The U.S. Helped Make Europe. Can It Break It?

After the end of the Second World War, every major city in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany had an Amerika Haus. People who might be lucky to have a roof over their heads gathered there to read American books and periodicals, watch American movies, listen to lectures about America, tap their toes to jazz from America. This enterprise, funded at first by the U.S. Office of Military Government, and later by the U.S. Information Agency, was obviously meant to present America in a positive light to men and women who had been fed Nazi propaganda for more than a decade. It was another propaganda exercise, then, but not a heavy-handed one, propaganda under the mantle of liberty and democracy.

Unlike in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Allies decided that the defeated enemy had to be punished for its sins, the goal this time was to educate the former Axis powers on how to be good democrats who would learn to embrace such vaunted American values as individual freedom and free enterprise. Much store was set on culture. This was not without its absurdities. A zealous young U.S. Army education officer in Japan believed that teaching locals the art of square dancing would contribute to their democratization. In the same spirit, the American occupation government instructed movie studios in Japan to show a Japanese couple kissing onscreen, as a public display of affection, American style. The resulting sensation was such that May 23, 1946, the première date of this film, “Twenty-Year-Old Youth,” came to be celebrated as Kiss Day.

Europeans who had lived under Nazi occupation did not have to learn how to kiss in the movies. But America’s effort to create a global alliance of democracies under U.S. tutelage and military protection involved a great deal of cultural and political education, or reëducation, and the endeavor became even more pressing once the Cold War began. There was concern that demoralized and impoverished Europeans—artists and intellectuals especially—would be drawn to the blandishments of the Soviet Union. So the C.I.A. financed reliably pro-American political parties for decades, along with arts festivals, exhibitions, concerts, and literary magazines such as Der Monat, in Berlin, and Encounter, in London. Much of this was done with an American mixture of political self-interest and idealism. (Intent on countering “Reds” in the C.I.A. and other U.S. foreign-policy institutions, Senator Joseph McCarthy sent his trusted lawyer, Roy Cohn, to Germany at the height of the Red Scare to weed out subversive books from Amerika Haus libraries.)

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One of the great creations of Pax Americana was what the political scientist Glyn Morgan calls the American Europe. (He shares his discipline’s fondness for denoting concepts with italicized phrases.) In his short and punchy new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Europe” (Polity), he argues that American Europe was a new order imposed by the United States. British, Dutch, French, Belgian, and Italian empires had to be dissolved, the thinking went, to make way for an integrated, democratic Europe. This would also address the perennial German problem: embedded in a federal Europe, Germany would become a country its neighbors could safely live with.

To bring all this about, and to counter the allure of Communism, European economies first had to emerge from the rubble of war and regain their strength as quickly as possible. Hence the Marshall Plan, which was designed to encourage European integration. The diplomat and foreign-policy thinker George Kennan wrote, “We considered that one of the long-term deficiencies of the European economy as a whole was its excessive fragmentation . . . the lack, in particular, of a large consumer’s market.” But Kennan’s vision for Europe wasn’t merely economic. To overcome the nationalist rivalries that had caused two devastating wars, he urged the United States to help depressed Europeans recover their “spiritual vigor” as a self-confident collective entity. As Morgan explains, this meant that “U.S. support would force the British, the French, and other nations to think of themselves as Europeans rather than as nationalists inhabiting separate nation-states.”

The originality of Morgan’s book lies in its claim that European unification—first the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1951, then the European Economic Community, in 1957, and finally the European Union, in 1993—was more an American creation than a European one. Postwar Europe, he argues, was made in America’s image.

The conventional view holds that the main architects of European integration were the Frenchmen Jean Monnet, a mild-mannered, mustachioed Cognac merchant and banker, and Robert Schuman, an austere, devoutly Catholic statesman from Lorraine. The Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, which proposed placing French and German coal and steel production under a common authority, is still commemorated by the E.U. as Europe Day. The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer, the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, and the Belgian Socialist statesman Paul-Henri Spaak are likewise counted among the European founding fathers.

Winston Churchill himself favored some form of European unification, though without Britain, which, like the United States, was to remain outside it, as a benevolent and, naturally, superior power. This became a sticking point in the much hyped (especially in Britain) “special relationship.” From Churchill onward, many British leaders clung to fantasies of global power and splendid isolation from Europe, fantasies that culminated in the disaster of Brexit. By contrast, most American Presidents, the current incumbent aside, preferred Britain snugly embedded in Europe, where it could serve as a dependable American ally.

Morgan sets out to revise this familiar genealogy of European integration. In his telling, Monnet and Schuman did not originate the idea. Franklin D. Roosevelt had long opposed European imperialism, much to the chagrin of his wartime ally Churchill, and Morgan maintains that members of the Roosevelt and Truman foreign-policy establishments were devising plans for a unified Europe well before European leaders embraced the project. In 1943, William C. Bullitt, a senior U.S. diplomat, argued in a letter to Roosevelt that the United States would “be obliged . . . in setting up administrations in occupied and liberated countries, not only to set up democratic administrations but also to lay the groundwork for a combination of democratic governments in Europe strong enough to preserve democracy in Europe and keep the Bolsheviks from replacing the Nazis as masters of Europe.”

Walt Rostow, who became Lyndon B. Johnson’s national-security adviser during the Vietnam War, had also been working on postwar plans to incorporate Germany into the rest of Western Europe by means of economic coöperation. Morgan believes that Rostow came to that idea first, before Monnet, and, indeed, that Rostow passed his views on to the Frenchman, who spent much of the war in Washington, D.C.

Morgan is right that Americans played a hugely important role in shaping postwar Europe, but he underestimates the European contributions, not least when he casts Monnet as Rostow’s pupil. The idea of pooling natural resources to prevent another war between major European powers, especially Germany and France, had been championed at the end of the First World War by a French politician named Étienne Clémentel. He called for a “new economic order” based on interdependence. His assistant was Monnet, who had suggested combining the British and French economies to defeat Germany in the Great War. In 1940, when France was invaded once again, Monnet went further and suggested a Franco-British union. None of this came to pass, but it’s clear that Monnet didn’t need Rostow to fire his pan-European imagination.

Nor were the Frenchmen alone. One of the more interesting and eccentric unifiers was the half Japanese Austro-Hungarian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. His book “Pan-Europa,” published in 1923, sparked the “Pan-Europa movement.” In his dream of pan-European leadership, those in charge would not necessarily be men of high birth but gentlemen imbued with an “aristocracy of the spirit”—an idea that was perhaps not so very far removed from Kennan’s notion of “spiritual vigor.” Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement, too, came to little. But his proposal that Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” serve as the European anthem endured; it is still played on official E.U. occasions.

In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe. German dissidents inside Hitler’s Reich, such as the Kreisau Circle, associated with Helmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis, in 1945, for “treason,” also drew up plans for a postwar European union. Many members of his circle were fellow-aristocrats, some of them kindred spirits of Coudenhove-Kalergi. And the Nazis themselves had pan-European ideals, albeit under the firm rule of the Herrenvolk.

There’s another side of postwar pan-Europeanism that is hard to associate with the twentieth-century American establishment: the deep Roman Catholic background of most of the founders, which made them receptive to a supranational order. Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman were all devout Catholics, and Monnet, though not a religious man, was born into a pious Catholic family. Adenauer was also a Rhinelander who loathed the largely Protestant and Prussian eastern part of Germany. He is said to have muttered “Asia again” whenever his train crossed the Elbe on the way to Berlin. For him, the West ended at the old borders of the Roman Empire, which had cut through the Teutonic territories. Ancient Rome was not his only model. John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany from 1949 to 1952, recalled that Adenauer spoke of the Holy Roman Empire as if it were recent history.

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