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At the National Press Club Washington, D.C. April 30th 1952 Monnet said:

Our times demand that we bring the European peoples together and not keep them apart. We are not uniting states, we are uniting human beings.

“That we bring the European peoples together” seems to clearly indicate that Monnet thought it was up to himself and his associates to bring about this unity.

One cannot wait for the resolution of all contingencies in advance, before bringing ones own judgment to bear upon the action demanded by the needs of the present.

This seems to be advocating some form of action towards his USE that did not require a candid statement of the final outcome. This is confirmed in the following paragraph;

In the conduct of our individual lives, we do not wait for action to have the future completely revealed to us. There is nothing more sterile than to pose in a present context a question which will arise only in the future, where the very purpose of our action is to change that context. If we do not act until we know the answers to all possible questions, we shall never act, we shall never achieve the certainty for which we have been waiting, and we shall be swept along by events which we have forfeited the power to control.

Monnet does seem to be advocating if not deceit, at least misdirection and this was before the French put paid to the idea of the European Defence Community, the words attributed to him, do describe the strategy behind the Monnet Method, imprecise and steady redirection of power from the nation states to a European Level.

The point is even if Monnet did not say Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. That is exactly what has been happening, and that is exactly the Monnet method in action, Monnet did want a united Europe and was clear in his ideas that the people should not be allowed to stand in the way. The fact is that Monnet would have had no argument with the sentiments expressed in the quote.

Myrto Tsakatika University of Essex

Monnets aim was to unite Europe so that the devastation of war and economic destruction that it witnessed during the two world wars of the twentieth century would not be repeated. This was not a new idea; what was new was the way, or the method which he envisaged for the uniting
of Europe. Europe, Monnet writes in his Memoirs:

will not be built all at once, or as a single whole: it will be built by concrete achievements which first create de facto solidarity. (Monnet, 1978: 300).

The way to unite Europe would be to show the States their common interests and convince them to act on these interests, pursuing them on a permanent basis. Concerted action was to be a concrete achievement, insofar as there was continuity and institutionalisation of a variety of partial projects of co-operation on economic and social issues the common projects that would result from it. These projects would habituate European states and their citizens in co-operation. Gradually co-operation would be needed on other projects and whole sectors of common activity, due to the inter-dependence that would emerge from initial co-operation.

Given time, Europe would become united without realising it, as common projects would lead European states to pool their sovereignties.

The Monnet plan stood on two clearly distinguishable intellectual premises. The first premise was neo-functionalist incrementalism: In the fifties and sixties, neo-functionalism was highly influential in attempts to explain the impetus towards European Integration. Since then, although it has gone through modifications and reappraisals, it has been and continues to be one of the most influential approaches to European integration. At its core was the concept of ‘spillover’, the prediction that once initially triggered, European integration, at least at the economic level, would be self-sustaining. Initial co-operation on partial, but well-focused projects would get the internal dynamics of the community going, leading it to further, co-operation. Cooperation in one sector would gradually require co-operation in other sectors (Lindberg, 1963:

10-11). Economic inter-dependence would be the drive behind this movement towards integration, which would proceed quasi-automatically (‘functional spillover’), not political decision, i.e. an overarching public political agreement or a constitution. The consideration here was that the political sphere can be separated from the socio-economic sphere and that political union would come, if at all, at the end of a long process of economic engagement and intradependence.

Citizen allegiance and support was not initially necessary; rather it would follow from the spill-over process, as loyalties would be redirected from the national to the European level (Haas, 1958: 16).

The second intellectual premise of the Monnet plan was technocratic elitism: Jack Hayward claims that Monnet was: accustomed to the manipulation of politicians whose expectancy of high office in any government was likely to be short-lived and of bureaucrats more inclined to inertia than innovation (Hayward, 1996:252).

Monnets general preference for governance by a technocratic elite, in other words, was due to his experience of the Fourth French Republic and to the operation of the French Planning Commission, which he headed after the war (Page, 1997: 5). Monnet experienced the instability and inefficiency of the governance of France, which was due to the radical and conflict-ridden parliamentary politics of the time, and he sought not to inflict the new European project with those shortcomings. Instead, he was in favour of governance by a small group of experts, because technocratic governance had been, in his view, the stable, long-term oriented and responsible element throughout the Fourth French Republic (Duchne, 1996: 51-53). It is

possible that his Fourth Republic experience led him to assume that selected technocrats are more likely to be responsible than political agents.