A major debate about the future
of Europe took place in France in the late 1950s and 1960s, with de Gaulle’s
supporters insisting that its membership of the European Economic Community must
not end France’s national sovereignty. (The EEC became the European Union in
1993.) Against the Gaullist conception of European cooperation between sovereign
governments and parliaments, the followers of Jean Monnet proposed an eventual
United States of Europe. In Monnet’s federal structure national governments and
parliaments would be subordinate to a both a supranational bureaucracy in
the European Commission and a federal judiciary. De Gaulle
resisted the Monnet approach, which was of course backed by elite German
opinion, in the celebrated Empty Chair Crisis of 1966.
Almost 50 years later it is
obvious that Monnet has won. Intergovernmental-ism, national sovereignty and the
veto have been defeated by supra-nationalism, federalism and qualified majority
voting. The EU bureaucrats have outclassed and outmanoeuvred
democratically-elected politicians from the member states, including Britain.
(Monnet despised democracy, as did many of the architects of ‘the European
construction’ in the 1950s and 1960s.) Prof.Tim
Congdon.
