example, this is obvious in the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (2000). The Stockholm Forum was unique in the sense that it united political leaders on the highest level, historians, social scientists and writers from forty- eight countries with the specific aim of obligating countries to commemorate the Holocaust, to spread knowledge of it through education and to do everything possible to prevent it from happening again. In the last and eighth paragraph of the declaration, presented on the last day of the forum, the representatives of the governments that participated pledged to ‘plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past’. The intriguing key word here is ‘amidst’: how can a better future be planted in the very midst of tragedy? Two of the most interesting suggestions have been made by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, and by Ulrich Beck. Levy and Sznaider point to the fact that the Holocaust is a highly diverse, transnational event. Despite the fact that the Holocaust has ‘become a measure for humanist and universalist identifications’ and a general moral ‘touchstone’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 88), the understanding of this event varies according to the context. In that sense, the Holocaust cannot be understood as a self- contained event. In a critique of Pierre Nora’s

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nostalgic isolation of lieux de memoire, Levy and Sznaider focus instead on the future- oriented use of memory. By comparing the interpretations of the Holocaust in the USA, Israel and Germany, they show that the Holocaust is not one thing but is different in every country. They move the focus from the atrocities themselves to how ‘the heirs’ cope with the atrocities. This is also the case for Ulrich Beck, who identifies a direct link between the Holocaust and the new cosmopolitan Europe: [Cosmopolitan Europe] was a reaction against the traumatic experience of European values being perverted. Cosmopolitan Europe was born in the bitter realization that the idea of what constitutes the ‘truly human’ implies the subhuman. And that when ‘truly human’ becomes the basis of a nation state, the result is a totalitarian regime that seeks to exclude, to separate out, to remodel, or to annihilate all people who can’t or don’t want to fit its ideal. (Beck 2003, 33) According to Beck, the collective memory of the Holocaust provides our ‘clearest archive’ for the future. The vision of a cosmopolitan Europe thus originates in the Holocaust. It calls for a Europe that does not exclude and cut out, but that is, rather, based on reconciliation, sympathy and what Beck calls a ‘logic of inclusive oppositions’ (Beck 2003, 37). While cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan traits of European culture thus constitute a guarantee against future horrors, these defences are reinforced by different institutions, among which legal ones are the most important. Just as for Levy and Sznaider, for Beck the most important documents of European cosmopolitanism are those of the Nuremberg Trials (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 93; Beck 2003, 34). Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal states that crimes against humanity legitimate a supranational or transnational interference in national sovereignty. One of the problems of fighting Nazism was its legality within German national borders. Accordingly, there was no institutional locus of resistance against the totalitarian power of Nazism, either within Germany or outside. The ‘cosmopolitan’ aspiration of Article 6 is founded in the fact that it provides a legal foundation for international interference. According to Beck’s powerful master narrative, European identity after the war has therefore been based on a close link between the

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traumatic experiences of the Holocaust and the idea of cosmopolitanism. As he states it, ‘Europe’s collective memory of the Holocaust provides the basis of the EU’ (Beck 2003, 35). Beck does not describe or analyse the process through which the transition from the memory of holocaust to the new Europe occurs or has occurred, but he leaves us in no doubt about the necessity of a progressive memory. The alternatives outlined by Beck to conscious cosmopolitanism are either a federation in which Europe would consist of a list of nation states or a federal superstate. Both of these alternatives are false, and they are deeply anti-European in the sense that they deny the cosmopolitan roots of European culture. There are apparently no shortcuts to creating a modern European identity. All routes lead through the gas chambers. All the stories about the Holocaust, all the cultural testimonies – whether they are fictional or real – when considered in this light serve the same function. They become part of the general regenerative work of mourning. However, it is necessary to ask what kind of truth appears in the confrontation with the Holocaust, and whether it is in fact possible to make a direct linkage between the experiences of the Holocaust and the new cosmopolitanism. How do the many different experiences of the Holocaust mingle into one story that can generate a collective story? And what do we learn from such stories? A received truth of psychoanalysis it that it is dangerous to look into the abyss of the past. We risk opening up an accumulative process of disintegration rather than focusing and developing history. Ulrich Beck sees the Nuremberg trials as somehow summing up the past in a way that enables us to move on, but Shoshana Felman writes in her book The Juridical Unconscious that some of the most important trials of history, when they are properly examined, reveal not ‘the curtain’s fall, not the closure of the case or a catharsis finally obtained by a legal resolution but here again only the terrifying opening, only the emptiness of an ungraspable abyss’. It is an abyss between ‘legality and justice [ ... ] an abyss between contradictory experiences of the significance of law enforcement and between conflicting views of the use or the abuse of the power yielded to the justice system’ (Felman 2002, 90). On this reading, the Nuremberg trials did not put an end to the story of the Holocaust; they formed a new kind of beginning. Since the historical trials, and especially from the 1960s, stories about the Holocaust have accumulated intensely. Many different kinds of memories, told in every possible language and genre and from every corner of Europe,

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have been produced. But how will they affect history, meaning the way we understand our present and future?

Learning from history? Among the survivors of the Holocaust, it was quite common to doubt the possibility of telling their story: ‘For what, when all is said and done, was there to tell? To us as well it began to sound like something imaginary, which ought not to be believed’ (Aharon Appelfeld, quoted in Buckler 1996, 5). The enormity and character of the Holocaust makes experiences of it seem like a fiction: this cannot be true. One counterstrategy to the threat of ‘fictionality’ is to adopt an objective, realistic and factual style. This was the strategy of Primo Levi. He wanted to show the reality of the camp, just as it was, without any emotional appeals or metaphorical devices, as concisely as ‘the “weekly report” commonly used in factories’ (Levi 1996, 181). Emotions would easily lead to pathos, and metaphors substitute the literal meaning with a figurative one; both strategies would thus lead away from the raw reality of the camp. Yet to write as objectively as possible does not always seem the best solution. Objectivity seems to betray the monstrosity of the event, an event which perhaps is ‘not presentable under the rules of knowledge’, as Lyotard has suggested (Kaes 1992, 206). A very factual technical report from the camps, Jean- Claude Pressac’s The Auschwitz Crematoria (1993), which documents how the crematoria worked technically and the general logistics of the camp, met severe critique for being too dispassionate and empirical (Buckler 1996, 2). In his book, L’écriture ou la vie (1994), Jorge Semprún underlines that everything can be told. The problem, he says, is not the telling. It is that people cannot listen properly. Semprún does not have much hope that we will ever learn how to listen, or that we even want to do it properly. Still, there is an obligation to tell – in the name of the people who went through the most horrific experiences and did not survive. Like Primo Levi’s, Jorge Semprún’s writing is motivated by solidarity with the dead victims of the Holocaust. But what does it mean to listen properly? What can we learn from the Holocaust, and in what way can the lesson contribute to giving Europe a new identity? Historically speaking, there are at least two ways of viewing the Holocaust’s significance for a common European future: one is ethical and universalistic, the other is historical and transcultural. A rather schematic overview of these two paradigms is presented in the scenarios below.

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The universalistic approach From this perspective, the Holocaust is seen as a universal tragedy, a crime against humanity. No one can escape its traumatizing effects, and we should therefore be brave enough to face it directly. To face it is to go through a process of mourning. The eventual aim is to heal the historical wounds, but never at the price of forgetting. We must keep the wounds open and the ‘trauma’ alive. The process is based on empathic identification with the most humiliated victims or with active acknowledgement of the inexpressible singularity of the event. This strategy is primarily ethically motivated. Jürgen Habermas and Giorgio Agamben can be named as examples of this approach. Despite great differences they both work with an indepth understanding and they are both deeply concerned with the relationship between humanism and inhumanity. Habermas strives towards a humanistic and ethical consensus about the Holocaust. Giorgio Agamben is less optimistic in this regard. Though he has protested against the cheap mystification of the Holocaust, he insists on its basically enigmatic character, which means that the only legitimately ‘humanistic’ understanding rests on an incorporation of the inhuman experience of the Muselmänner, or men and women who were so destroyed by starvation and maltreatment that they were actually like living corpses, out of touch with the world.

The transcultural approach While the Holocaust was a historical event which was tragically based on strict differentiation and separation (for instance between Jews and Aryan people), it also opened up a differentiated, transnational and transcultural space of border- crossing. The camp brought victims together from all of Europe and its reality was multilingual and multicultural. To go through the reality of the camps also means going through an immediate experience of the coexistence of differences. This coexistence worked against the dehumanizing effect of the Nazi regime. Also, as already indicated, the post-war interpretation of the war is based on acknowledgement of differentiation, and the lesson learned by the war is that we should accept differences. The acknowledgement and acceptance of differences is more important than the acknowledgment of a common human nature and consensus on the understanding of it. This is the perspective of Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider and, partly, of Ottmar Ette, of whom more will be said later.

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The two approaches should not be seen as totally incompatible. The historical approach outlined here is, for instance, not related to some of the revisionist historical attempts to relativize the Holocaust and its unique traumatizing character that were seen in the German Historikerstreit in the 1980s.2 The historical approach acknowledges the traumatic crime against humanity that the Holocaust represents, but it also insists on the value of transnational and multicultural experiences in the camps for the future of Europe (or the world). In fact, the key to viable historicization lies in the way one chooses to integrate these two approaches, as may become apparent with reference to the writings of Jorge Semprún. These writings include both the universalistic and the transcultural approach. In Semprún’s writing, both universalism and differentiation occur, but never in isolation.

Universalist and transcultural moments in Semprún In Semprún’s work, there is an attempt to show solidarity with the victims who suffered most: the Muselmänner. As he writes, nobody in the camp would have anything to do with them. They were the outcasts among outcasts – cast out by the outcasts. They were at the threshold of death and already dead in spirit, unable to speak or show any other sign of humanity. Primo Levi paradoxically called the Muselmann ‘the complete witness’. Since the Muselmann has suffered most, he is the ultimate witness; but, at the same time, he is unable to speak. Only very rarely did the Muselmänner survive. Therefore, they are dependent on others to tell their story. 3 Despite the fact that the survivors did not suffer the ultimate evil of total destruction and death, and therefore cannot bear first-hand testimony to the fact of their occurrence, Jorge Semprún insists on telling their story. In fact, this telling is an important motivation for writing. In his work L’écriture ou la vie, there is a scene in which he faces a three-metre-tall heap of dead bodies, just after the end of the war but still in the camp. His first thought is that he has an obligation to tell their story: the living experience of non- existence and the final death. ‘I have to create life with all this death,’ he says (Semprún 1994, 130). Semprún believes in the possibility of bearing witness to death. In a direct argument against Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had claimed that death is not an experience in life, Semprún insists that it is possible to experience death while still alive. He cannot, of course, tell about his own death; but he can tell about death, a death so close and horrifying that it creeps in under your skin. Living in the camp, he says, is like

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‘traversing death’ or like ‘being traversed by death’. In a later interview, Semprún explains that saying that survivors have ‘experienced’ death, in the sense of the English word, might not be adequate. Perhaps, he says, it would be more appropriate to use the Spanish word vivencia, which does not have an equivalent term in English. With the word vivencia, Semprún stresses the acute closeness and vividness of the radical experience of dissolution, of non-existence (Semprún 2008). Semprún relates how everything was turned upside down by the camp experience: the camp was a nightmare turned real. Therefore, it is only natural that reality seemed like a dream after the war. Unlike Primo Levi, Semprún hesitated for a long time before he began to write about the experiences in the camps. The first book on the concentration camp, Le grand voyage, was written (in French like most of his books) and did not appear until 1963. After that there was a pause until Aquel domingo (1980). There was another pause until 1994, when L’écriture ou la vie appeared. For Semprún, not to write about the camp was to forget and live in the dream of life; to write about the camp was traversing the reality of death once again, or, as he has stated in a later interview, it was like ‘committing suicide’: no relief but a necessity (Semprún 2008). With the title L’écriture ou la vie, ‘writing or life’, Semprún points to the fact that writing could not ‘heal the wounds’, thus exercising a therapeutic effect; rather, writing was always a return to the living experience of death, a choice to remain inside the memory of death (‘permanecía en la memoria de la muerte’, Semprún 2008). This is also true to an extent for the readers who are traversed by the stories of Semprún, and who are forced to see through these. According to Giorgio Agamben, we will never understand Auschwitz if we do not gaze into the eye of the Gorgon to see the reality of the living dead. Even though it is impossible, it is only through identification with the radical inhumanity of the experience of the Muselmann that we can become human: What testimony says [ ... ] can be formulated in the following theses: ‘human beings are human insofar as they are not human’. Or more precisely ‘human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman’. (Agamben 1999, 121) This may have been what the authors of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust were thinking about when they wrote that we should plant the seeds for a better future

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‘amidst the soil of a bitter past’. To listen properly to the testimony of the survivors does not (or not only) mean to submit to the shocking character of the stories, or to be appalled by the evilness of the Nazis. Rather, it means to acknowledge the ever-present inhumanity of human beings as such. In a speech Semprún gave in 1994 in Frankfurt, he stressed that the evil, totalitarian beast is not only German; it is also French, Russian and Spanish, and he added, with an expression borrowed from Paul Celan, ‘La Mort est un maître venu de l’humanité’, telle serait la formulation philosophique la plus appropriée, car elle soulignerait la possibilité permanente de l’homme, fondée sur la liberté constituante de son être, d’opter pour la mort de l’oppression et de la servitude, contre la vie de la liberté: la liberté de la vie. (Semprún 1997, 88) ‘The master of death’ originates in humanity itself. In the words of Agamben, humanity and inhumanity are thus at the same time closely connected and radically opposed. This is the enigmatic lesson that the Holocaust teaches us, and that is why the Holocaust is never ‘only’ a historical event but also a universal moral touchstone. According to Agamben, the Holocaust teaches us that any testimony, in order to be true, must be based on the impossibility of speaking, and that the teleology of history and the potential redemption is a threat to the true understanding of the Holocaust. Therefore, according to Agamben, the witness is not a ‘historian’ but a ‘poet’, and not just any poet, but ‘the auctor par excellence’. He cites the examples of Hölderlin and Celan, as well as Hurbinek, the handicapped boy in Levi’s book Reawakening, who speaks a non-language with non- existing words like mass-klo and matisklo (Agamben 1999, 161–2).4 However, the Holocaust does not only teach us a lesson of speech based on the impossibility of speaking and the universal ethics that stem from the testimonies of the Holocaust. According to the historical and transcultural approach, European identity should be grounded on the experience of the concentration camp, not because of the ‘experience’ of death and non- existence, but because of the unique multicultural space that it opens up. This view is also very strong in Semprún’s writings on the Holocaust. In the camp people are divided into groups according to status and nationality. But they intermingle all the time and conversations are heard in all the languages of Europe. Semprún himself speaks at least four languages, a talent that turns out to be a great help in the camp. There is no need to romanticize the relationship

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between the prisoners. Reports have been given that the blows of the coprisoners were harder than the blows of the warders, and your own differentiation from the Muselmänner could mean the difference between your own life and death. Still, Semprún insists that the positive dimension of multicultural contact was an important part of everyday experience in the camp. One was forced to interrelate with other people and forced into the solidarity of a common destiny. After the liberation of the camps, this experience seemed to dissolve at first. All the prisoners split up and went back to their individual homelands. And the general approach in these countries was not to see the homecoming prisoners as ambassadors for a cross- cultural experience, but to see them as ‘prodigal’ children returning to the bosom of the nation. The problem for Semprún was that he did not feel that he had a homeland to return to, and in light of this and some of the experiences of ‘homecoming’ after the liberation of the camps he strengthened his critique of nationalism. Before the war, he had been an exile in France. He lived in France and spoke French, and it was because of his participation in the French resistance movement that he had been sent to Buchenwald. After the liberation of the camp, when Semprún, together with some of his companions, returned to Paris, he was denied the modest financial and symbolic help that the French state gave to former prisoners of the concentration camps, on the grounds that he was not a French citizen. The grotesque irony of this scene exhibits the narrow-mindedness of French nationalism, and more generally it depicts differentiation according to nationality as superficial or even inhuman. Before the final liberation of Paris, Semprún gave a lecture for the Committee for the French Resistance Movement. Before the lecture he was asked by one of the committee members to remove the letter ‘s’ from his badge. The ‘s’ marked that he was a Spanish citizen, and, since there were ‘patriotic members’ of the audience who would not like this fact, he was asked to conceal it. Semprún’s answer to this was to insist on being Spanish. Though he had chosen to be in exile in France and to fight in the French resistance movement, in a situation in which he was being asked to conceal his foreign origin, he insisted on it. This action did not represent resistance to being assimilated by a foreign nationality and it was not a patriotic gesture towards Spain. It represented a resistance towards the notion of the national homeland. This is also underlined by the fact that, when someone wrongly applied the term ‘Gaullist’ to the ‘Jean-Marie Action’ resistance movement, of which Semprún was a member, he protested that the movement was under English command, as part of the Buckmaster network. In L’écriture ou

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la vie he repeatedly writes that he has no homeland, and that therefore there is no Heimkehr for him. Also he has never fought for any nation: There was no Homeland for me any longer. Or, there were several homelands which came down to the same thing. Consider the possibility of dying for several nations at the time? It is unthinkable. But to die for the nation is the best ontological proof of its existence. Maybe the only one. All these possible forms of death would annul each other. For you can only die once and for one nation. You cannot joke about this: no pluralism of nations. The nation is one and indivisible, unique. (Semprún 1994, 92) Semprún’s stark irony here is turned against the nationalism of warfare, a nationalism that was denied by the war experiences of the individual soldier and member of the resistance movement, and by the reality of the concentration camps. Much later, in Frankfurt in 1994, Semprún performed a critical reading of Thomas Mann’s proclamation that, even after he had assumed American citizenship, the German language had remained his true ‘homeland’. Semprún sympathized with the fact that ‘language’ was substituted for ‘nation’ in the role of ‘homeland’. However, his personal experience was much more complex. At one time, he had hoped that French would become such a ‘homeland’, but this turned out to be impossible, not only because Spanish remained an important language for him but also because German was just as important. Not only had Semprún read philosophy in German, he had even read Don Quijote in German. For Semprún, all these languages and the cultural heritage they carry with them formed his own transcultural experience. Therefore, he stated that ‘ma patrie n’est pas la langue, ni la française ni l’espagnole, ma patrie c’est le langage. C’est-à- dire un espace de communication sociale, d’invention linguistique’ (Semprún 1997, 77). In a European multilingual context, the idea of building a homeland out of different languages is extremely important. Semprún stresses the social and the imaginary aspects of language. These aspects only become visible in a transcultural context. There is no dream of one ‘homeland’ for everybody, whether at a political or a cultural level. Despite the eternal, ahistorical and moral lesson of the Holocaust – that we are all inhuman–human beings – these beings can never be grasped as anything but ‘different’ from each other. Therefore it is essential that any rebuilding of European identity be not only attached to the moral obligation of remembering the singular and ‘radical evilness’ of the

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Holocaust; it must also be linked to the active recollection of the transcultural nature of the Holocaust. As Ottmar Ette has described it, the camp becomes an important experience for the identity of the new Europe because it opposes an ‘auf der Achtung des Anderen basierenden Gemeinschaft’ to ‘dem Grauen under massifizierten Vernichtung’: Dass das universe concentrationnaire zu jenem Ort wird, an dem sich ein neues Europa, eine künftige Gemeinschaft herauskristallisiert, die zwischen den Kulturen, zwischen den Muttersprachen und zwischen den Vaterländern ihre eigne Dynamik, ihre eigene Bewegung entwickelt, gehört zu den faszinierenden Einsichten, die das Werk dieses Europäers par excellence für seine Leserinnen und Leser bereit hält. Jenseits aller nationalen Zuordnungen konstruiert sich diese Literatur einen Bewegungsraum der Europa in Bewegung weiss und als Bewegung versteht. (Ette 2007, 13)

The refugee as the founder of a new Europe In 1943, Hannah Arendt, then in exile in the United States, wrote an article entitled ‘We Refugees’. In 1994, Agamben wrote an article with the same title. Building on Hannah Arendt, Agamben’s text claims that the refugee is in a position to play a unique historical role in the creation of the new Europe. From his radical outsider position, the refugee ‘unhinges the old trinity of state/nation/territory’, making holes in the territorial space of Europe and thereby opening up a whole new historical consciousness (Agamben 1994, 5). In this sense, the refugee holds the future in his hands. The anti-nationalistic potential of the refugee is extremely important, since nationalism has historically been an obstacle to the unification of Europe, and even the cause of war. According to Agamben, the refugee is able to ‘unhinge’ the trinity between state/nation/territory because the refugee is an outsider, a human being without any rights. In that sense he resembles the Jew under the Nazi regime. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that human rights are only protected inside the nation. If you were not a citizen of a state you had no rights at all. Therefore, it was essential for the Nazis to denationalize their victims. Agamben writes: One of the few rules the Nazis faithfully observed in the course of the ‘final solution’ was that only after the Jews and the gypsies were completely denationalized (even of that second- class citizenship

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that belonged to them after the Nuremberg Laws) could they be sent to the extermination camps. When the rights of man are no longer the rights of the citizen, then he is truly sacred, in the sense that this term had in archaic Roman law: destined to die. (Agamben 1999, 117) Though the situation of the refugee may be completely different from the situation of Jews and gypsies under Nazi rule, Agamben draws a parallel between them because the refugee is also denationalized. The refugee does not belong to a category that counts within the nation, and in that sense he is no one: he is reduced to the mere state of being a human being. In the moment when the French resistance fighter asked Semprún to remove the sign of Spanish citizenship from his shirt, in a certain sense Semprún became a ‘refugee’ in Giorgio Agamben’s terms. Semprún had been forced into exile from Spain before the war. Even though he officially held Spanish citizenship at that moment, he was no longer a citizen of Spain. Since France did not want to recognize him as a native son either, he was caught between nations and had no rights in any country. This situation after the war parallels the situation during the war when the Spanish were denied the status of prisoner of war by the German High Command (according to D.W. Pike, because of their dedication to the anti-fascist struggle). They were denied this status ‘even if they were captured in French uniform’, and, since they did not have passports, they were considered to be stateless (Pike 2000, 10). However, though the refugee named Semprún might have been a denizen, officially speaking (a term Agamben borrows from Tomas Hammar), he is not ‘no one’, and he is never only ‘a human being’ or naked (or sacred) life, not even seen from the outside.5 Instead he is a man of a diversity of cultures. For Semprún the situation of the refugee becomes a new place to speak from. This place is not a void between two substantial spaces (such as nation states); it is a place that is filled with transnational interrelations and cultural heritage. The problem with the connection Agamben makes between the situation of the refugee and the naked life of the Muselmann is that the comparison assumes that the refugee is just as mute as the latter. This is definitely not the case in the situation of Semprún, and, more importantly, it is not a desirable state. To take the state of ‘naked life’ upon yourself is to accept what has been pressed upon you. But it is hardly a position of resistance. This is also a point in which Agamben differs from Hannah Arendt. When Arendt writes that ‘refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard

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of their peoples,’ she wisely adds ‘if they keep their identity’. This is also what guarantees that Jews are not only isolated or assimilated pariahs but that Jewish history can be ‘tied up with that of all other nations’ (Arendt 1978, 66). Similarly, when Semprún writes in L’écriture ou la vie that he wants to turn the region of Weimar–Buchenwald into a ‘lieu de mémoire et de culture internationale de la Raison démocratique’, he does not seek to make the naked life in the camp into a singular experience, but rather to reconnect its transnational character with the cosmopolitan horizon of Goethe’s Weimar. The transnational and transcultural experience is at the heart of Semprún’s anti-totalitarian endeavour. As Ottmar Ette has said, Semprún becomes a European writer rather than a Spanish, French or German writer, and he continues: Die Konzentrationslager werden zum Schmelztiegel einer neuen europäischen Kultur, deren Schöpfungskraft fraglos in der Erfahrung des univers concentrationnaire wurzelt und jeglichem Totalitarismus abgeschworen hat. (Ette 2007, 13) The point here is not that Agamben is mistaken in his analysis of the naked life of the Muselmann or the legal situation of the refugee. On the contrary, he is extremely precise. It could be argued that the framing of the naked life as an important experience must not be turned into a project in itself. If the refugee can be seen as an emblematic vanguard figure for the future Europe, it must be because of his transcultural identity and not because of his status as an outcast. So what can we learn from history? An attempt was made to distinguish at least two different approaches to the camp, both of them present in Jorge Semprún’s work. The first entails confrontation and constant revivification of and reflection on the experience of death/ non- existence. The second focuses on the transnational encounter, the outcast’s ability to transcend the borders that the rest of us live within, thus showing us a new way out. The two approaches have to be seen as connected. This is what is so clear in the work of Jorge Semprún. For Semprun, the experience of Buchenwald is double. It is an experience of both radical evilness and transcultural solidarity. Semprún’s work testifies both to the void that underlies any identity and to the value and character of transnational cultural negotiations that can delineate a new European identity. This may have been what Ulrich Beck was thinking of when he said that the camps provide the clearest archive for the vision of cosmopolitan

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Europe. For Beck, the defence of human rights is directly linked with the experience of cultural difference and otherness which he believes to be especially characteristic of Europe. The vision is clear, but one may be suspicious of the easiness with which Beck links the camps with cosmopolitanism. As indicated earlier, one of the lessons of the history of the Holocaust may be that we can only acknowledge inhumanity as part of our own identity with great difficulty, and to do so on a larger scale may require a complete rethinking of the relationship between identity and power. In a slightly different context, Etienne Balibar has suggested that the future of Europe lies in an anti-strategic policy based on the acknowledgement of the palimpsestic character of European identity. The traditional nation state presupposes that a sovereign and identifiable subject must be in place before any strong action can be taken. Sovereignty is dependent upon a stable identity. Building on Foucault, Balibar suggests that we should explore another path that will lead to an ‘anti-strategic policy’, in which ‘power does not predate action but is rather its result’, and in which collective identity is not a given, ‘a metaphysical prerequisite of agency’, but ‘a quality of collective agency which changes form and content in time as new agents come into play and new solidarities are built’ (Balibar 2004, 324). Whether Balibar is right, we do not yet know. But the historical lesson to be taken from the Holocaust definitely involves a rethinking of the relationship between identity and politics. This has to be done if we want to understand what Semprún means when he says that the camp gives us the first outline of a European spirit: ‘la première ébauche d’un esprit européen’ (Jorge Semprún in Semprún and De Villepin 2005, 96). This new European spirit or identity cannot in any way be built on homogenization; it must be built on the experience of diverse cultures and languages: ‘réunification ne veut pas dire uniformisation ou homogénéisation. L’unité profonde de l’Europe sur le plan culturel est riche de sa diversité et elle demuerera ainsi’ (Jorge Semprún in Semprún and De Villepin 2005, 197). Or, as Ulrich Beck has phrased it, the unity of European culture is not to be seen despite cultural difference, but through cultural difference (Beck and Grande 2007, 11).

Notes 1. Berel Lang describes such a view in his The Future of Holocaust. Polemically he asks: ‘Would we dare to ask someone who was dying what “lessons” his experience promised for us, the living?’ (Lang 1999, 174).

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2. For a good summary of the Historikerstreit in Germany see, for instance, Wood (1991). 3. In 1987 Zdzisla Ryn and Stanslaw Kodzinski published many interviews with former prisoners of Auschwitz, among them ten persons who for a short while were Muselmänner. For translations of excerpts of these interviews, see Agamben (1999), 166ff. 4. Agamben builds on the paragraph in Primo Levi’s Reawakening where he says of Hurbinek, the handicapped, almost speechless but lively three-year- old boy: ‘Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine’ (Agamben 1999, 38). 5. Hammar himself does not overestimate the category of denizen, and in the book he suggests new positive models for avoiding making people into denizens (Hammar 1990).

References Agamben, G. 1994. We Refugees. Trans. M. Rocke. http://egs.edu/faculty/giorgioagamben/articles/we-refugees/ (accessed 12 December 2009). Agamben, G. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Arendt, H. 1978. We Refugees (January 1943). In The Jew as Pariah, ed. R.H. Feldman, 55–66. New York: Grove Press. Balibar, E. 2003. Europe: Vanishing Mediator. Constellations 10/3: 312–38. Balibar, E. 2004. We the People of Europe? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beck, U. 2003. Understanding the Real Europe. Dissent, summer 2003. www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/su03/beck.htm (accessed 10 April 2010). Beck, U. and E. Grande. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buckler, S. 1996. Historical Narrative, Identity, and the Holocaust. History of the Human Sciences 9/4: 1–20. Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, Stockholm 2000: www.dccam.org/Projects/Affinity/SIF/DATA/2000/page1192.html (accessed 7 January 2010). Ette, O. 2007. Lebensfuge oder Eine Philosophie des ÜberLebenSchreibens. Laudatio für Jorge Semprún. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam. http://pub.ub.unipotsdam.de/volltexte/2007/14236 (accessed 12 December 2009). Felman, S. 2002. The Juridical Unconscious. Trials and Traumas of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. 1988. Concerning the Public Use of History. New German Critique 44 (Special Issue on the Historikerstreit): 40–50. Hammar, T. 1990. Democracy and the Nation-State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration. Aldershot: Avebury. Judt, T. 2008. Reappraisals. Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin. Kaes, A. 1992. Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema. In Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedländer, 206–22. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Holocaust Literature and the Shaping of European Identity 223 Lang, B. 1999. The Future of the Holocaust. Between History and Memory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Levi, P. 1996. A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth. In idem, Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity, 175–87. New York: Simon & Schuster. Levy, D. and N. Sznaider. 2002. Memory Unbound: the Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory. European Journal of Social Theory 5: 87–106. Pike, D.W. 2000. Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, Horror on the Danube. Florence, KY: Routledge. Rietbergen, P. 1998. Europe. A Cultural History. London: Routledge. Semprún, J. 1963. Le grand voyage. Paris: Gallimard. Semprún, J. 1994. L’écriture ou la vie. Paris: Gallimard. Semprún, J. 1997. Mal et modernité. Paris: Seuil. Semprún, J. and D. de Villepin. 2005. L’homme européen. Paris: Plon. Semprún, J. 2008. Jorge Semprún y los campos de concentración Nazis. Interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW), Amsterdam, 20 February 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_QmLezLoy8 (accessed 20 January 2010). Wood, N. 1991. The Holocaust: Historical Memories and Contemporary Identities. Media Culture Society 13: 357–79.

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13 Goodbye to All That? Jewish Views of Europe after 1945 Irene Zwiep

Ever since the late 1980s, when the Jewish communities in Europe began to rise from their ashes and reinvent themselves, ‘Jewish Europe’ has become a fashionable and productive topic. Recently, Israeli scholars have even begun to speak, with a tinge of worried envy, of contemporary European Judaism as he- ammud ha-shelishi, the ‘third pillar’ of world Jewry, which is gradually reclaiming its position as a centre of Jewish life alongside the approved strongholds of Jewish continuity in Israel and the US. Authors such as Kertesz and Konrad, established filmmakers such as Lanzmann and Szabó, and scholars such as Dan Diner and even the Israeli–American historian Saul Friedländer are usually identified as the intellectual heralds of this collective resurrection.1 In a 2002 lecture, the Dutch-born Israeli historian Dan Michman noted with alarm that István Szabó’s family epos, Ein Hauch von Sonnenschnein (A napfény íze, 1999), portrayed a Hungarian–Jewish history that did ‘not even mention the option [...] of Zionism’. Not autonomy but integration, not Israel but the Holocaust and its moral implications, Michman observed, were the focal point of this drama that covered some 150 years of Jewish life in Hungary. In the secular, assimilationist ideology that fosters Szabó’s narrative, there is very little room for the ‘original’ (read: pre-modern) notions of ‘Jewish tribal unity’, religion, and rabbinic law, as cherished by many Jews in Israel and North America to this day. Michman therefore feared a major shift in the traditional balance of Jewish power. He concluded his paper by urging his fellow-historians to be watchful, to ‘pay attention to the phenomenon [...] and develop thoughts regarding our position towards it’ (Michman 2004). As we can deduce from Michman’s wary tone, the sudden arousal of European-Jewish consciousness coincided with an acute crisis in Israeli Zionist confidence (Michman 1997). His watchful rhetoric stands in 224

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stark contrast to the relative ease with which Israeli scholars previously dismissed European Jewry in their historical analyses. The pinnacle of this trend was without doubt the 1971 Encyclopaedia Judaica, the thoroughly Israel- and Hebrew- oriented Jewish version of the Britannica, which was intended by its editors not only to catalogue Europe’s Jewish heritage, but also to serve as its tombstone and memorial.2 Given this Zionist prism, it is no surprise that Israeli historians were taken aback by the collective reaffirmation of European, Jewish ‘diasporic’ identity. They would, however, have been better prepared had they not viewed this development in relation to the decline in their own position within world Jewry, but against the broader background of modern EuropeanJewish history in the immediate post-war years, which, with its strong Anglo- Saxon and transatlantic ties, effectively counterbalanced missionary Israeli ideology (Bauer 1989). This chapter aims to suggest a few starting points for such a broader perspective by examining the post-war views of Europe as a locus of Jewish life. First, a brief outline is provided of the mentalities behind the collective efforts to restore the pre-war Jewish communities in the various countries of Europe. Subsequently, an analysis is offered of the crucial, dialectical role which Europe has always played in modern Jewish discourse, from its earliest beginnings at the start of the nineteenth century. As early as November 1944, the Board of Deputies of British Jews (an organization whose origins date back to the 1760s) issued a comprehensive agenda for the restoration of Jewish life on the Continent, to be effected immediately upon German surrender. The Board argued that during the war the Jews of Europe had paid a disproportionally high price, and were therefore entitled ‘to a sympathetic and generous attitude on the part of the Powers engaged in making the Peace’ (BDBJ 1945, 52). In a detailed memorandum called ‘Planning for Peace’, they demanded ‘justice for Jewry’, which included 1) material and spiritual relief and rehabilitation; 2) the repatriation of all refugees who wished to return; 3) equality of citizenship in all European states (including those where the 1919 Minority Treaties had been consistently flouted – Poland, Rumania, Hungary); 4) freedom of association, which would allow Jews to manifest themselves on European soil as a strong community rather than as fragile individuals; 5) retribution for war crimes, and restitution of all property lost during the years of persecution (53–60). It is only at the end of the list (61–3) that we find claims concerning the prospective Jewish homeland, notably the demands that the White Paper of 1939, which had imposed severe restrictions upon Jewish

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immigration into Palestine, be abrogated, and that the Allied powers would hasten to establish a Jewish state as stipulated by the Balfour declaration. The phraseology in which the Board put forward that final claim is telling. There cannot be any doubt [they wrote] that hundreds of thousands [...] will want to flee from Europe [...] in order to shake off the effects of the ghastly nightmare [...] and go to a land where they can find a home and meet with friendship. The land to which most of them wish to go is Palestine, for [...] no other country will be open to receive a large number. (61, emphasis added) There is precious little Zionist zeal in these lines. Instead, the possibility of emigrating to a Jewish National Home outside Europe was presented as a ‘last-resort’ option. In the restoration agenda proposed by the British Jewish elite in 1944 Palestine featured as the only hospitable country left in the world, offering the battered Jews an escape from European anti-Semitism, rather than a vibrant alternative to life in the diaspora.3 In accordance with this Anglo-Jewish vision of a renewed Jewish future on the Continent, we find that the first post-war years were dominated by an effort to restore Jewish rights and restore the decimated communities in the various countries. This restoration was all about trying to make up for recent losses: if relatives could not be revived, pre-war Jewish infrastructure could. In Eastern Europe, however, Communism soon brought an end to institutionalized cultural and religious Jewish life. In Western Europe, where Jewish emancipation had been more successful and the Jews had to a large extent adopted the various majority cultures, an attempt at reaffirming this pre-war Jewish life was the inevitable (if largely short-lived) consequence. Witness, for example, the European Jewish Year Book for the year 5714, which, as we learn from its subtitle, aimed at documenting Jewish Life in Europe, that is to say, at giving details about the Jewish national and international organizations that were active in the various European countries in 1953–4. When browsing through the section on the Netherlands (which will occasionally serve as my case study here), we encounter the same catalogue of local communal services and international Jewish organizations that we find in any pre-war almanac, despite the fact that Dutch Jewry had been decimated less than ten years before (Brasz 1995, 351–74). Thus the efforts of restoration bolstered conservatism, giving a second life to Jewish interests and organizations that had been waning in pre-war

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years. It revitalized religious institutions that had previously suffered from secularization, and breathed new life into the pre-war Zionist programme, which now became the dynamic heart of the efforts at rebuilding a national, Dutch-Jewish community. As a consequence, the restoration of pre-war Jewry in the Netherlands could be deemed a theoretical success, less than ten years after the Shoah. In reality, however, the demographic losses had been too great for most communities to maintain their heritage. By the mid-1950s, most of the former structures that had served Dutch Jewry were repaired, but at the same time several of the ‘undermining’ pre-war trends (notably secularization and mixed marriages) had resurfaced (Brasz 1995, 374). In addition, the previously unconditional identification of the Dutch Jews with their Dutch ‘fatherland’ had been damaged, as witness European Jewry Ten Years After the War. An Account of the Development and Present Status of the Decimated Jewish Communities of Europe, published by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress in New York in 1956. In an unsystematic manner this publication, which mostly relied on impressionistic contributions by local eyewitnesses, documents the varying degrees to which Jewish life had been restored in the various European countries. In the account of the Dutch-Jewish condition the emphasis is once again on successful national reconstruction. Yet the concluding summary gives an adequate recapitulation of the disenchanted atmosphere that had descended upon Dutch Jewry in the aftermath of the Second World War: [Dutch Jews are] positively Jewish and pro-Israel in spirit [...]. One is internationally-minded and conscious of the relativity of the position of the Jew in the Golah [i.e. diaspora]. Notwithstanding the ties of love for Holland and complete loyalty as citizens, the strong feeling of Dutch chauvinism which was manifest before the war has practically disappeared. (WJC 1956, 231) This final observation marks a fundamental change in Dutch-Jewish identity. Ever since the nineteenth century the Jews in the Netherlands, who had received civic equality as early as 1796, had believed that they were the product of a unique historical process, which had set them apart from all other Jewish communities in Europe. This process, they felt, had been marked not by intolerance and struggle, but by opportunity and smooth integration. The result had been a self-confident Dutch brand of Jewishness that became known as the species judaica hollandia. The expression was first coined in the early 1920s by the German-born

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historian Sigmund Seeligman. Soon afterwards it was adopted by the entire Dutch Jewish population as a cherished epithet.4 The loss, by the mid-1950s, of this ‘natural’ affinity with the Dutch homeland deeply affected Dutch Jewry. After the Shoah, the Jewish religious and cultural infrastructure could be restored. The species judaica hollandia, however, seemed to have vanished along with the other communities of Europe.5 Still, the new Jewish homeland in the young state of Israel, with its aura of vitality, authenticity and, above all, political autonomy, did not apparently provide an obvious alternative. Of the roughly 8,000 Jews who emigrated from the Netherlands in 1955, more than half left for countries other than Israel. Given the role Zionism had played in Jewish life in pre-war Europe, this relative lack of appeal should not surprise us. Ever since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, Zionism had been more than a Jewish variant of political ‘diaspora nationalism’. For many Zionists (who, as the well-known saying goes, seldom contemplated giving up their comfortable existence for a pioneer’s life in Israel) it served first of all as a shared, transnational cultural identity, one that was distinctly Jewish, yet remained firmly embedded in a European context. For Jews looking for a common secular identity, based on traditional Jewish values, it served as a counterweight to ‘shared religion’. For those who feared the cultural loss implied in assimilation, it provided an attractive supplementary nationality (Berkowitz 1993). To a certain degree post-war Zionism continued to fulfil these roles, but with a predictable difference. Prior to the Shoah the various brands of Zionism had represented many ways of fashioning Jewish life in the diaspora; after the Shoah political Zionism could not but undermine the diaspora’s potential as a locus of Jewish existence. From 1948 onwards the state of Israel became a prominent, formative element in European Jewish identity, and as an inevitable consequence European Jewish identity became once again explicitly inspired by notions of exile and diaspora. In pre-war Amsterdam, Seeligman, who had coined the expression species judaica hollandia, had become a Dutch orthodox Zionist (‘Mizrachi’) historian of modern Jewry. In post-war Holland (which Seeligman did not live to see), such composite, yet comfortable identities seemed much less obvious. In 1946 Seeligman’s son, to name but one example, chose to emigrate to Palestine, where he pursued a career as a Bible scholar at Tel Aviv University. So the first post-war decades show at least two, mutually reinforcing, trends. One: all over Europe, Zionism as a constitutive force in Jewish identity had lost its pre-war European momentum, with the foundation

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of the state of Israel in 1948 underscoring the ‘exilic nature’ of Jewish life in Europe. Two: whereas in Eastern Europe the Jewish infrastructure was crushed by Communism, in the West the Jewish identification with the various host nations, and with Europe as a whole, had faded; that is, until the late 1980s. The fact that by that time a European Jewish consciousness without overt diasporic overtones was able to resurface owed much to the pivotal role Europe had always played in the formation of a modern Jewish identity. In order to put that role into its proper perspective we must briefly return to the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, when the Jews on the Continent ventured their first steps into European society. Needless to say, that entry was fraught with qualms and obstacles, which forced Jewish intellectuals from Mendelssohn onwards to redefine their Jewishness, and to formulate a brand of Judaism that would prove compatible with European modernity. On the one hand, they had to show to the gentile world that the Jews deserved to become Europeans. On the other, they had to explain to themselves why, given the new opportunities, Jews should choose to remain Jews rather than vanish without a trace among Europe’s Christian majority. In tune with the intellectual spirit of the times, many felt that only critical historical research into the Jewish cultural heritage could provide the solution to this dilemma. And so, in the early 1820s in Berlin, the Wissenschaft des Judentums was born, an unprecedentedly ‘objective’ branch of Jewish historical writing that was heavily dependent on German idealism and Hegelian dialectics, and aimed to prove Judaism’s compatibility with European Geist and Zivilisation.6 In the words of the first president of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, Eduard Gans (1798–1839), the new Wissenschaft served to identify ‘the Jewish current’ in the endless ‘European Ocean’.7 From the onset the Wissenschaft cherished a dynamic, progressive world view that was deeply indebted to Hegel (who in his Berlin years had mentored several of the earliest Wissenschaftler). In Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie world history was portrayed as a succession of great civilizations, whose historical encounters had served as building blocks for European society. In the Hegelian scheme, this succession of dialectic encounters had eventually culminated in the culture of the budding nation states of modern Europe. In the earliest Jewish counter-narratives it was neither England, France nor Germany but stateless Judaism that, having renounced all claims to political autonomy, emerged as the fittest of all. This portable Jewish Geist was now ready to enter its next phase, and was in fact seriously contemplating a

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new dialectic relationship. This time, European bourgeois nationalism was its chosen bride. Yet, for all their optimism, the Jewish elite were well aware of one important potential obstacle to the prospective marriage: their oriental (that is, non-European) origins. The early nineteenth- century responses to this awkward detail present us with a variety of strategies, which range from renunciation, via the rhetoric of reassurance (‘we used to be oriental, but now we’re modern!’),8 to accommodation (‘if we’re essentially oriental rather than European, then we certainly are the most European of all Orientals’).9 Yet, despite this relative denial, we cannot escape the impression that the nineteenth- century Jewish disciples of Hegel were rather keen to acknowledge that they were, as the poet (and one-time Verein-member) Heinrich Heine had once put it, at least at trifle ‘west- östlich’. Many of them were quick to point to a precedent for this dual disposition, one that they felt had been of great consequence for European history: the medieval Islamic empire which had once spread its borders (and, with it, religious tolerance and Hochkultur) far into the Continent. This superior Grossstaat had offered Europe a solid platform for a shared culture that seamlessly merged the Greek heritage with oriental science. On that multicultural stage, the Jews emphatically claimed a space of their own, as the most prolific cultural brokers of medieval Europe – a west- östlich nation that, by its very nature, knew how to bridge the gap between oriental Islam and occidental Christendom. The implications of the imagery are clear: by drawing attention to the mediating role they had played in medieval civilization, the Jews intimated that they could once again play that role in modern Europe (Zwiep 2008). This early nineteenth-century Jewish vision of convivencia, in which Islam appeared as the prefiguration of a unified and tolerant Europe with the Jews as its principal champions, of course served less to formulate a Jewish paradigm for a united Europe than to solve the tensions that were felt to exist between Europe’s ‘Western’ history and the supposed ‘orientalism’ of its Jewish citizens. Jewish intellectuals continued to rely on this topos until the second half of the nineteenth century, when Jewish participation in European life (and especially West European life) increased, and less rhetorical strategies became available. These strategies went back to fundamentally different appraisals of the nature of Jewish history and, accordingly, of the prospects for Jewish life in Europe (Brenner 2002). On the one hand, we encounter examples of Jewish discourse of the species judaica hollandia kind, which

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aimed at vindicating the process of Jewish emancipation and assimilation by postulating a historically determined political union between the ‘local’ Jewish Geist and the génie of its host nation (Toury 1964). In deliberate opposition to this line of thinking, an initially Spinozist, but increasingly Romantic, variant was formulated, running from thinkers such as Heinrich Graetz (1817–91) and Moses Hess (1812–75) to the great Zionist scholar Gershom Scholem (1897–1981). This opinion rejected all enlightened sublimation in favour of a more tangible form of Jewish nationality, a nationality that could only be realized within the framework of an independent Jewish state. In Eastern Europe, the socio-political circumstances prompted Jewish intellectuals to take up an intermediate position. Emphasizing the possibility of autonomy without territory, Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) and his followers identified the community, the autonomous and virtually autarchic collective known in Hebrew as the qehillah, as the driving force in Jewish history (Frankel 1992). Over the years, despite many major and minor catastrophes that seemed to prove each of them wrong, the two more extreme approaches (diasporic individualism on the one hand and political nationalism on the other) have proven quite persistent. Yet they can be seen to alternate. In the first post-war decades it was the Zionist option that acquired unprecedented plausibility, simultaneously feeding and undermining European Jewish identity.10 Against the radically changed European decor of the late 1980s, however, a new generation of intellectuals (writers, film-makers, historians) were ready to reclaim the Jews’ unique, constitutive role in European history.11 In doing so, they continued the notion of ‘the Jewish contribution to Europe’, which was first explored by the Wissenschaft des Judentums but continued to be rethought by postwar intellectuals.12 Only this time they did not position themselves as cultural mediators or intellectual catalysts, but as an ethical conscience, as the sole remnant of a liberal–humanitarian tradition that had been erased in the ultimate European cataclysm: the Holocaust. Through this exclusive admonitory role, they once again claimed to constitute a vital chain in (and perhaps even the cornerstone of) Europe’s collective identity. Yet, owing to the vicissitudes of twentiethcentury history, the playfully optimistic and positivistic European utopia of the original Wissenschaft des Judentums was lost for good. The newly resurrected ‘third pillar of world Jewry’ continues to be founded on the unsolved tension between minority and majority, outsiders and insiders, East and West.

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Notes 1. Academic responses to this observation are offered in Pinto 2006; Bodemann 2008 (especially in the Introduction); and the conference ‘European Jewry: A New Jewish Centre in the Making?’, organized by the Moses Mendelssohn Centre, Potsdam, in cooperation with Klal Yisrael/Tel Aviv University (Berlin, 10–12 May 2009). 2. Most explicitly the introduction, where it is observed that the Holocaust ‘brought to an end the long primacy of European Jewry and its many glorious contributions to Jewish history’ (Roth and Wigoder 1971, Vol. I, 5). 3. The BDBJ’s stance vis- à-vis Israel was analogous to that of the ‘Joint’ (the Joint Distribution Committee), the most active of all American Jewish organizations in aiding European Holocaust survivors during the first postwar years. In Joint ideology, Palestine–Israel was a haven for displaced persons, not the political centre for the Jewish nation (Bauer 1989, xxiv). 4. A lovely illustration of both the extent and the conspicuousness of this identification can be found in Jacob Glattstein’s (1896–1971) autobiographical travel narrative, Ven Yash iz geforen (The Peregrinations of Yash, 1938), in which the Polish-born, but now US-based, protagonist meets a Dutch Jew who repeatedly reassures him that the Dutch Jews are first of all ‘gute hollender un ersht dernokh yidn’ (‘good Dutchmen, and only after that Jews’, 51). 5. This loss is most acutely addressed in the work of first-generation post-war Dutch-Jewish historians such as Jozeph Michman (1914–2009) and Jaap Meijer (1912–93). Having to come to terms with the manifest dangers of Jewish life in Europe, they did not condemn Nazi Germany, but rather nineteenth- century Dutch society (Michman) or their own assimilationist forefathers (Meijer). This reaction was no doubt fostered by the immediacy of the Holocaust. 6. For an introduction, see Schulte (1997); Waszek (1999); Wolf (1822). 7. ‘Aufgehen ist nicht untergehen [...] noch kann das ganze Judenthum sich auflösen [...] es soll [...] fortleben, wie der Strom fortlebt in dem Ocean’ (quoted in Waszek 1999, 196). 8. Eduard Gans (quoted in Waszek 1999, 199). 9. As claimed by the historian Isaac Marcus Jost, who argued that the Jews had always distinguished themselves from their fellow- orientals by their innate ‘natural mobility and flexibility’ (Jost 1858, 291–7). 10. In the Netherlands the historian Jaap Meijer, for instance, observed that the Jews suffered from ‘leeg Israëlisme’, an ‘empty Israelism’ that was little more than a bland fascination for the State of Israel, no longer nourished by Zionist ideology, religion and other Jewish values (Meijer 1965). A notorious stance against this fascination was formulated by the American Jewish scholar Gershom Cohen in his famous mid-1970s speech ‘The Blessings of Assimilation in Jewish History’ (Cohen 1994). 11. Simultaneously, Zionism had lost much of its previous attraction, both inside and outside Israel (Michman 1997); cf. Wallet 2008, who rightly points out that in present- day Dutch-Jewish identities a strong interest in Israeli culture rather than in Zionist politics serves as a common denominator.

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Goodbye to All That? 233 12. In this process the ‘dialectics of Europe’ are also prominent. Witness, for example, George Steiner’s definition of Marx, Freud and Chomsky as ‘meta-rabbis’, deeply indebted to Jewish hermeneutics, yet operating outside Jewish law within a European cultural context; or Paul Mendes-Flohr’s characterization of European Jewish intellectuals as ‘cognitive insiders’, yet ‘axionormative outsiders’, excluded from academic and other pivotal positions and thus more inclined to scepticism and innovation. Also see Steven Aschheim’s recent notion of ‘co- constitutionality’, which wishes to dissolve the boundaries between majority and minority culture, presenting such fundamentally European institutions as the Weimar Republic as ‘jointly constructed by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals who were not acting in their “Jewish” or “non-Jewish” capacities’. For a discussion of these and other approaches see Sorkin 2007, 21–9.

References Bauer, Y. 1989. Out of the Ashes. The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Berkowitz, M. 1993. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Board of Deputies of British Jews. 1945. The Jews in Europe. Their Martyrdom and Future. London: The Board of Deputies of British Jews. Bodemann, Y.M. 2008. The New German Jewry and the European Context: The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brasz, F.C. 1995. Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Van kerkgenootschap naar culturele minderheid. In Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland, eds J.C.H. Blom et al., 351–403. Amsterdam: Balans. Brenner, M. 2002. Von einer jüdischen Geschichte zu vieler jüdischen Geschichten. In Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute: Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen, eds M. Brenner and D.N. Myers. Munich: Beck. Cohen, G.D. 1994. The Blessings of Assimilation in Jewish History. In Great Jewish Speeches Throughout History, eds S. Israel and S. Forman, 183–91. Northvale: Aronson. European Jewish Year Book. Jewish Life in Europe. 5714/1953–54. Frankfurt: H. Bary. Frankel, J. 1992. Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth- Century Europe. Towards a New Historiography? In Assimilation and Community in European Jewry 1815-1881, eds J. Frankel and S. Zipperstein, 1–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress. 1956. European Jewry Ten Years After the War. An Account of the Development and Present Status of the Decimated Jewish Communities of Europe. New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs. Jost, I.M. 1858. Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten, vol. 2. Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke. Meijer, J. 1965. Van Israëlieten tot Israëliërs: anderhalve eeuw Joodse geschiedenis 1815-1965. Leiden: Sijthoff.

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234 Irene Zwiep Michman, D. 1997. Post-tzionut ve-sho’ah. Ha-pulmos ha-tzibburi ha-yisra’eli benose’ ha-post-tzionut ba-shanim 1993-1996 u-meqomah shel ha-sho’ah bo. Ramat Gan: Tel Aviv University Press. Michman, D. 2004. A ‘Third Partner’ of World Jewry? The Role of the Memory of the Shoah in the Search for a New Present-Day European Jewish Identity. In Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, eds K. Kwiet and J. Matthäus, 123–35. Westport, CT: Praeger. Pinto, D. 2006. A New Role for Jews in Europe. Challenges and Responsibilities. In Turning the Kaleidoscope. Perspectives on European Jewry, eds S. Lustig and I. Leveson, 27–40. New York: Berghahn. Roth, C. and Wigoder, G., eds. 1971. Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Schulte, C. 1997. Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums: die ursprüngliche Konzeption der Wissenschaft des Judentums und ihre Aktualität nach 175 Jahren. Askhenas 7/2: 280–310. Sorkin, D. 2007. The New ‘Mosaik’. Jews and European Culture, 1750-1940. In Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom, 1998-1940, eds J. Frishman and H. Berg, 11–29. Amsterdam: Aksant. Toury, J. 1964. Emancipation and Assimilation. Concepts and Conditions. Yalqut Moreshet 2/2. Wallet, B. 2008. From Political Activism to Cultural Identification. Dutch Jewry Between the Netherlands and Israel. Unpublished paper presented at the University College Utrecht Symposium on Jewish Politics and Political Behaviour II, Universiteit Utrecht, 1 December 2008. Waszek, N. 1999. Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza – Beiträge der Philosophie zur ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’? Eduard Gans und die philosophischen Optionen des Vereins für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Menora 10: 187–215. Wolf, I. 1822. Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums. Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1/1: 1–24. English translation by L. Kochan. 1957. On the Concept of the Science of Judaism. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2: 194–204. Zwiep, I.E. 2008. ‘Judenthum’, ‘Griechenthum’ and ‘Christenthum’ as Parameters in Early Nineteenth- Century Jewish Political Thinking. In Empsychoi Logoi. Religious Innovations in Antiquity, eds A. Houtman et al., 3–17. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

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14 Language Out of Darkness: George Steiner Speaking the Unspeakable Ricardo Gil Soeiro

The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance of language as creator and bearer of humane, rational truth. Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life. This apprehension was not Kafka’s alone. The fear of the erosion of the Logos, of the gain of letter on spirit, is strong in Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos and the polemics of Karl Kraus. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Broch’s Death of Virgil (which may, in part, be read as a gloss on Kafka’s dilemma) are pervaded by the authority of silence. George Steiner, Language and Silence (1967, 123) In his essay The Idea of Europe (2004), originally delivered as a lecture at the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands, George Steiner offers five axioms to define Europe: the coffee house; the landscape on a traversable and human scale; the streets and squares named after statesmen, scientists, artists and writers of the past; our twofold descent from Athens and Jerusalem; and, lastly, that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset, which shadowed the idea and substance of Europe even in its noon hours. This chapter will explore that sense of an ‘epilogue’, which, according to Steiner, was poignantly substantiated by the horror of the concentration camps, and which has proved crucial to a distinctively European self-understanding in the sense that we can no longer believe in the dream of reason that animated the spirit of the Aufklärung. In a selection of six essays under the heading ‘Language Out of Darkness’ included in Language and Silence (1967), Steiner mournfully declares that silence grows palpable and that language will no longer 235

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grow and freshen. Haunted by the terrifying paradox of the inhumanity in humanity (which grew from the very core of Europe), as well as by the Shoah’s revelation of how human speech can be used both to love and to hate, to create and to destroy, it is Steiner’s post-Auschwitz Jewishness that informs his dark reading of man, and compels him to wager on the meaning of meaning pursued in his book Real Presences (1989).1 Conceding that the aspiration of putting together some notes toward a redefinition of culture crumbled before the unfathomable in Bluebeard’s Castle, Steiner recognizes that the death of god at Auschwitz can only be surmounted by the survivors’ narratives, particularly by Paul Celan’s revolutionary use of a purified post-Holocaust language, which aims at representing something of the essential Holocaust experience.2 This essay hopes to shed light on this subject and show how, initially calling for silence in relation to the Shoah, Steiner has now altered his conception of ‘silence’ to act as a metaphor, warning against the use of ordinary linguistic techniques when speaking or writing about the Tremendum, the Holocaust. Steiner, like survivors themselves, suffers from a divided allegiance to both sides of the opposed thinking on Holocaust representation – the aesthetic–expressive impossibility of communicating the Shoah experience on the one hand, and the paramount moral responsibility to do so on the other (Lyotard 1988). Steiner is a European thinker who thinks about Europe, and, indeed, it is as if he were writing as the last European, as a kind of survivor. 3 In his George Steiner: a Reader (1984), he draws our attention towards an overwhelmingly brutal paradox: The edifice of total warfare and of the death-camps, of totalitarian torture and ‘the big lie’, had its base, had its contemporary triumphs, in the heart-lands of western culture. The spheres of AuschwitzBirkenau and of the Beethoven recital, of the torture-cellar and the great library, were contiguous in space and time. Men could come home from their day’s butchery and falsehood to weep over Rilke or play Schubert. The Jeffersonian, the Arnoldian promise that the spread of education, together with the cultivation of the arts and sciences, would humanize man, would bring with them a civilization of politics had proved illusory. How could this be? (Steiner 1984, 10–11.)4 According to Steiner, the Holocaust was not an accident in European culture. This notion would surface again in works such as In Bluebeard’s Castle, Language and Silence, No Passion Spent and Errata. In his view,

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Europe, despite being the cradle of high culture, or precisely because of it, did not prevent the atrocities that occurred in the twentieth century. In her study of Steiner’s thought on the Holocaust, Catherine Chatterley (2009) has convincingly demonstrated the centrality of the Holocaust to Steinerian cultural criticism, and the larger historical significance of Steiner’s post-Holocaust analysis of Western humanistic culture. Steiner has defined himself as a ‘remembrancer’: At the centre of my work is an attempt to come after the Shoah, culturally, philosophically, in a literary sense: to be somewhere around with all the shadows and the ghosts and the ash, which are so enormous here. [...] There should be a few impractical Jews left in the great shadow of Europe who at least remember what the civilization here was. (Steiner 1995, 72–3) In his haunting book Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contends that, contrary to being history’s paradigmatic example of barbaric regression into pre-societal bestiality, the Holocaust was in fact modernity’s corollary. This perception was, in turn, modelled by the Frankfurt School, in, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Auflärung of 1947 (English edition: Horkheimer and Adorno 1988). Being, quite justifiably, the pivotal textbook of Freudo-Marxist critical theory, the Dialektik addressed the question that went to the very heart of the modern age, namely ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988, xi; see also Wolin 1992). To seek an answer, the authors subjected the whole history of Western categories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche, to a searching philosophical and psychological critique. It seems that lurking beneath the veneer of civilization and progress lie more sinister corollaries, which act in dialectical congruence, thereby perpetuating the risk of eventualities such as the Holocaust.5 In an attempt to address the paradox of humanism and barbarism in European culture, in the third lecture of In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) Steiner refers to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as representing the intractable moral dilemma, the Gordian knot he cannot untie: ‘One of the principal works that we have in the philosophy of language, in the total reading of Hölderlin’s poetry, was composed almost within earshot of a death camp. Heidegger’s pen did not stop nor his mind go mute’ (Steiner 1971, 78). Furthermore, the controversy is made more complex, argues Steiner, by the problem of deconstruction, whose

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hermeneutics (or anti-hermeneutics) Heidegger influenced directly. He assures us that ‘Sein und Zeit and Heidegger’s theory of a language that speaks man rather than being spoken by him, is utterly seminal in the modern anti-humanistic movement. There is little in Deconstruction or in Foucault’s “abolition of man” [ ... ] which is not voiced in Heidegger’s a-humanism’ (xxiv–xxv). The thinker of Being fell silent and, after 1945, found nothing to say about the death camps. In addition, given that the collusion between art, culture and inhumanity remains one of Steiner’s central concerns in his vocation as critic of European culture, his high regard for Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus comes as no surprise. In 1921, after the First World War, Mann had already expressed his doubts about European culture and its spiritual and moral values in Goethe und Tostoi. Fragmente zum Problem der Humanität. Faustus, published in 1947, could be read as an anguished meditation by an exiled German observing Europe from America after the devastation of World War II. The novel is a reshaping of the Faust legend in the context of the first half of the twentieth century and the intellectual, moral and spiritual destiny of Germany and Europe in that period. In Steiner’s eyes, the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn (a former theology student who trades his soul and body to become a musician of genius), as told by Serenus Zeitblom (Adrian’s friend and teller of the story, who represents humanity and moral values), tragically strikes a chord in the idea of the collusion between high culture and barbarism: In Doktor Faustus, Mann addressed himself directly to the ruin of the German spirit. The novel is shaped by the contrast between the language of the narrator and the events which he recounts. The language is that of a classical humanist, a touch laborious and oldfashioned, but always open to the voices of reason, scepticism, and tolerance. The story of Leverkühn’s personal tragedy prefigures the greater madness of the German people. Even as the narrator sets down his pedantic but humane testimony to the wild destruction of a man of genius, the Reich is shown plunging to bloody chaos. In Doktor Faustus there is also a direct consideration of the roles of language and music in German soul. Mann seems to be saying that the deepest energies of the German soul were always expressed in music rather than in words. And the history of Adrian Leverkühn suggests that this is a fact fraught with danger. For there are in music possibilities of complete irrationalism and hypnosis. Unaccustomed to finding in language any ultimate standard of meaning, the Germans

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were ready for the sub-human jargon of Nazism. And behind the jargon sounded the great dark chords of Wagnerian ecstasy. (Steiner 1967, 104) Both authors, Steiner and Mann, saw that European culture, for all its weight and beauty, harboured in its heart appalling depths of cruelty and evil: hence this crepuscular notion – also put forward by Edmund Husserl in his Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (1977) – of the crisis of European humanity, of a closing chapter. In fact, terms such as crisis, end, epilogue, afterword or fall pervade Steiner’s writing, conveying an apocalyptic tone which very much dominates his intellectual framework. His Grammars of Creation (2001), for instance, a work described by the author as an in memoriam for lost futures, begins significantly with the alluring perception of the end: There is [...] in the climate of spirit at the end of the twentieth century, a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry, the contracts with time which so largely determine our consciousness, point to late afternoon in ways that are ontological – this is to say, of the essence, of the fabric of being. We are [...] latecomers. The dishes are being cleared. “Time, ladies and gents, time.” [...] The shadows lengthen. We seem to bend earthward and towards night as do plants. (Steiner 2001, 2) In addition, addressing the motif of the severance of word from the world as yet another symptom of today’s sense of an acute crisis, Steiner argues in Real Presences that in the period stretching roughly from 1870 to 1930 the West underwent an epochal change in its relation to language. Before this period, we assumed that the relation between word and world was covenant-like, two realms bound together beneath truth’s umbrella. Shakespeare, Montaigne and Hume were ‘thoroughly at home in the house of language’ (Steiner 1989, 92). They quite conclusively presumed ‘that being is, to a workable degree, “sayable” ’, and that ‘until the crisis of the meaning of meaning which began in the late nineteenth century, even the most subversive of anti-rhetorics remained committed to language’ (90, 92). Steiner claims in his magnum opus, After Babel, that: With them [Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Joyce, Stein and Wittgenstein] Western literature and speech- consciousness enter a new phase. The poet no longer has or can confidently hope for tenure in a generalized

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authority of speech. The languages waiting for him as an individual born into history, into society, into the expressive conventions of his particular culture and milieu, are no longer a natural skin. Established language is the enemy. The poet finds it sordid with lies. Daily currency has made it stale. The ancient metaphors are inert and the numinous energies bone dry. It is the writer’s compelling task, as Mallarmé said of Poe, ‘to purify the language of the tribe.’ He will seek to resuscitate the magic of the word by dislocating traditional bonds of grammar and of ordered space (Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’). [...] He will endeavour to rescind or at least weaken the classic continuities of reason and syntax, of conscious directions and verbal forms. (Steiner 1975, 186) It should not go unmentioned, however, that Steiner does not deny the fragility and self- opaqueness of the once-sovereign subject. What is particularly disheartening, thinks Steiner, about the new paradigm is: ‘Where the “I” is not “I” but a Magellanic cloud of momentary energies always in the process of fission, there can be no authorship in any single, stable sense. The maker’s – the poet’s, the painter’s, the composer’s – will and intentionality in regard to his work can have no fixed locus’ (Steiner 1989, 100). A semantics of the ethical is postulated here: Steiner’s reproach is directed against the deconstruction of the ‘I’ and of authorship that separates the aesthetic from the ethical, which he sees particularly in Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. For him, the deconstructionist counter-theology of absence, with its Nietzschean claim that once we have been released from the straightjacket of Western metaphysics a Dionysian joyous wisdom will supplant the claims of reason, falls short of any ethical criterion.6 Martha Nussbaum reports, in this respect, that in Derrida’s work ‘the ethical vanishes more or less altogether,’ leaving her with a certain hunger for blood, a craving she satisfies by blowing the dust off volumes by Aristotle and Henry James (Nussbaum 1990, 170–1). Real Presences (1989) expands on themes from previous key essays such as ‘The Retreat from the Word’ (1961), ‘Silence and the Poet’ (1966) and ‘Critic/Reader’ (1979), and is Steiner’s attempt to confront the current ‘crisis of sense’ embodied by Derridean deconstruction. Returning to the claim that the Holocaust tragically corroborates Steiner’s suspicions about the decline of European culture, there is an elegiac sense that we live in a post- culture, after the fall. This cannot be easily divorced from Nietzsche’s claim that Europe was in the grip of nihilism, or from Heidegger’s conviction that forgetting of being

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(Seinsvergessenheit) requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive destruction of the history of ontology. Philippe LacoueLabarthe (1988) argues that Auschwitz does indeed represent what Hölderlin called a caesura, a radical break in history which comes into view when God and humanity draw apart from one another. Steiner, too, in The Death of Tragedy (1961) argued similarly that ‘God grew weary of the savagery of man. Perhaps He was no longer able to control it and could no longer recognize His image in the mirror of creation. He has left the world to its own inhuman devices and dwells now in some other corner of the universe so remote that His messengers cannot even reach us’ (Steiner 1961, 353). ‘We come after,’ Steiner wrote in Language and Silence (1967, 4), and in his important essay ‘The Long Life of Metaphor: an Approach to the Shoah’ he continued to argue: It may be that the Auschwitz-universe, for it was that, precisely marks that realm of potential – now realized – human bestiality, or, rather, abandonment of the human and regression to bestiality, which both precedes language, as it does in the animal, and comes after language as it does in death. Auschwitz would signify on a collective, historical scale the death of man as a rational, “forward dreaming” speech- organism (the zoon phonanta of Greek philosophy). (Steiner 1988, 156). For him, the haunted music of the Shoah ‘is that of the embers which continue to crackle in the cooling ash of a dead fire. Eloquence after Auschwitz would be a kind of obscenity’ (ibid.). Silence is preferable, since it is perhaps the most fitting answer to a loss whose magnitude so overwhelms description. The question is ‘whether language itself can justly communicate, express, give rational or metaphoric constructs to the realities of modern torture and extermination’ and whether we ought not ‘to acquiesce in Adorno’s famous dictum: “No poetry after Auschwitz” ’ (Steiner 1984, 14). For Steiner, Paul Celan is, together with Primo Levi, the only survivor of the Holocaust whose writings are commensurate with the unspeakable. After Auschwitz (a telling phrase), which is for Steiner an appalling symbol of God’s absence, Jews faced the challenge of speaking to and about God, as well as the difficulty of using language to try to conceptualize and understand Auschwitz while wondering whether the ‘limits of language do not fall short of the limits of the Shoah experience’ (Steiner 1988, 155). Celan is absolutely crucial to

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Steiner’s thought on language and Holocaust representation, because he single-handedly, in Steiner’s account, managed to create a new language of representation, a language to the north of the future (im Norden der Zukunft), and, through it, was able to pierce the heart of the Shoah experience – and this in German. Celan’s poetry turned the German language against itself, purifying it by expunging its Nazi residue, and used it to communicate a profoundly Jewish experience. As evidence of his argument in this essay, Steiner cites Celan’s poem ‘Psalm’: Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand. Gelobt seist du, Niemand. Dir zulieb wollen wir blühn. Dir entgegen. Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose. Mit dem Griffel seelenhell, dem Staubfaden himmelswüst, der Krone rot vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen über, o über dem Dorn. (Celan 1983, 225)7 Only Celan, in Steiner’s view an even more necessary poet than Rilke, has found adequate expression for the ‘eclipse of God’ (Buber 1998), for the ‘No- oneness’ that was God during the Shoah. Through his poem, Celan confronts the absence, impotence and indifference of God during the Holocaust (Jonas 1984). And through the name ‘Niemand’ the poet’s naked cry stresses the exit of God from language and from the bounds of human experience. Be that as it may, Steiner points out that even after Auschwitz, in the absent face of God, Celan sustains the perennial Jewish tradition of dialogue with God. Steiner reads the poem as an accusation out of ash, some kind of a blossoming indictment that

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tells against the finality of annihilation. Celan’s poetry thus takes the reader into a sphere of lived metaphor, of language beside itself, which is one of the (wholly insufficient) images or tropes whereby we can come nearer the question with which I began: that of the very possibilities of human discourse in regard to God and to the Shoah – a duality that has for the Jew, been made an irreparable unison. To ask what, if any, are such possibilities is to ask metaphysically and theologically. It is to recognize the essential inadequacy of pragmatic-positivist levels of argument. (Steiner 1988, 169–70) He argues further: Celan’s later poems seem to be harvesting ‘silence stones’ towards the reconstruction of a language laid waste by sadistic falsehood. This reconstruction lies ‘north of the future’; only there shall these mute stones and the German language return to authentic saying. (Steiner 1984, 14) Even though Steiner sees Celan’s suicide as a symbol of overwhelming desolation, and wonders whether the Shoah ‘has eradicated the saving grace, the life-giving mystery of meaningful metaphor in Western speech and, correlatively ... poetry and philosophic thought’, he believes that the ‘compulsion to articulacy within Judaism, the commandment of dialogue even with, even against, a mute God’ must persist (Steiner 1988, 170). So Steiner’s Sisyphean task becomes clear: that of celebrating a lost world of European humanism while, at the same time, condemning its tragic destiny. He cannot succeed in getting the rock to the top of the hill, but neither can he give up the attempt. The author of Real Presences makes us look at the darkness, like Job, and be dazzled by light. He speaks the unspeakable and, such is his desperate passion for language and the arts – the muses as the bearers of our European culture – that the shock gives us the strength to go on. In reflecting on the fascinating imaginative realm of the novel, Milan Kundera writes compellingly of the art born as the echo of God’s laughter: The ‘agelastes’ [Rabelais’ word for those who do not laugh], the non-thought of received ideas, and kitsch are one and the same, the three-headed enemy of the art born as the echo of God’s laughter,

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the art that created the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood. That imaginative realm of tolerance was born with modern Europe, it is the very image of Europe – or at least our dream of Europe, a dream many times betrayed but nevertheless strong enough to unite us all in the fraternity that stretches far beyond the little European continent. But we know that the world where the individual is respected (the imaginative world of the novel, and the real one of Europe) is fragile and perishable. [ ... ] For if European culture seems under threat today, if the threat from within and without hangs over what is most precious about it – its respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life – then, I believe, that precious essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel. (Kundera 2003, 164–5) Steiner’s hermeneutic musings appear to be harvesting this wisdom of uncertainty embraced by Kundera. There is little doubt that at the close of In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971), and in regard to a theory of culture, Steiner leaves us standing ‘where Bartók’s Judith stands, when she asks to open the last door on the night’ (Steiner 1971, 95). It is equally unsurprising that Steiner argues that absolute tragedy is a negative ontology, in which birth itself is seen as a tragic act existing in the world as a fatality, quoting Kafka’s stark finding that ‘there is abundance of hope but none for us’ (Steiner 1996, 134). However, in spite of Steiner’s dark picture of existence (clearly mediated through high Attic tragic drama, as well as through Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life), one can perceive in his hermeneutic writings (namely, in Real Presences) a different mood: there is a kind of illumination, as in the tiny, free-standing phrase in one of Celan’s darkest poems, ‘Tenebrae’: Es glänzte. Concluding, and to be a little impudent, we could say that Steiner’s confrontation with European culture, and particularly with Celan’s language out of darkness, is all about hope, but actually a more unknowing, less assured hope, more of a hope against hope, definitely a hope like that found in the closing pages of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: ‘a hope as spectral and muted as the last trembling cello note of Leverkuehn’s great cantata, a mere vibrant ghost on the air or scarcely audible silence. What is being pursued here through the halls of hell is a hope beyond hopelessness – that possibility of resurrection’ (Ward 2005, 106).

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Notes 1. For a detailed discussion of Steiner’s complex approach to the Shoah, see Abad (2004); Asensio (2001); Boyers (1985); Peterson (1999); Rastier (2004). 2. On the idea of the death of god see Nietzsche (1980), 480–1. For a detailed discussion of Celan’s poetry, see Blanchot (2002); Broda (1986); Derrida (1986); Felstiner (1996); Levinas (1976); Pöggeler (1986). 3. See his essay ‘A Kind of Survivor’, in Steiner (1967), 140–54. 4. This paradox is explored throughout his career (in Steiner 1999; 2002; 2007). 5. See Wolin (2004) on skeletons in the closet; he also re- examines the chequered relationship between intellectuals and right-wing politics during the 1930s, and the implications of that relationship for the political present. 6. In fairness, it should be noted that throughout the 1990s Derrida’s work had been drawn to ethical topics and concerns such as friendship, hospitality, responsibility, forgiveness and the gift. 7. The English translation is provided by Steiner: ‘No- one kneads us again out of earth and loam,/No- one bespeaks our dust./No- one.//Praise unto thee, Noone./For love of you will/we bloom./Towards/You.//A nothing/we were, are we, will/ we remain, blooming:/the Nothing-, the/No- one’s-rose.//With/our stylus soul-bright/the dust-thread sky-waste,/the crown reddened/by the purple word, which we sang/above, o above/the thorn.’ (Steiner 1988, 167–8.)

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Husserl, E. 1977. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologische Philosophie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Jonas, H. 1984. Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. Eine jüdische Stimme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kundera, M. 2003. The Art of the Novel. New York: Harper. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 1988. La Fiction du Politique. Heidegger, l’Art et la Politique. Paris: Bourgois. Levinas, E. 1976. Paul Celan: De l’etre a l’autre. In Noms Propres. Paris: Fata Morgana, 49–56. Lyotard, J.-F. 1988. Heidegger et ‘les Juifs’. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Nietzsche, F. 1980. Morgenröte * Idyllen aus Messina * Die fröhliche Wissenschaft („la gaya scienza”). In Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, 480–1. München/Berlin/New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag/De Gruyte. Nussbaum, M. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Peterson, J. 1999. The Holocaust, George Steiner, and Tragic Discourse. Rendezvous: Journal of Arts and Letters 34: 93–105. Pöggeler, O. 1986. Spur des Worts. Zur Lyrik Paul Celans. München: Karl Alber Freiburg. Rastier, F. 2004. L’Après- culture – a partir de George Steiner. Po&sie 108: 95–113. Steiner, G. 1961. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1967. Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. London/Boston: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1971. In Bluebeard’s Castle. Some Notes Toward the Re-Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1975. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, G. 1984. George Steiner: A Reader. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1988. The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the ‘Shoah’. In Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang. New York/London: Holmes and Meier. Steiner, G. 1989. Real Presences. Is There Anything Real in What We Say? London/ Boston: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1995. Art of Criticism. The Paris Review: 72–3. Steiner, G. 1996. No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 1999. The Humanities - At Twilight? PN Review 25: 18–24. Steiner, G. 2001. Grammars of Creation. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. 2002. The Muses’ Farewell. Salmagundi: 148–56. Steiner, G. 2004. The Idea of Europe. Tilburg: Nexus Institute. Steiner, G. 2007. A New Literacy. The Kenyon Review 29: 10–24. Ward, G. 2005. Steiner and Eagleton: the Practice of Hope and the Idea of the Tragic. Literature and Theology 19. Wolin, R. 1992. The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolin, R. 2004. The Seduction of Unreason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Atlantic Charter. 1941. The Roosevelt- Churchill Declaration. London: National Peace Council. Balibar, E. 2003. Europe: Vanishing Mediator. Constellations 10/3: 312–38. Balibar, E. 2004. We the People of Europe? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barfoed, N., ed. 2006. Samarbejde/Modstand – et stadigt dilemma. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Barker, E., Sir G. Clark and P. Vaucher, eds. 1954. The European Inheritance. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barraclough, G. 1955. History in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauer, Y. 1989. Out of the Ashes. The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bauman, Z. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beck, U. 2003. Understanding the Real Europe. Dissent, summer 2003. www. dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/su03/beck.htm (accessed 10 April 2010). Beck, U. and E. Grande. 2004. Das kosmopolitische Europa. Gesellschaft und Politik in der Zweiten Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Beck, U. and E. Grande. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Becker, J.-J. 1973. Le carnet B; les pouvoirs publics et l’antimilitarisme avant la guerre de 1914. Paris: Klincksieck. Becker, J.-J. 1986. L’opinion de gauche française et les débuts de l’Europe. In Histoire des débuts de la construction européenne (mars 1948- mai 1950), ed. Raymond Poidevin, 241–59. Brussels: Bruylant. Beloff, M. 1957. Europe and the Europeans: An International Discussion. London: Chatto & Windus. Beloff, M., P. Renouvin, F. Schnabel and F. Valsecchi, eds. 1959–67. L’Europe du XIXe et du XXe siècle: Problèmes et interprétations historiques. 7 vols. Milano: Marzorati. Benda, J., G. Bernanos, F. Flora et al. 1947. Rencontres internationals de Genève: l’esprit européen. Neuchâtel: Baconnière. Benjamin, W. 2007. Über den Begriff der Geschichte [1940]. In Walter Benjamin erzählen, ed. A. Honold, 129–40. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Berkowitz, M. 1993. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biagianti, I. 1986. Il federalismo di Salvemini. In Gaetano Salvemini tra politica e storia, ed. G. Cingari. Rome: Laterza. Bjørnvig, T. 1960. Begyndelsen. Essays. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Blanchot, M. 2002. Le Dernier a Parler. In Une Voix Venue d’ailleurs, 69–105. Paris: Editions Gallimard. Bloxham, D. 2001. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trial and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Board of Deputies of British Jews. 1945. The Jews in Europe. Their Martyrdom and Future. London: The Board of Deputies of British Jews. Bodemann, Y.M. 2008. The New German Jewry and the European Context: The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bordoni, G.S. 1994. Federalismo europeo e federalismo infranazionale: l’eredità di Altiero Spinelli. Storia contemporanea XXV/5: 715–28. Boyers, R. 1985. Steiner’s Holocaust: Politics and Theology. Salmagundi 66: 26–49.

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Index Certain ubiquitous names (Europe, Asia, Nazis, World War II, etc.) have been omitted. Aachen 95 Abendland 78, 83, 85, 189 Achtenvijftig 180–2 Action Committee for the United States of Europe 166, 177 Adorno, Theodor 187, 237, 241 Africa 2, 60, 127, 131, 187–9, 193, 195–6 Agamben, Giorgio 14, 212–20 Aix la Chapelle 95 Aksoy, Zeki 28 Alger républicain 124–5 Algeria 56, 124–31 Alps, the 146 Alsace-Lorraine 190 Amendola, Giorgio 143 America see under United States of America American Committee for a Free and United Europe 45 American Office of War Information 94 Amersfoort 162, 169 Amsterdam 159, 228 Annales School 83 Antelme, Robert 14 Arendt, Hannah 187, 218–19 Argentia 61 Aristotle 240 Armand, Louis 181 Aron, Raymond 130, 133 Asia Minor 24 Athens 235 Atlantic Charter 62, 63 Atlantropa 177 Atomium 179–81 Atoms for Peace 12, 179–81 Auschwitz 69, 211, 235–6, 241–2 Australia 198 Austria 28, 58–9, 97–8, 106, 128

Austro-Hungary 146 Baker, Sir Ernest 88 Balfour Declaration 226 Balibar, Étienne 24, 221 Barcelona 188 Barraclough, Geoffrey 82, 86–7 Bartók, Béla 244 Basso, Lelio 143 Bastid, Paul 191 Battle of Britain 92 Bauer, Riccardo 147 Bauman, Zygmunt 237 Baur, Erwin 197 Beck, Ulrich 17, 22, 25, 27, 208–10, 220–1 Becquerel, Henri 179 Beethoven, Ludwig van 236 Belgium 61, 64, 131, 163, 186–7, 190, 193 Belize 199 Beloff, Max 82–3, 86–8 Belsen 95–6, 104 Benda, Julien 78–9 Benelux 166, 180 Benes, Edouard 44, 60 Benjamin, Walter 77 Bergamo 146 Berlin 58, 104–6, 229 Bernanos, Georges 78 Bernard, Jacqueline 127 Bevin, Ernest 40, 47 Bidault, Georges 191 Bilderberg conferences 169 Birkenau 236 Bjørnvig, Thorkild 120 Bloom, Claire 106 Blum, Léon 125 Bocchini, Arturo 141 Bohemia 66

265

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266

Index

Bohr, Niels 178 Boulogne 107 Bourdet, Claude 130 Bowie, Robert 167 Bracken, Bernard 95 Bretton Woods 40 Briand, Aristide 126, 133 Britain 4, 9, 47, 60–3, 66–7, 70, 92–108, 132, 166–7, 171–2, 176, 188; see also United Kingdom British Broadcasting Corporation 95–6, 102, 105, 106 British Commonwealth 43, 60, 95, 163, 186, 189, 199 British Empire 43 Broch, Hermann 235 Bruges 43 Brugmans, Henri 43, 194 Brussels 12, 178–80 Brussels Pact (1947) 39, 44, 180 Brussels World Fair (1955–58) 180 Buchenwald 94, 95, 104, 216, 220 Buckmaster network 216 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 172 Caffa, Andrea 147 Cahiers Politiques, Les 193 Calamandrei, Piero 146 Cali, Francesco 34 Cambridge Modern History 82 Camp Amersfoort 164 Camus, Albert 10, 11, 17, 21, 124–34, 153 Canada 31 Canton 143 Caribbean 199 Carr, E.H. 163–5, 169 Cassin, René 8, 17, 56–71 Cassin, Samuel 68 Cassin, Yvonne 68 Cattaneo, Carlo 147 Caucasus, the 31 Celan, Paul 14, 215, 236, 241–4 Cesarani, David 99 Charles the Bald 190 Charter-77 56 Chattanooga 161 Chatterley, Catherine 237 China 5, 132

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Christianity 38, 39, 85, 197 Churchill, Winston 9, 40, 42–5, 47, 61, 63, 66, 80–1, 93, 95, 103–4, 108, 131 Cilento, Sir Raphael 198 Civitavecchia 144 Claus, Luc 180 Cold War 4, 8–9, 11, 15, 39, 48–9, 51, 55, 71, 92–108, 117, 120, 124, 131–2, 134, 165, 169, 173, 206 Colditz Story, The 197 Collège de France 83 College of Europe 43 Columbia University 168 Combat 10, 11, 124–34 Combat et Révolution 126 Cominform 40 Comité Français de la Libération Nationale 69 Comité Français pour la Fédération Européenne 129 Comité Général d’Études 192 Commission Internationale Europe Outre-Mer 197, 199 Committee on Publicity for the Education of Popular Opinion on Foreign Workers 98 Commonwealth, British see under British Commonwealth Communism 43, 81, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 125, 130, 144–5, 206, 226, 229 Communist Party, Algeria 125, 130 Communist Party, Germany 144 Communist Party, Italy 144 Communist Party, Soviet 113, 116 Congo 179 Congress of Europe 7, 38–41, 45, 48, 50, 194 Conseil National de la Résistance 191–2 Conseil pour l’Europe Unie 40 Continental Café 107 Continuation War 111 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights 30–1, 39, 47 Convention on Genocide 66 Copenhagen 199 Corriere della Sera 147

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Index 267 Cotten, Joseph 99 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard 37, 40, 45, 189 Council of Europe 5, 17, 23–4, 26, 30–2, 37–40, 42–3, 46, 48–50, 86, 88, 180, 194, 196–7 Courtin, René 192–3 Critica Sociale 147 Croce, Benedetto 78, 82, 145 Croix de Feu 56 Czechoslovakia 55, 60–1, 64, 100, 125, 128 Daily Express, The 104 Daily Mail, The 95, 96 Daily Mirror, The 94, 99, 101 Dalmatia 146 Dawes Plan 58 Dawson, Cristopher 82 Day to Remember, A 107 De Gaulle, Charles 56, 59–60, 62, 65, 130–2 Declaration of Human Rights 8, 40, 47–8, 59, 66 Defeated Nation, A 100 Dehio, Ludwig 84 Demachy, J.C. 199 Denmark 10, 46, 111–22 Derrida, Jacques 240 Desboeuf, Germain 199 Dimbleby, Richard 96 Diner, Dan 224 Don Quijote 217 Dostoevski, Fyodor 21 Dounreay 179 Drancy 68–9 Dreyfus, Alfred 56 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre 126 Druillenec, Harold de 95 Dubnow, Simon 231 Dulles, John Foster 167–8 Dumbarton Oaks 44 Dunkirk 92 East Indies 4 Edda 118 Eden, Sir Anthony 62, 64 Einaudi, Luigi 147–9 Einstein, Albert 172

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Eisenhower, Dwight 159, 167–8, 173–4, 181–2 Encyclopaedia Judaica 225 England 8, 59, 61; see also United Kingdom Enlightenment 7, 15, 22, 38, 82, 199, 206 Esprit 130 Esprit Européen, L’ 78 Ette, Ottmar 14, 212, 218, 220 Etzel, Franz 181 EU Charter on Fundamental Human Rights 28, 30 Eurafrica 187–8, 190–2, 195 Euratom 5, 168–9, 177–9, 181, 183 Europa-Archiv 195 Europe after the Rain 171 European Coal and Steel Community 5, 11–12, 28, 38, 159–60, 166–7, 169, 179, 194–7 European Commission 2, 6, 26, 32 European Communities 23, 27, 34, 71, 188, 198 European Convention on Human Rights 26, 30, 38, 49, 71 European Court of Human Rights 7, 23, 27–8, 30–1, 34, 38–40, 46, 47, 50, 71 European Court of Justice 7, 23–34 European Defence Community 166 European Defence Council 102 European Economic Community 5, 28–9, 108, 169, 179–80, 187, 199–200 European Free Trade Association 5 European Inheritance 86, 88 European Jewish Year Book 14, 226 European Movement 40, 177, 180, 183 European Parliament 116, 180 European Parliamentary Union 40 European Political Community 196–9 European Recovery Programme 45, 187 European Union 2, 7, 22–4, 26–9, 31–2, 34, 39, 43, 60, 120, 181 European Union of Federalists 80 European Volunteer Workers 98–9, 105

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268 Index Eurovision Song Contest 27 Expo-58 178–81, 183 Fabre-Luce, Alfred 126 Fasci di combattimento 146 Fascism 3, 78, 105, 120, 142, 145–6, 149–53, 243 Fausto Nitti, Francesco 141 Febvre, Lucien 8, 82–3, 85–7 Felman, Shoshana 210 Fernandez, Ramon 126 Figaro, Le 129, 130 Finland 111, 163 First World War see under World War I Fischer, Eugen 197 Fischer, Herbert 81 Flaubert, Gustave 21 Flora, Francesco 79 Foa, Vittorio 147 Fonda, Henry 28 Foucault, Michel 221, 238 Franc Tireur, Le 129 France 4, 10, 23, 59, 62–3, 65, 67–70, 93, 102, 124–38, 146, 160, 163, 166–7, 171–2, 176, 179, 181, 186–7, 190–3, 216, 219, 229 France Libre 8, 60, 68, 70 Frankfurt 215, 217 Frankfurt School 237 Free French National Committee 64 Frenay, Henri 130, 191 French Popular Front 125 French Resistance 10, 60, 124, 126, 192, 216 French Revolution 85 Freyer, Hans 84 Friedländer, Saul 224 Frisch, Hartvig 82 Front National 56 Fulbright, James William 45, 50 Gaeta 143 Gans, Eduard 229 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 40 Geneva 57, 58, 60, 62, 70, 78, 80, 173, 179 Geneva Conference (1944) 129 Geneva Convention 67, 96–7

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German Law Journal 23 Germany 8–9, 41, 57, 62, 64, 68–70, 77–8, 83, 92–103, 105–8, 120, 125–6, 128, 130, 133–4, 160, 164–6, 169, 181, 186, 188, 209, 229, 238 Gestapo 69 Gideon, Clarence 28 Giordani, Francesco 181 Giustiza e Libertà 146 Glaser, Stephan 68 Glendon, Mary Ann 22 Goebbels, Joseph 127 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang 205, 220 Goetz, Walter 82 Goldhaber, Michael D. 27, 32 Gollancz, Victor 99, 194 Gollwitzer, Heinz 83 Graetz, Heinrich 231 Gramsci, Antonio 141 Grande, Edgar 25, 27 Great Britain see under Britain Greece 43, 60, 64, 96, 131, 134 Greenland 100 Grese, Irma 95 Groeben, Hans von der 199 Grundtvig, N.F.S. 118 Gruppe 47 77 Guéhenno, Jean 79 Guiton, Raymond-Jean 195 Haaren 162 Haber, Heinz 174 Habermas, Jürgen 207, 212 Hague, The 9, 38–41, 44, 64, 67, 81, 194 Hague Congress, The (1948) 9, 81, 194 Halecki, Oscar 83, 85–7 Halifax, Lord Edward 62 Hallstein, Walter 199 Halphen, Louis 82 Hamilton, Alexander 147 Hammar, Tomas 219 Hansen, Martin A. 10, 111, 114, 117–20, 142 Harryvan, A.J. 165 Harst, J. van der 165 Hartnell, William 97 Hazard, Paul 82 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich 145, 229, 230

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Index 269 Heidegger, Martin 237–8, 240 Heine, Heinrich 230 Helsinki 48, 56 Heretica 10, 112–13, 119–20 Herodotus 196 Hess, Moses 231 Heydrich, Reinhard 66 Heylen, Jean 180 Hiroshima 171–2 Hirschfeld, E.H. 165, 169 Historikerstreit 213 Hitler, Adolf 40–1, 57, 62, 66, 70, 93, 104, 125, 144, 162 Hobsbawm, Eric 75 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 235 Holborn, Hajo 84–6 Hölderlin, Friedrich 215, 237, 241 Holland see under Netherlands, The Holocaust 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 13–15, 17, 66, 205–21, 224, 231, 236–7, 240–2 Homer 237 Hopkins, Harry 66 Horkheimer, Max 187, 237 Hours, Joseph 193 Howorth, Muriel 174–6 Hume, David 239 Humphreys, John 70 Hungary 55, 67, 224–5 Hurst, Cecil 67 Husserl, Edmund 239 Huxley, Aldous 173 Huxley, Julian 172 Iceland 111 Indochina 131 Ingrand, Max 37 Innocents in Paris 106–7 Institut Colonial Belge 198 Institute of Atomic Information for the Layman 174 Inter-allied Commission on War Crimes 66–7 Inter-allied Veterans Federation (FIDAC) 59 Inter-American Court of Human Rights 31 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 40

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International Declaration on Human Rights 34 International Labour Organization 57 International Monetary Fund 40 Ireland 24, 47, 94, 116 Iron Curtain 93, 104–6, 175 Islam 25, 230 Israel 14, 209, 224–5, 227–9 Italia libera, L’ 146, 193 Italy 57, 88–9, 128, 131, 141–7, 155, 166, 181, 186, 188, 193 Jagland, Thorbjørn 49 James, Henry 240 Japan 5, 31, 63, 132, 172 Jaspers, Karl 78–9 Jaurès, Jean 56 Jay, John 147 Jennings, Humphrey 100 Jerusalem 235 Jews 14–16, 34, 62, 66, 68–9, 95, 98, 103, 187, 212, 218–20, 224–33, 243 Joerges, Christian 34 Joyce, James 239 Judt, Tony 38, 187, 205, 207–8 Junius letters 148 Kafka, Franz 235, 244 Kant, Immanuel 145 Kautsky, Karl Johann 145 Keiner kommt davon 171 Kelsen, Hans 44 Kerstens, Pieter Adriaan 41–2 Kertesz, Imre 224 Keynes, John Maynard 163–4 Kharkov 67 Kirk, Hans 113 Knipping, Franz 38 Kohnstamm, Max 11–12, 17, 159–69 Kramer, Josef 95 Kraus, Karl 235 Kumm, Mattias 23, 33–4 Kundera, Milan 243–4 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 241 Lafay, Bernard 195 Lampedusa 141–2 Lange, Halvard 46, 47 Lanzmann, Claude 224

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270

Index

Lasalle, Ferdinand 144 Lauterpacht, Hersch 60 Laval, Pierre 131 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 56 League of Nations 16, 41, 44, 57–9, 62–3, 65, 147, 151, 159, 164 Lean, David 107 Lebanon 60 Lecroix, Maurice 126 Lemkin, Rafael 69 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 144–5 Lenz, Fritz 187 Leonard, Mark 26 Leverkühn, Adrian 238 Levi, Primo 14, 211, 213–15, 241 Levy, Daniel 208–9, 212 Lévy, Paul 37 Lewis, Anthony 28 Leynaud, René 127 Libération 129 Libérer et Fédérer 191 Lidice 66 Lie, Trygvie 61 Ligue Indépendente de Coopération Europeénne 40 Linden, Fred van der 198 Linnaeus, Carl 196 Lipari 141 Lipgens, Walter 127, 190–1 Lisbon Treaty 28–30 London 55, 59, 60, 63, 66–8, 70, 107, 161, 194 Longo, Luigi 143 Lost People, The 97–8 Lothair 190 Louis the German 190 Low Countries 193 Lucca 144 Lukacs, Georg 78 Lussu, Emillio 141, 147 Luxembourg 23, 31, 61, 64, 180, 193 Lyotard, Jean-François 211 Maastricht Treaty 26, 28 MacBride, Sean 47 Madagascar 188 Madariaga, Salvador de 78 Madison, James 147 Maisky, Ivan 62

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Malik, Charles 70 Mallarmé, Stéphane 239–40 Malraux, André 78 Man Between, The 166 Man from Belsen, The 95 Manchester Guardian 95 Mann, Thomas 217, 238–9, 244 Marshall, George 45, 145 Marshall Plan 12, 48, 165, 181 Marsling, Jeppe 34 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Masaryk, Jan 61 Matteotti, Giacomo 146 Mauriac, François 131 Mazower, Mark 70 Mazzini, Giuseppe 145, 148 McClean, P.J. 28 McCloy, John 167 Mediterranean Sea 177, 191 Meinecke, Friedrich 8, 77, 78, 83 Melman, Billie 104 Melville, Herman 21, 22 Messina Conference (1955) 195 Mexico 31 Michman, Dan 224 Middle Ages 117, 161, 165, 196 Middle East 168 Mila, Massimo 147 Milan 144 Milton, George Fort 161 Mirgeler, Albert 88 Monde, Le 129 Monnet, Jean 11, 81, 134, 159, 166–8, 181 Monnet Plan 167 Montaigne, Michel de 239 Montpellier 192 Montreux 80 Moravia 66 Morgan, Kenneth 92 Morocco 188 Moscow 116, 130 Moser, Thomas 187 Mouvement National Belge 190 Movimento Federalista Europeo 154 Munich 66 Musselmänner 212–20 Mussolini, Benito 11, 57, 141–3, 145–6

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Index 271 Nagasaki 171, 172 Naples 11, 143 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 168 Netherlands, The 61, 64, 96, 159–63, 172, 186, 193, 226–8, 235 Neues Abendland 78 New Deal 12, 159, 161, 169 New Order, Nazi 3 New York 160, 227 New York Times 28 Newfoundland 61 Nexus Institute 235 Nietzsche, Friedrich 237, 240 Nixon, Richard 174 Nora, Pierre 208 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 38, 48, 116 Norway 46, 49, 61, 64, 111, 163 Nouvelles Equipes Internationales 40 Nuremberg Laws 219 Nuremberg Trials 25, 97, 209–10 Nussbaum, Martha 240 Nutting, Lady Helen 175 October Revolution 186 Ollivier, Albert 130 Organisation de l’Armée Secrète 56 Organization for European Economic Cooperation 38, 40, 48, 160, 165, 169, 180–1 Oswald, John 128 Our Friend the Atom 174, 181, 183 Pagden, Anthony 26 Palestine 226, 228 Pallanza 146 Panamerica 189 Pan-Europe 37, 40, 43, 48–9, 189 Paris 8, 11, 44, 58, 70–1, 126, 129, 133, 161, 195, 216 Paris, Jacques Camille 37 Paris, Treaty of (1951) 28 Paris-Soir 126 Partito d’Azione 193 Passionate Friends, The 107 Pearl Harbor 62–3 Pell, Herbert 67–8 Persians 196 Personalists 130

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Pertini, Alessandro 143 Pétain, Philippe 130–1 Peuples et civilisations 82 Pia, Pascal 125, 130 Piacenza 146 Picture Post 92, 97, 100–1 Picturegoer 106 Pike, D.W. 219 Pirenne, Henri 82 Placentia Bay 61 Poitiers 192 Poland 55–6, 60–1, 64, 85, 100–1, 125, 131, 225 Political War Executive 94 Politis, Nikolas 60 Polizeiliches Durchgangslager 162 Ponza 141–2, 144 Popolo d’Italia 146 Popular Movement against the EU 116 Portrait from Life 98 Portugal 67, 186 Powell, Dilys 106 Prague Spring 55 Pressac, Jean-Claude 211 Price, Dennis 97 Prodi, Romano 32 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 148 Prussia 95 Queensland 198 Ramadier, Paul 44–5 Rasmussen, Gustav 46–7 Rassemblement du Peuple Français 130 Redcar 92 Reed, Carol 99, 106 Reichsbund 58 Résistence 126 Reynolds, David 92 Rhineland 188 Rhodesia 199 Richter, Hans Werner 77–8 Ricoeur, Paul 75–6 Rietbergen, Peter 206 Rifkin, Jeremy 32, 33 Rights of Man, The 192 Rilke, Rainer Maria 136, 242

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272 Index Rimbaud, Arthur 239 Risorgimento 147 Ritter, Gerhard 83 Robbins, Lionel 148–9 Rolfe, Guy 98 Roma 95 Romans 26 Rome 30, 47, 87, 96, 144, 147, 194 Rome, Treaty of (1957) 12, 28–9, 34, 38–9, 49, 51, 187 Roosevelt, Eleanor 70 Roosevelt, Franklin 61, 63, 66–7, 159, 161, 169 Roselli, Carlo 141, 147 Rossi, Ernesto 11, 129, 143–55 Rossi, Mario 146 Rougemont, Denis de 13, 78–80, 119, 120 Ruf, Der 78 Rumania 225 Russell, Bertrand 78 Russell of Liverpool, Lord 102–3 Russia 31, 85, 87, 132, 161, 186 Russian Federation 30, 32 Rutherford, Ernest 174 Ruttley, Philip 26, 27 Sagnac, Philippe 82 Salvemini, Gaetano 146–7 San Francisco 70, 132 San Francisco Conference (1945) 132 Sandys, Duncan 40 Save Europe Now Campaign 99–100 Scandinavia 10, 111–20 Scandinavian Council of Ministers 114–15 Scholem, Gershom 231 Schopenhauer, Arthur 244 Schubert, Franz 236 Schumacher, Kurt 78 Schuman, Robert 46–9, 81, 134, 160, 194 Schuman Plan 49, 165–6 Schwanzer, Karl 180 Scourge of the Swastika, The 102–4, 107 Secchia, Pietro 143 Seeligman, Sigmund 228 Sellafield 179

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Semprún, Jorge 14, 205–21 Senegal 188 Shakespeare, William 239 Shoah 7, 15, 227–8, 236–7, 241–3 Shute, Nevil 171 Sikorski, Władysław Eugeniusz 61, 64 Sint-Michielsgestel 162, 169 Slavs 95, 172 Smith, Anthony 75, 76 Smith, Gerard 167 Smith, Malcolm 93 Soddy, Frederick 174 Soir républicain, Le 124–6 Solidarity 56 Sorbonne 195 South America 55, 189 Soviet Union 5, 11, 13, 45, 56, 61–3, 65, 67, 70, 83, 85, 93, 104–5, 111, 132, 154, 186, 188–9, 199 Spaak, Paul-Henri 47, 61, 194 Spain 125, 216, 219 Spanish Civil War 125 Spender, Stephen 78, 79 Spengler, Oswald 114 Spinelli, Altiero 11, 129, 143–5, 148–55, 193 St James Conferences 60–4, 66–8 Stalin, Jozef 131–2, 144 Stauning, Thorvald 115 Steiner, George 7, 15, 235–44 Stern 177 Stern, Alfred 82 Stikker, Dirk U. 165 Stockholm Forum (2000) 208 Strasbourg 23, 30, 31, 37–8, 50, 71, 180, 196 Strasbourg Convention 30 Stråth, Bo 76 Streit, Clarence 163, 165 Suchenwirt, Richard 83 Suez Crisis 168, 177 Sunday Chronicle, The 101 Swallow, Norman 105–6 Swatland, Donald 167 Sweden 111, 163 Switzerland 106, 163, 193 Syria 65 Szabó, István 224 Sznaider, Natan 208–9, 212

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Index 273 Tanker i en Skorsten see under Thoughts in a Chimney Teitgen, Pierre-Henri 191 Tel Aviv 228 Témoignagne Chrétien 193 Terracini, Umberto 143 Tesi Federaliste 154 Third Man, The 124 Thomas, Ralph 134 Thoughts in a Chimney 10, 114, 116–20 Times, The 93, 96, 97, 101, 106 Toíbín, Colm 24, 25 Toulouse 191 Toynbee, Arnold 82, 87 Treaty of Rome see under Rome, Treaty of (1957) Tremiti Islands 141–2 Tribunale Speciale 141, 146 Trotsky, Leon 144 Truman, Harry S. 45 Turkey 31, 87 Unden, Oesten 47 UNESCO 197 Union Européenne des Fédéralistes 40, 194–5, 197, 199 Union Fédérale L’ 57 Union Française 198 Union of European Federalists 43 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics see under Soviet Union United Europe Movement 40 United Kingdom 32, 116, 186, 189; see also Britain, England, Great Britain United Nations 4, 8, 40, 42–4, 46–7, 63, 66–8, 70–1, 132, 173, 180 United Nations Security Council 132 United States of America 5, 12, 21, 25, 31, 43, 45, 61–4, 70, 82–3, 85, 108, 132, 154, 159, 163, 165, 167, 173, 181, 183, 188–9, 209 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 8, 47, 59, 66 USSR see under Soviet Union Ustica 141

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V for Victory campaign 93 Valéry, Paul 78 Valsecchi, Franco 82, 87 Vatican 130 Ventotene 11, 141–2 Ventotene Manifesto 11, 16, 129, 141–55 Verdun 190 Versailles 16 Versailles Treaty 125, 133, 188 Vertriebenenverbände 187 Vichy regime 68, 130–1 Vienna 58, 99 Vietnam 55, 188 Villey, Daniel 192 Viterbo 144 Voix des Belges, La 190 Wallonie Libre, La 190–1 War in the Air 103 Warsaw 58 Washington 66 Washington Post 182 Weber, Alfred 77–8 Weimar 220 Weisberg, Richard 21–2, 34 Welles, Orson 99 Wells, H.G. 172 Western Union 196 White Man’s Burden 3, 13 Wilson, Woodrow 16, 151, 159 Winand, Pascaline 167 Wissenschaft des Judentums 229, 231 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 213, 235, 239 Wolff, Larry 105 World Bank 40 World Jewish Congress (1956) 227 World War I 3, 5, 16, 41, 44, 56, 62, 82–3, 95, 126, 145, 147, 150, 164, 186, 189, 205, 238 Yalta Conference 132 Yugoslavia 64 Zeeland, Paul van 46 Zetterling, Mia 97–8 Zionism 14–15, 224, 228

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