In a year replete with historical anniversaries, 2025 marks the 75th year since the inception of the Schuman Plan. It is likely to be largely overlooked by national governments in Europe. Yet it marked the beginning of the orchestrated attempt by European elites to establish a nascent federation of a ‘united’ Europe: that is, a Europe united not by popular consent but under the auspices of an undemocratic ruling class.
The EU will not be so circumspect. In 2020, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration (also called the Schuman Plan, named after France’s foreign minister Robert Schuman, who served 1948- 53), the European Commission officially and very humbly announced: “We mark the 70 years of the historic Schuman declaration—70 years of peace and solidarity in Europe.” The EU’s hubristic appropriation of the laurels of peace is classic propaganda misdirection. It uses the date of the Schuman declaration—9 May—for its annual Europe Day, which “celebrates peace and unity in Europe.” With short-term historical optimism and ideological assertion, the EU claims that the Schuman Plan “would make war between European’s nations unthinkable.” But for those with a longer historical perspective, it can readily be argued that the EU is actually more likely to cause a catastrophic conflagration in Europe. It is true, however, that the EU could indeed make “war between nations unthinkable” through the envisioned expediency of eliminating nation-states within a pan-European federation.
Leaving aside the EU’s preposterous and self-aggrandising claims, the Plan was indeed a pivotal moment in the formation of the integrationist European Union we see today. Whether that is to be celebrated or lamented is another matter, but it clearly is a moment of great historical importance. The lazy historical consensus—one supported by the EU, European federalists, political establishments, and indolent journalism—is that the Plan was an altruistic and genuine endeavour with the sole intent of ensuring peace and economic prosperity in Europe after an apocalyptical conflict. The truth is seldom so pristine.
On 9 May 1950, Schuman set out a proposal which would see coal and steel production in Germany and France not only pooled but, far more significantly, set under a supranational authority. This authority, the European Coal and Steel Community, which became established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951, was the practical seedbed of the European Economic Community, which evolved into the European Community and thence into the European Union. The political trajectory had been set. The idea that the main industrial engines of war—coal and steel—should be controlled in this way easily created a superficial or naïve rationale as a means to prevent future war. Given that these events occurred so soon after the horrors of World War II, there was an understandable enthusiasm, even desperation, to latch onto a project that promised to prevent a return to conflict in Europe. Schuman said in his declaration: “The proposal will lead to the realisation of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace.” Consequently, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands joined the plan. These comprise the six nations that went on to sign the Treaty of Rome in 1957, thereby forming the EEC.
The supranational authorities established were key. They necessitated governance, laws, and the loss of important aspects of national sovereignty. The ECSC’s Special Council of Ministers, High Authority, Common Assembly, and the Court of Justice were all prototypes of the EU’s federalist institutions familiar to us today: the European Commission, European Parliament, European Court of Justice, and Council of Europe. And all of this was intended from the start. The British Member of Parliament and later (pro-EEC) Prime Minister of Britain, Harold Macmillan, rightly noted of the Plan:
The most significant aspect of Monsieur Schuman’s initiative is the political. It is not, in its essentials, a purely economic or industrial conception; it is a grand design for a new Europe; it is not just a piece of convenient machinery; it is a revolutionary, almost mystical conception.
He added that Britain “will not hand over to any supranational Authority the right to close down our pits or our steelworks … No Government could do it; no party could stand for it.” That statement is worth pondering; it captures the enormous boldness of the radical undertaking.
Britain sensibly stayed out. The Korean War started in June, putting increasing global demands on energy sources. Britain had substantial energy security with major coal and steel sectors, and its empire and commonwealth provided other important industrial commodities. Winston Churchill remarked in Parliament on 27 June 1950:
If he [Stafford Cripps, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer] asked me, “Would you agree to a supranational authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?” I should say, without hesitation, the answer is “No.”
We are reminded once again of how Britain, unoccupied during World War II and victorious over authoritarianism due to great costs in blood and treasure, had a different attitude to another European Grand Project. It was easy for Britain to understand the dramatic break with the past and the intentions of Europe: Schuman himself said at the time that the ECSC was “at the service of a supranational community with objectives and interests that are distinct from those of each of its participating nations. The individual interests of those nations merge into the common interest.” That “common interest” was the motivation for a federal Europe.
Schuman may have lent his name to the plan, but he was only the political face of it.
The real mover was Jean Monnet. Monnet actually said of Schuman, that he “didn’t really understand the treaty which bore his name” (but immediately after making his declaration, Schuman himself admitted the proposal was “a shot in the dark”). Indeed, this is the intended strategy of architects of Euro-federalism: make the structural process so byzantine that few, especially the population at large, can understand what is happening. Technocracy, rather than democracy, is the project’s driving force. Monnet is the EU’s patron saint of that technocracy.
Born in 1888, Monnet started his career as a Cognac salesman. His appetite for supranational authorities was fed when, in 1920, he became Deputy Secretary-General of the newly created League of Nations. As with the careerist political classes of today, he was quickly institutionalised and joined the technocratic clerisy. He was just as keen to make a great deal of money in international finance, something that brought him into close association with insider dealing through his associates. One of his closest friends was another leading elitist internationalist, the American John Foster Dulles, a future U.S. secretary of state. In 1941, Dulles wrote: “We should seek the political reorganisation of Europe as a federated commonwealth.” In 1943, Monnet declared peace in Europe could not be regained if states retained “national sovereignty.” Dulles and Monnet were on the same page.
The involvement of America in the creation of the European Grand Project is rarely fully appreciated, not least because these days the EU plays down that aspect
At the height of the crisis of France’s collapse before the German Blitzkrieg of 1940, it was Monnet who cynically exploited the desperate situation to persuade Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill to offer an “indissoluble union” between the two countries. He continued to whisper into the ear of receptive politicians after the war, putting forward the idea of the ECSC to the unsophisticated Schuman.
There can be little doubt of Monnet’s intentions, proudly declared in his formation, in 1955, of the Action Committee for a United States of Europe (ACUSE). This body was dispersed in 1975: in 1973, the six countries of the EC had become nine, with Britain, Ireland, and Denmark now joining. The accession of Britain was a huge win for Monnet and the federalists: all the biggest countries were now in the fold; ACUSE was no longer deemed necessary. Following shady and constitutionally questionable manoeuvrings in the mid-1980s (most notably the European Council of Milan in 1985, which the historian and leading intellectual Perry Anderson calls a “magnificent coup”), the EC by-passed democratic inconveniences and became more politically integrated than ever before. Monnet’s renown as father of federalism grew to secular hagiographical status: in 1988 his body was interred in the Panthéon. ACUSE was reformed in 2024 to reinvigorate a “federal direction” for Europe; the damage done to the project by the Eurozone crisis starting in 2009 and Brexit in 2020 has given it fresh impetus.
Monnet was a top-down technocrat who found democracy a hindrance to his federalist plans. He was never elected to any public office. Appointed as the first president of the ECSC, he was an unelected bureaucrat ordering democratic governments in Europe what they could and could not do. He set a disturbing trend which continues to this day. That he is so venerated by the EU as the “Father of Europe” reveals much about that polity’s mindset. As for the Schuman Plan’s namesake, his sanctification by Euro-federalists is apparently not enough: Pope Francis has awarded him the honourable title of “Venerable,” an important step towards beatification and sainthood, meaning that Schuman may soon be able intercede on behalf of us mortals directly with God. And no doubt, as he does so, Monnet will be there whispering in his ear.
This essay appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 34:47-49.
