The Great Deception: The True Story of Britain and the European Union

By Christopher Booker and Richard North

Since its publication in 2003, The Great Deception has taken on the role of the Eurosceptics' bible, with the third edition helping to fuel the debate during the 2016 EU Referendum.

This fourth edition celebrates the moment when the UK broke away from the European Union, having been extensively re-edited to incorporate newly available archive material, and updated to include the tumultuous events of recent years.

The Great Deception, therefore, tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times, from its intellectual beginnings in the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, right up to the point when the UK resumes its path at as an independent sovereign nation after 47 years of membership of the European project in its various guises.

Drawing on a wealth of new evidence and existing sources, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher and the build-up to the referendum campaign which had its roots in the Maastricht Treaty.

The book chillingly shows how Britain's politicians were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. It ends by evaluating the post referendum negotiations and asking whether this is the end of an episode or just a new beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781472993724

Christopher Booker

Christopher Booker was a founding editor of Private Eye, to which he regularly contributed, and also wrote a longstanding column for the Sunday Telegraph. His bestselling books include The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, The Real Global Warming Disaster, The Great Deception, The Mad Officials, Scared to Death and The Neophiliacs. Booker died in July 2019.

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Contents

Foreword and Acknowledgements

1 The Early Days: 1918–1945

2 Try, Try and Try Again: The First Attempts at European Integration: 1945–1949

3 The Rocky Road to Rome: 1950–1957

4 ‘A Triumph for Monnet’: 1958–1961

5 Why de Gaulle Kept Britain Out: 1961–1969

6 The Real Deceit of Edward Heath: 1970–1972

7 Britain Stays In: 1973–1975

8 The Awkward Partner: 1975–1984

9 Enter Mr Spinelli: 1979–1986

10 Decline and Fall: 1986–1990

11 ‘At the Heart of Europe’: 1990–1993

12 The Single Market: A Tale of Three Halves

13 Odd Man Out: 1993–1997

14 Towards ‘Political Unity’: 1997–1999

15 Hearts and Minds: 1999–2001

16 The Crowning Dream: 2002–2004

17 Downfall: 2004–2005

18 The Road to Lisbon: 2006–2009

19 The Euro Crisis: 2010–2012

20 Countdown to Referendum: 2012–2013

21 The Impossible Dream: 2014–2016

22 End Game: 2016–2020

     Conclusion: End and a Beginning

Index

Foreword and Acknowledgements

The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present: they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future. And the Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organised world of tomorrow.

Closing words of Jean Monnet’s Memoirs

Europe’s power is easy to miss. Like an ‘invisible hand’ it operates through the shell of traditional political structures. The British House of Commons, British law courts and British civil servants are still here, but they have become agents of the European Union, implementing European law. This is no accident. By creating common standards that are implemented through national institutions, Europe can take over countries without necessarily becoming a target for hostility.

Mark Leonard, Centre for European Reform, 2005

Since this book was first published in 2003, the story it tells has moved on to the point where – with the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020 – we can decently draw a line under an extraordinary and lengthy chapter in Britain’s history. This was something Booker and I always intended to do together, but sadly he passed away in July 2019 – at least having seen the outcome of the referendum but before the UK had actually left the European Union, on 31 January 2020.

It falls to me, therefore, as the survivor of a working partnership that reached back to 1992, to finish the story that, in the second and third editions, we left in the middle of 2005. The book now covers some of the most tumultuous years of our relationship with the EU, encompassing not only the referendum on 23 June 2016 and the campaign that preceded it, but also the subsequent years devoted first to negotiating the Withdrawal Agreement and then the ‘future relationship’ with the EU, culminating in the Christmas Eve deal labelled the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Something that yet again became painfully apparent, this time in the referendum campaign, and even more so afterwards, was how remarkably little the protagonists in the debate seemed to understand of the very thing on which they were focused. For 48 years Britain had been in the thrall of this vast, amorphous new system of government centred in Brussels. Again and again, it became clear how astonishingly ignorant the politicians were about the working of the European Union and, when it came to the crunch, how we could manage successfully to extricate ourselves from it.

When we first began researching for this book, we had already long been learning how the European Union worked and reporting on the extremely damaging effects it was in so many ways having on British life. But when we got seriously to work, we were continually amazed by how much about the history of the ‘European project’ had never been properly uncovered before, and how often we came across crucial episodes in the story that had been quite deliberately misrepresented.

No one before, it turned out, had tracked down how the core principles that were to shape the evolution of the project from the early 1950s onwards had originated in the minds of two men back in the 1920s. No one had really uncovered how their real purpose was to create a wholly integrated ‘United States of Europe’, ruled by an unelected ‘supranational’ government – or how in the 1950s it was deliberately decided to disguise that ultimate goal, and only to work towards ‘ever closer union’, step by step, starting with the pretence that what was being set up was only a trading arrangement, a ‘common market’.

We were able to tell, more fully than ever before, the story of how, when Britain applied to join in 1961, the Macmillan government deliberately decided to go along with the same deceit. Although he and his ‘minister for Europe’ Edward Heath had been briefed that the real aim was full political and economic union, they decided, for what they called ‘presentational’ reasons, to conceal this from the British people behind the same pretence that we were only joining a ‘common market’.

We told for the first time the real story behind the French president de Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s application to join, that he wanted first to get firmly in place the financial arrangements for the Common Agricultural Policy, which would require Britain to hand over huge sums to subsidise his French farmers and to buy in return some of their resulting surpluses. Only when this had finally been put in place in 1969 was Britain allowed to join, which Heath was desperate to do when elected prime minister the next year. And throughout the negotiations, Heath followed that same policy of deception, hiding what he well knew was the real aim – full political and economic union – by repeatedly claiming that our membership would involve ‘no essential loss of sovereignty’.

Even while the accession negotiations were continuing, Heath learned that there were already plans in Brussels for a single currency, and had to send over his Europe minister to implore them to keep this under wraps until Britain was safely in: just as his ministers deliberately lied to Parliament about the extent to which we had given away the richest fishing waters in Europe as part of our price of entry.

So the deceptions continued – into the early 1980s with secret plans for further moves towards integration, which were so ambitious that it was agreed that the treaty they proposed needed to be split in two. The first part, the Single European Act in 1986, was sold to the British people as the setting up of a ‘Single Market’, when in reality it was much more than that and just what its title should have indicated: a further giant step towards creating a ‘Single Europe’.

The second part was signed in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty, completing the task of transforming the ‘European Community’ into the ‘European Union’. It launched the single currency and much more, including the first serious moves towards giving the fast-emerging ‘government of Europe’ its own foreign and defence policies – further supported after 1997 by Tony Blair, who was also enthusiastic for giving the now vastly expanding European Union its own ‘constitution’ after 2001.

Not once in all those years did any British prime minister, with the exception of Mrs Thatcher, try to explain what had always been the project’s real goal, any more than we were ever told the truth by David Cameron when he staged his referendum in 2016. It was for this and so much more that we had no hesitation in calling this book The Great Deception.

When we wrote the original edition, our aim was unashamedly to produce a Eurosceptic manual, better to inform those who were seeking to leave the European Union of the nature of the construct against which they were campaigning. Now that we have left, where the process of our leaving could hardly have been worse managed and the problems attendant on our newly restored status have yet to be resolved, there are siren voices calling for us to re-join. Possibly, as our difficulties multiply, those voices will intensify.

The purpose of this book, therefore, has subtly changed. While the aim is still to write a proper history of the ‘European project’, right up to the point of the UK’s full departure, the purpose is graphically to recount the ‘nature of beast’ and Britain’s experience of it, in order to warn current and future generations against seeking to repeat the experience. To that extent, the book erects a ‘fence’ around a metaphorical ‘Chernobyl’, to mark a point beyond which we as a nation should never pass.

With that, this is not and never has been an ‘insider’s’ book. We cannot tell you what Jean Monnet had for breakfast on the morning of 9 May 1950 when his Schuman Plan was about to be announced, nor do we trouble our readers with the pallor of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer just before he met the prime minister on 15 March 2017. Rather, the book is the product of meticulous research, drawing on thousands of books, documents, academic papers and other sources, augmented by interviews and tempered by long personal experience of EU issues, working with many of the personalities who later feature in the story. Most crucially though, it is the product of informed analysis and synthesis, filtering out extraneous material to get to the essence of over a hundred years of history, in a way that is accessible, readable and informative.

To that effect, as time has passed and new perspectives have been acquired, some issues that seemed (and were) important in previous editions seem less so now, enabling me with judicious editing to cut some fifty thousand words from the original text, despite adding a considerable amount of new archival and other material. New writing amounts to about a third of the text, without adding to its overall length.

Our work (that of Booker and I in the first three editions and my solo efforts in this current edition) reveals a picture of the story so radically different from any previous accounts – even up to date with the account of the referendum campaign – that anyone remotely concerned with this hugely important subject might find it both startling and illuminating. Certainly, when our first edition appeared, that view was confirmed by the private responses of a number of well-informed readers. These ranged from historians and respected commentators to a retired senior diplomat who had been intimately involved in some of the episodes we described. They commended the book for having reconstructed the story in a way that at last made sense of so much that had previously been confusing, and brought to light so much that had remained previously hidden.¹

The public response to the first and successive editions could not have provided a greater contrast. Not a single national newspaper found space to review them. Only the Spectator (ed. Boris Johnson) published a spectacularly jaundiced ‘non-review’ of the first edition, by the author of an earlier book on the subject whose views he believed we had failed to treat with sufficient respect. This silence was broken months later by the columnist Peter Hitchens, who, in the Mail on Sunday, expressed surprise at how comprehensively the book had been ignored, and urged that it should be read by ‘every MP, every senior civil servant, every journalist with any claim to understanding the current state of the country’.

Despite such lack of publicity, the three editions have sold more than fifty thousand copies, including those generously sent by a businessman, Paul Sykes, to every British member of the Westminster and European Parliaments (there was no evidence, alas, that most of them ever bothered to read it!).

That the book ever came into being is in no small measure due to those many people who helped us in the early days, such as Richard Balfe MEP, who shed light on the hugely significant part played in relaunching the ‘project’ in the early 1980s by Altiero Spinelli, which was to lead to the transformation of the European Community into the ‘European Union’.

Another reason why it was possible to write this book has been the crucial part played in our researches by the internet. This has made it infinitely easier and quicker than before to track down myriad sources, ranging from books long out of print to obscure documents on European integration. The internet has also proved invaluable in reconstructing the history of recent years, for which it is not yet possible to draw on the evidence of historical accounts or political memoirs, especially during the period of Covid-19 restrictions when many physical archives were closed and travel was difficult.

For the first edition, we owe a great debt to Dr Helen Szamuely (sadly deceased) for casting her customary shrewd eye over many passages of the text while the book was in preparation. For particular insights, documents and other help, we also owe thanks to Charlotte Horsfield, Dr Saul Kelly, John Ashworth, Derek Bennett, Jens-Peter Bonde MEP, Nicholas Booker, Heather Conyngham, Nigel Farage MEP (for underlining the significance of Verdun), Jim McCue, Bill Jamieson, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Dr Anthony Coughlan, and the readers of the Sunday Telegraph.

We also owe a special debt to Brigadier Anthony Cowgill of the British Management Data Foundation (also deceased), not least for his unique consolidated and annotated editions of the various European treaties, producing texts before they were officially available. We were also grateful to Mary and Peter North for their tireless quest through Yorkshire’s second-hand bookstalls, for ever more obscure old books that might shed a further chink of light on one of the most labyrinthine political stories the human mind has yet produced.

My special thanks to Peter Troy (also sadly deceased), who arranged the interviews of the Norwegian actors who feature in this edition. Our thanks, and mine separately, are also due to our publisher Robin Baird-Smith for his unfailing encouragement, and to his staff at Bloomsbury. Finally, no one but ourselves (and especially myself as the final author of record) can be blamed for any mistakes that will inevitably have crept into such a complex narrative.

Notes

1 Among the many people who privately gave the first edition a fulsome welcome were the historian Sir John Keegan, Lord Rees-Mogg, Sir Oliver Wright, formerly HM Ambassador to Washington and Bonn, and Ruth Lea of the Centre for Policy Studies. Bill Jamieson, executive editor of the Scotsman, generously wrote ‘I have been reading The Great Deception every night for the past week, and am so enthused and inspired by its detail and thoroughness … not just a must read but a truly monumental achievement’. We were particularly pleased to have an equally generous letter from Dr Richard Vaughan, formerly Professor of History at Leyden, who in the 1970s had written what up to that time was the fullest historical account of how the ‘European project’ had been launched on its way. Although he had begun with rather more sympathy for the ‘project’ than ourselves, he kindly described our work as ‘surely the best and most readable book on the EU so far written’.

1

The Early Days: 1918–1945

Europe is being liquidated, and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate.

Jan Smuts (1918)¹

The United States of Europe must be a political reality or it cannot be an economic one.

Arthur Salter, The United States of Europe (1931)

On 22 September 1984, two portly middle-aged men stood holding hands in front of the largest pile of human bones in Europe. One was the president of France, François Mitterrand; the other the chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl. The reason why the two most powerful political leaders in western Europe were staging an act of reconciliation before tens of thousands of graves was that the site of this ceremony was the ossuary at Douaumont, overlooking Verdun in eastern France.

And if there was one historical event that more than any other inspired what was eventually to become the European Union, it was the battle that had raged around Verdun in the First World War. For the British the defining battle of that war was the Somme in the summer of 1916. For France and Germany, it was the colossal battle of attrition launched in February the same year, when the French commander, General Philippe Pétain, pronounced that the fortresses on the hills overlooking Verdun on the River Meuse were where the advance of German armies into his country would be brought to a halt. His legendary words ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ were endorsed the same day by France’s prime minister, Aristide Briand.

For nearly a year, the French and German armies battered each other to destruction in the most intense and prolonged concentration of violence the world had ever seen. French artillery alone fired more than twelve million shells, the German guns considerably more. The number of dead and wounded on both sides exceeded seven hundred thousand. So deep was the wound Verdun inflicted on the psyche of France that the following year her army was brought to mutiny. Its morale would never fully recover. And from this blow were to emerge two abiding lessons.

The first was a conviction that such a suicidal clash of national armies must never be repeated. The second was much more specific and immediate. It came from the realisation of the degree to which the war had been shaped by industrial power. As the battle for Verdun had developed into a remorseless artillery duel, trainloads of German shells were arriving at the front still warm from the factories of the Ruhr. The battle, and the war itself, became a contest between industrial systems. And the French system had been found sorely wanting.

Particularly inferior had been the heavy guns, many dating back to the 1870s, able to fire shells at only a seventh of the rate of their German counterparts. More and better guns became vital. But manufacturing them and their ammunition was beyond the capacity of an industry that compared poorly with Germany’s. In the summer of 1916, therefore, a crisis-stricken French government turned to an industrialist, Louis Loucheur. Before the war, he had been an early pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, and, in a national economy dominated by artisan manufacture, he was one of the few French technocrats familiar with mass-production techniques.

Loucheur built new factories to make the guns. But improved production brought shortages of steel and coal, made worse by the German seizure in the first weeks of the war of around half of France’s north-eastern industrial base.² Supplies from Britain and then the USA filled the gap, but the consequential demands on shipping required unprecedented economic co-operation between the Western Allies. This led Loucheur to observe that success in modern warfare demanded industrial organisation, from which he concluded that removing key industries, above all coal and steel, from national control and vesting them in a ‘higher authority’ might be the means of preserving peace.³

Building the World Anew

When the fighting stopped on 11 November 1918, much of the pre-war world that had brought it about had already slipped into history. Four great empires had fallen: that of Germany itself, and those of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Turks who had ruled over so much of the Middle East. There followed a general sense that the world must be rebuilt, in a way that might ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. But this determination took two competing forms: one was idealistic, the other vengeful.

Post-war idealism was symbolised by US president Woodrow Wilson, whose country’s intervention in the last year of the war had finally tipped the military balance against Germany. Wilson’s famous ‘Fourteen Point Declaration’, supporting the right of peoples to self-determination, guided the post-war settlement agreed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. New nations arose in the former lands of now-defunct empires, their borders supposedly guaranteed by a League of Nations that would keep the peace.

This mood of idealism was quickly undermined. Following opposition from the US Senate and Woodrow Wilson’s succession by President Harding, the US withdrew from the League. America’s retreat into isolationism left the new international forum largely a European body, dominated by Britain, France and Italy (neither Germany nor Russia, now locked in the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, were initially admitted as members). Then France decided to wreak vengeance on Germany, the country it held chiefly responsible for the war, seeking to ensure that it would never again be strong enough to endanger the peace.

Largely as a result of French pressure, therefore, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed on defeated Germany fearsome punishments. She lost more than an eighth of her land area and all her overseas empire. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France in perpetuity, along with the Saar, rich in coal and iron, pending a plebiscite after 15 years. The Rhineland was to remain under Allied occupation. Germany’s army was limited to 100,000 men and she was prohibited from producing heavy guns, tanks or military aircraft. Additionally, she was required to pay crippling reparations, amounting eventually to £6.6 billion.

In January 1923, the screw was tightened further. Taking as excuse the late delivery of a small quantity of timber for telegraph poles due under the reparations settlement, followed by a default on deliveries of coal (at a time when coal was plentiful), France and Belgium sent 70,000 armed men to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The French contingent included a large number of colonial troops who were allowed to run amok, triggering a widespread campaign of non-cooperation and sabotage. The French countered by deposing or imprisoning the ringleaders and expelling nearly 150,000 people from the district, including over 46,000 German officials and their families. They also resorted to hostage-taking and collective fines, to aggressive house searches, identity checks and summary executions.⁴

Few details of this episode survive in modern textbooks on European history, but it was clear that the French were seeking to destabilise the German nation.⁵ The occupation force actively interfered in German civil administration, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and sponsored the deliberate wrecking of Germany’s infrastructure, particularly its railway system.

These interventions caused industrial output to collapse, creating mass unemployment. When the German government guaranteed the wages of dispossessed workers, hyper-inflation ensued. By November 1923, this had so devalued the currency that a single US dollar could buy 4.2 trillion German marks. The resulting turmoil saw attempts at revolution, an unsuccessful putsch in Bavaria by Adolf Hitler and his followers, and moves to create a separate Rhineland republic, the latter financed by French agents using money stolen from German municipalities.

Despite this, Germany recovered, and remarkably quickly, largely due to the leadership of one man, Gustav Stresemann, chancellor of a coalition government, from 13 August 1924 until 23 November. So highly regarded was he that his successor as German chancellor in November 1924 chose him as foreign affairs minister, an office he was to hold with distinction under four governments. He established a warm friendship with Aristide Briand, now France’s foreign minister. With him in 1925, he became co-author of the Locarno Treaty, supported by Britain, Italy and Belgium, which guaranteed mutual security for France and Germany. For this achievement, the two men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus did western Europe emerge into what Winston Churchill was to describe as ‘the pale sunlight of Locarno’.⁶

The following year, 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. A week later, Stresemann and Briand, celebrating over a private lunch, ‘waxed expansive over Stresemann’s favourite theme of Franco-German economic collaboration’.⁷ It was no accident that both men had become active supporters of a movement that had lately become remarkably fashionable, calling for a ‘United States of Europe’.

Visions of Europe

By the mid-1920s there was a heady sense that the shadows of the previous decade had receded. Amid what became the euphoria and idealism of the period, leading politicians, businessmen and intellectuals became seized by the vision of a united Europe.

Even before the war had ended, in 1918, the Italian industrialist Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the Fiat empire, had published a book entitled European Federation or League of Nations, arguing that the only effective antidote to destructive nationalism was a federal Europe. But the young man who truly caught the mood of the moment was Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, born in Tokyo in 1894 to a diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian embassy and a Japanese mother.

In 1922, still in his late twenties, he published his book Pan Europa, launching a movement under the same name. Like Louis Loucheur, he sought peace by merging the German and French coal and steel industries into a single ‘pan-European’ industry. They would form the basis for a federal ‘United States of Europe’ on the American model. Two years later he developed this idea by supporting the suggestion of a French economist, Charles Gide, that Europe should form a customs union.⁸ However, Coudenhove was emphatic that his federation would not eradicate national identities or reduce the sovereignty of its members, but celebrate the ‘spirit of Europe’ by providing a framework in which they could co-operate for the common good.

The speed with which Coudenhove attracted the support of many of Europe’s leading cultural figures was remarkable. Among them were Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, and writers such as Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire and St John Perse. Businessmen and left-wing thinkers joined the cause, including, in Italy, Giovanni Agnelli and Professor Luigi Einaudi, a left-wing lawyer who had formerly edited La Stampa; in Holland, Edo Fimmen, chairman of the International Transport Workers’ Federation; and in Germany, Karl Tucholsky, one of the leading left-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic.⁹

Among Coudenhove’s most significant converts were European politicians, including the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who would play a crucial role in shaping Europe in the future. Stresemann was another, and French prime minister Edouard Herriot, who had briefly been munitions minister during Verdun, also joined. In 1931 he was to publish a book, The United States of Europe. Another convert later to become prime minister was Léon Blum, but the most committed supporter was France’s foreign minister, Aristide Briand. Prime minister 11 times, he was now, with Stresemann, the co-author of the Locarno Pact.

It was these two major figures supporting the ‘pan-European’ vision that, on 24 June 1925, inspired Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to tell members of the House of Commons, as he later recalled, how ‘ending the thousand-year strife between France and Germany seemed a supreme object’. By weaving the Gaul and Teuton closely together ‘economically, socially and morally … Europe would rise again’.¹⁰

In October 1926, Coudenhove enjoyed his greatest moment of triumph when, at the age of 32, he staged a European Congress in Vienna. Among the 2,000 who attended was Briand, who in 1927 became Pan-Europa’s honorary president. In the same year, as a fervent supporter of the League of Nations, he proposed to US Secretary of State Kellogg a ‘non-aggression pact’, whereby their two countries would renounce war as an instrument of policy for ever. The outcome was the ‘Kellogg–Briand Pact’, under which, in 1929, 15 nations, including France and Germany, signed up to similar terms.¹¹ On 7 September that year, following discussions with Stresemann, at which he cited the ‘menace of American economic power’ as one of the greatest threats Europe now faced, Briand presented the League of Nations with a dramatic new proposal. ‘I think’, he said,

that among peoples who are geographically grouped together like the peoples of Europe there must exist a kind of federal link … Evidently the association will act mainly in the economic sphere … but I am sure also that from a political point of view, and from a social point of view, the federal link, without infringing the sovereignty of any of the nations taking part, could be beneficial.¹²

On 20 May 1930, three days after French troops began their final evacuation of the German Rhineland (under the Young Plan), Briand circulated the governments of Europe with a memorandum ‘on the organization of a system of European Federal Union’.¹³ He proposed that, ‘in the interests alike of the peace and of the economic and social well-being of the continent’, Europe should be given ‘something in the nature of a federal organisation’. Implemented within the framework of the League of Nations, it would ‘respect national sovereignties’, centring on ‘the conception of European political co-operation’. It would subordinate ‘the economic to the political problem’, and would be concerned with co-operation on ‘economic policy, transport, finance, labour, health and intellectual co-operation’.

Briand’s proposal had already received its warmest welcome from Winston Churchill, now out of office, who told readers of the New York Saturday Evening Post on 13 February 1930: ‘the mass of Europe once united, once federalised or partly federalised, once continentally self-conscious, would constitute an organism beyond compare …’ Then, as later, Churchill saw no place in such a federation for his own island, with its worldwide empire. Speaking for Britain, his article went on:

We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not comprised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. And should the European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, ‘Wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the captain of the Host?’ we should reply with the Shunamite woman. ‘Nay sir, for we dwell among our own people.’ We must build a kind of United States of Europe. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America must be friends and sponsors of the new Europe.

Of the responses eventually received from 26 European governments, almost all ‘expressed full agreement with the idea of closer European cooperation’. Only Britain rejected Briand’s proposals outright, possibly because he proposed the formation of a customs union, abolishing internal customs and raising ‘more rigorous barriers’ against states outside the union. But all the states except Holland insisted that such an association must be ‘on the plane of absolute sovereignty and of entire political independence’.¹⁴

It was to no avail. The mood in Europe was changing. The previous autumn, only weeks after the death in October of Briand’s closest ally, Stresemann, the Wall Street crash had heralded the greatest slump in history. In Germany’s elections of 14 September 1930, fuelled by soaring unemployment and continuing nationalist resentment at the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty, votes for the National Socialist Party had soared from 810,000 to six and a half million. Hitler won over a hundred seats in the Reichstag. The following year the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was to expose the League of Nations as no more than a talking shop.

Those brave dreams of the 1920s were fading rapidly. But all this time a much smaller group of men, watching the events of the 1920s at close quarters, had begun to think that, if the goal of a United States of Europe was ever to be achieved, it would require a different strategy altogether.

Enter the Supranationalists

From the League of Nations, to Pan Europa and Briand’s European Federal Union, the visions of the 1920s all had in common the idea of nations co-operating on an ‘intergovernmental’ basis. This was the road to universal peace: governments should learn how to work willingly together for the common good, but without abandoning their sovereignty.

Curiously enough, this posed a problem that had already exercised one of the finest minds Europe has ever produced, six centuries earlier. In 1318, exiled from his native Florence, the poet and statesman Dante Alighieri had, in his treatise De Monarchia, addressed the question of how Europe might overcome the endless wars and conflicts produced by a multitude of nations and city states. As an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire, he suggested that there must be one ‘empire’ above them all, with the power to control their actions in the common interest.

Over the years, many thinkers offered proposals for the political unification of Europe, from Leibniz, Kant and the Dutch lawyer Grotius, to Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Victor Hugo. The French King Henry IV’s minister, Sully, suggested that Europe should be split into 15 states, governed by a council, and with an army of 100,000 men to keep the peace. William Penn, who gave his name to Pennsylvania, proposed an ‘Assembly of the United Europe’, taking its decisions by a form of qualified majority voting, weighted accorded to national population sizes and economic importance.

In the eighteenth century, the French Abbé de Saint-Pierre suggested rule by a ‘European Senate’, also with a form of qualified majority voting according to size and the power to summon a European army. In the nineteenth century the Comte de Saint-Simon proposed a political union of Europe based on the union of England and France, with a bicameral parliament, the upper chamber chosen by governments, the lower elected by universal suffrage. The French revolutionary Proudhon, at the end of his life, published The Federal Principle (1863), attacking nationalism as the supreme evil that leads inevitably to war, and arguing not only that nation states should be welded together in a European federation, but that the states themselves should be broken up into regional governments.¹⁵

The element common to these proposals, to a greater or lesser extent, was the ‘supranational’ principle, an authority above the nation state, relegating national governments to a subordinate role. In the period after the First World War, the first to suggest such a structure for Europe was Louis Loucheur. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, when acting as chief economic adviser to French prime minister Clémenceau, he urged that peace would only come by integrating the economies of France and Germany, particularly those industries central to waging war: coal and steel.

It took until September 1926 for Loucheur’s vision to be given practical expression. Emil Mayrisch, head of the giant Luxembourg-based steel combine ARBED, brokered an ‘International Steel Cartel’, the Entente Internationale de l’Acier (EIA), covering the steel industries of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Saar.¹⁶ This was hailed by Gustav Stresemann as ‘a landmark of international economic policy, the importance of which cannot be overestimated’, not least because it had the power to reduce over-capacity by imposing production quotas for each member country. It also had a central ‘treasury’ with power to levy surcharges on members that broke the rules.¹⁷

Mayrisch’s EIA had created Europe’s first, albeit embryonic ‘supranational’ authority. He hoped it would be a model for similar schemes. It would certainly later be remembered by Konrad Adenauer and others as the model for the European Coal and Steel Community that was to be the embryo of the European Union. Loucheur himself, before his death in 1931, would in 1927 propose the setting up of an ‘economic League of Nations’ based on a customs union or ‘common market’. But it was not Loucheur who would one day be remembered as ‘the Father of Europe’. That title would be reserved for a younger man who alone would crack the secret of how to get that ‘United States of Europe’ finally launched on its way.

Enter Monsieur Monnet

Among the senior figures in the League of Nations at its foundation were two who were already close friends. One was Arthur Salter, the British civil servant who was head of the League’s economic and financial section, and also acted as general secretary of the Reparations Commission. His friend Jean Monnet, younger by seven years but appointed aged only 31 to be the League’s deputy-secretary general, was a small, self-effacing Frenchman with a moustache, who decades later would be described as looking like Hercule Poirot.¹⁸

Monnet was born in Cognac in 1888, the son of a wealthy brandy-maker, leaving school at 16 to work in his father’s firm, J. G. Monnet. From 1906 to 1914 he represented the firm abroad, spending more time overseas than in France, returning to his home country for the start of the war. While fit enough for his globetrotting adventures, he was found unfit for military service. Through the good offices of his family lawyer, who was a friend of France’s prime minister, René Viviani, he managed to meet directly with Viviani, the outcome of which was to get himself sent to London, working for the French minister of commerce. His duties included buying and shipping wheat for the civilian market in France.¹⁹

At some point, Monnet returned to France, possibly in late 1915, to work for France’s economics minister Clémentel, a friend of his father.²⁰ When the British decided to cut the amount of shipping they had allocated to the transport of French goods, at a time when they were carrying 48 per cent of their supplies, Monnet was despatched to London in an attempt to get the decision rescinded.²¹ There, he first met Salter, who had been transferred from working on Lloyd George’s national insurance scheme to a new Ministry of Shipping, as director of ship requisitioning. Salter reported to John Anderson (of bomb shelter fame), then secretary to the Ministry, who was to become Churchill’s right-hand man in the Second World War. Anderson and Monnet were to meet many times.²²

Subsequent events are described at length by Salter in two of his books.²³ They culminated in the creation of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, with Loucher as one of two French ministerial representatives on the Council.²⁴ Monnet was a French representative on the Executive until the end of the war. He claims a significant role in creating these organisations, their official tasks being ‘to watch over the general conduct of Allied transport’ and then to make ‘the most advantageous allocation and disposition of the tonnage under their control in accordance with the urgency of war needs’.²⁵

Based in London, the Executive’s secretariat comprised representatives of the four governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Italy, eventually reaching 300 in number. Salter, who had been appointed secretary to the Council, noted that although members of the secretariat were of different nationalities, ‘they divested themselves of any national point of view’.²⁶ Monnet thus was keen to talk up the ‘supranational’ role of the Council, an idea he found particularly appealing. To him, it was an example of what nations could achieve through co-operation, even though he had pressed for the Council to have full authority (pleins pouvoirs) – a proposal that had been rejected.²⁷

It was, however, even less influential than Monnet thought. As Salter pointed out, Britain was the only one of the Allies that could meet her own essential military and civilian requirements with less than the total of her national tonnage and thus have some to spare for her Allies. The result was that, behind all Allied discussions, there was an ultimate power of decision in a single authority, the British government. Although this power was kept in the background, the fact that the power was there, and known to be there, must be taken into account in estimating the character of the Allied achievement.²⁸ When the idea of a conference to discuss the management of Allied shipping had been first mooted back in August 1917, the British government was reluctant to hold the conference. There was a risk, the secretary to the War Cabinet had written, ‘that the Allies may insist on the pooling of British shipping among all the Allies, with a consequent loss of British control’.²⁹

In the structure that was agreed, in Paris in December 1917, the British never gave up that control, a lesson that was apparently lost on Monnet. Nevertheless, he had gained his spurs as an accomplished behind-the-scenes operator, making alliances with others to help advance his projects. Salter was one such ally and, when the war was over, and the statesmen and civil servants of the victorious powers gathered in Paris for the peace conference, Monnet made many more. Among those was a young American lawyer, John Foster Dulles.

After tireless lobbying, the young Frenchman became a deputy-secretary-general in the new League of Nations, under Sir Eric Drummond. Working closely with his old friend Salter, now administering German reparations, for three years Monnet was at the centre of the new organisation. With its Secretariat, its Council, its Assembly and a Court of International Justice, he was initially highly optimistic that the League could impose its benevolent will on the world ‘by its moral force, by appealing to public opinion and thanks to customs which would ultimately prevail’.³⁰ He admired the internationalist idealism of his colleagues (Drummond had decided from the outset that the secretariat of the League … was not to consist of national delegates but of international servants loyal to the League).³¹

Increasingly, Monnet became frustrated by one particular feature of the League: every member state had the power of veto, so decisions could only be taken unanimously. As he was later to put it, ‘the veto is the profound cause and at the same time the symbol of the impossibility of overcoming national egoism’.³² Otherwise, he felt that the League of Nations ‘was a disappointment’. He resigned in 1923.

It was left to Salter, therefore, to carry the flame of supranationalism. In 1931, he published a collection of papers under the title The United States of Europe, in which he addressed the possibility of adapting the largely Europe-orientated League of Nations to provide a framework for a politically united Europe. He drew on the nineteenth-century idea of German unification, which employed a Zollverein or ‘common market’, so his ‘United States’ would thus finance itself through a common tariff on imported goods. Like Germany, it would need ‘a political instrument’ to manage the distribution of funds. As these would be a ‘central and substantial a part of their revenues’, the common political authority would be almost as important as, or even more important than, the national governments, reducing them to ‘the status of municipal authorities’.³³

‘In other words,’ he went on, ‘the United States of Europe must be a political reality’, borrowing from the structure of the League of Nations, with its Secretariat, Council of Ministers, parliamentary Assembly and Court of Justice. But there was a crucial proviso. The authority in this new body, Salter urged, must be reserved for a ‘Secretariat’, a cadre of international civil servants, loyal to the new organisation, not to the member countries. The problem with giving too much power to a Council of Ministers was that they would always remain motivated by national interest:

In face of a permanent corps of Ministers, meeting in committees and ‘shadow councils’, and in direct contact with their Foreign Office, the Secretariat will necessarily sink in status, in influence, and in the character of its personnel, to clerks responsible only for routine duties. They will cease to be an element of importance in the formation or maintenance of the League’s traditions.³⁴

‘The new international officer needed for the League’s task’, he wrote, ‘is something new in the world’s history.’³⁵ It would adopt precisely the ‘supranational’ principle that nearly three decades later Monnet would apply to the European Economic Community, deliberately intended as an embryonic ‘United States of Europe’. Salter even envisaged that another way to erode nationalism might be to split member states into regions. The only term in his blueprint that would eventually need to be changed was ‘secretariat’; and as it happened, in describing reactions to Briand’s proposal in 1930 for a ‘European Federal Union’, he was able to record that the League of Nations had already established a ‘European Commission’ to enquire into how this should be set up.³⁶

By now, however, as Europe plunged into the Great Depression, the shadows were gathering over such dreams: 1932 saw the death of Briand himself, the most distinguished champion a ‘United States of Europe’ had yet won to its cause. The next year brought the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. His idea of how Europe might be united was very different.

The Nazi Cul-De-Sac

In the late 1990s, it became fashionable in some Eurosceptic circles to assert that the European Union had Nazi origins. The thesis was mainly based on the publication by Reich economic minister Walther Funk in 1943 of his Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft.³⁷ As this term translates as ‘European economic community’ and the scope overlapped with some of the attributes of the EEC – such as industrial production, agriculture and a single currency – a common origin was assumed.³⁸ Yet there are few similarities in the structures of the two organisations and their governance. The former merely brought the economies of the occupied territories into the economic sphere of Greater Germany, segmented on racial lines.

The initial aims were set out in a set of lectures delivered by Funk in Berlin in 1942. These elaborated on a meeting on 22 July 1940 at the Reich Economic Ministry on the reorganisation of the European economy, chaired by the minister, and a speech by him on 25 July.³⁹ ,⁴⁰ Notwithstanding that the structure of what was to become the EEC and then the EU had already been set out by Arthur Salter, what Funk sketched out was a command economy, relying on strong state intervention in industry and labour markets. As to the detail, Funk himself noted: ‘One difficulty of planning lay in the fact that the Führer’s aims and decisions were not yet known and the military measures against Britain were not yet concluded.’ The assumption was that the British economy would continue to exist, but if that assumption was altered, ‘other proposals would have to be worked out’.⁴¹

There is no evidence of any systematic attempt to put Funk’s ideas into practice. Indeed, a European single currency would have caused Germany serious problems. The occupied countries were being charged for the costs of their occupation: in the case of France twenty million Reichsmarks per day. Repayments were calculated at a much-devalued exchange rate, magnifying the debt to such an extent that 42 per cent of the total foreign contribution to the German economy came from France.⁴² Whatever the rhetoric of some of his followers, therefore, Hitler had not the slightest intention of giving up control. As Goebbels put it: ‘It is only right and just that we take the leadership of Europe definitely into our hands … The German people … have actually won the hegemony of Europe and have a moral right to it.’⁴³

In fact, the Nazis only paid lip-service to European unity, largely for propaganda purposes, especially after the invasion of Russia when volunteer soldiers from occupied nations were encouraged to believe that they were fighting for ‘Europe’ against the Bolshevik hordes.⁴⁴

A more prosaic appeal appeared in an article the Catholic Herald on 1 November 1940, at the height of the London Blitz. Headed, ‘Axis plan: Europe for the Europeans’, the article came in the wake of the Italian invasion of Greece. In the name of ‘European solidarity’, the Axis powers were seeking to bypass the strength of the British Empire east of Suez, the conquest of which was deemed ‘impossible’. The aim, therefore, was to win strategic victories and seize strategic points such as Egypt and Gibraltar, and possibly Iraq, thereby setting the stage for ‘a grand council of European solidarity to force peace on Great Britain’. The whole tone of Axis propaganda, the Herald said, was moving along these lines of ‘Europe for the Europeans without British interference’.

‘Federalism’ moves to Britain and America

Rather than Nazi Germany taking on the role of champion of European political integration, that mantle was progressively assumed by the free democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

In the UK, the idea of international federation had been influential among certain strands of elite British opinion for some decades. Since 1910 the ‘Milner group’, largely made up of senior civil servants, had been advocating federalising the British Empire, arguing its case through the journal Round Table. Its editor, Philip Kerr (later to become Lord Lothian), saw this as a step towards world federalism.⁴⁵ Other notable figures, including Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells, had long been expounding the need for world government, organised on a federal basis.⁴⁶

A key member of the group was Lionel Curtis. As a British diplomat at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he had launched the idea of an organisation ‘to foster mutual understanding of and between nations through debate, dialogue and independent analysis’. Originally proposed as a single body with branches in London and New York, what emerged was two ‘think-tanks’, each destined to play important roles in lobbying for European integration. The first was the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, set up in 1920. Its US counterpart was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), established initially in New York, later opening an office in Washington.⁴⁷

In 1940, when Coudenhove escaped from Nazi-dominated Europe to America, the CFR arranged a position for him at New York University, where he held seminars on the problems of European federation. Through CFR contacts, he was given regular coverage in the New York Times and Herald Tribune, whereby the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ was during the war years to become increasingly familiar to influential American opinion.⁴⁸

In the immediate pre-war years, the idea of federalism as a means of preserving the peace had already entered a brief but intense vogue, particularly in Britain. Much of this had been tied in with a rising tide of pacifism. As early as 1933, the Socialist academic Harold Laski published a tract, The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War, arguing that peace could not be ‘built on a system of separate sovereign states’. In 1935 Lord Lothian published a pamphlet entitled Pacifism is Not Enough, Nor Patriotism Either.⁴⁹ In this, he argued that the cause of war was ‘the division of humanity into sovereign states’. Pacifists, he declared, would fail unless they worked for a federal constitution and a federation of nations.

A spate of similar tracts followed, notably, at the time of Munich in 1938, a best-selling book by Clarence K. Streit, an American living in Geneva, called Union Now. This advocated a federation of the ‘North Atlantic democracies’, to include the United States, Great Britain and the other democratic nations of western and northern Europe, plus Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. He suggested that its constitution should include sections on ‘The Rights of Man’, a common defence policy and a single currency.

The Munich agreement inspired the setting up in Britain of the Federal Union, which won the support of Curtis, Lothian and the historian Arnold Toynbee, then director of studies at Chatham House. In July 1939 Toynbee wrote an unpublished memorandum, ‘First Thoughts on a Peace Settlement’, arguing that, after the war that now seemed imminent, Britain and France should seek full political union.

He was not the first to propose such a union. In Paris in December 1938, Alfred Duff Cooper gave a public lecture that argued for the two countries to pool their resources.⁵⁰ In February 1940, the Comte Jean de Pange gave a talk to Chatham House on an Anglo-French federation, which would include a common air force.⁵¹ Following up on his pamphlet, Toynbee wrote to the secretary general of the Centre d’Etudes de Politique Etrangère suggesting that the ties between Britain and France should be strengthened, making them the nucleus of a powerful European union. The secretary general, M. M. E. Dennery, was agreeable, and the two institutes set up a joint study group to explore the idea.⁵²

Shortly after war began in September 1939, the now fast-growing membership of the Federal Union was given a further boost by the publication of The Case for Federal Union, a ‘Penguin Special’ by W. B. Curry, headmaster of the progressive school Dartington Hall. It sold over a hundred thousand copies in six months. This closely echoed the arguments of Streit’s book the previous year. Such became the momentum of this movement that, on 24 February 1940, 2,600 people packed the Queen’s Hall London to hear Barbara Wootton and other speakers. By April, the Federal Union had a hundred thousand members.

Meanwhile, other League of Nations insiders who had been enthusiastic for a ‘United States of Europe’ in the 1920s had remained in close touch. Salter, who continued to work for the League until 1930, became in 1934 the Gladstone Professor of Politics at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls. In 1937, he had been elected an independent MP for Oxford University. One close friend, since they had met at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, was the economist John Maynard Keynes. Salter was later to recall how they had both been members of a ‘small and secret committee’ of leading economists that continued to advise successive prime ministers up to the outbreak of war.⁵³

When the war began, Keynes held weekly meetings at his house, where they were joined by William Beveridge, the civil servant who was to shape the post-war expansion of the welfare state, and the economist Walter Layton, who in the early 1920s had worked alongside Salter in the League of Nations’ economic and financial section.⁵⁴ From 1923 to 1939, Layton, a Liberal, had been an influential editor of The Economist and remained a fervent enthusiast for a federal Europe, a cause he was to continue to champion into the post-war era.

Another old friend with whom Salter was reunited shortly after the outbreak of war was Monnet, who had been appointed chairman of the Franco-British Economic Co-ordination Committee, with the task of arranging contracts for war supplies in America and their shipment across the Atlantic.⁵⁵ Salter, as parliamentary secretary to the new Ministry of Shipping, became his vice-chairman. Just as in 1914, the outbreak of war had brought the two men together in London and again for a very similar purpose.

In March of the following year, a month after Comte Jean de Pange’s talk to Chatham House, Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmern travelled to the Centre d’Etudes de Politique Etrangère – the ‘opposite number’ of Chatham House – to hear Senator Honnorat, a former French minister of education, propose an Anglo-French union. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, Toynbee described how Honnorat wanted the two governments, without delay, to conclude a ‘treaty of perpetual association’. It would pool defence, foreign policy and the economic resources of the two countries. This, it was felt, would ‘deeply discourage the Nazis’, because ‘it would show them that, even if Hitler’s Greater Germany were to survive the war intact, it would henceforth be confronted by another European Power of still greater calibre and staying power’.⁵⁶

R. A. Butler, the Foreign Office parliamentary under-secretary, asked Toynbee and Zimmern to develop their thoughts, whence Zimmern in consultation with Toynbee produced a ‘draft Act of Perpetual Association’ between the two countries.⁵⁷ In parallel, Halifax had been thinking about post-war Anglo-French collaboration and ‘the experiment of Anglo-French union’. On 8 April 1940, he wrote to Maurice Hankey, then a minister without portfolio in Chamberlain’s administration, asking him to form an inter-departmental committee to examine the administrative implications of post-war Anglo-French collaboration.⁵⁸

On examining Zimmern’s draft Act at its very first meeting on 30 April 1940, the committee complained that the document was ‘somewhat academic’. It planned a second meeting for 7 May.⁵⁹ Before then, on 5 May – five days before German forces crossed the border of neutral Holland – the outline of the ‘secret’ plan was leaked to the press.⁶⁰ The second meeting of the committee did not take place until 21 May, a day before Hitler’s 2nd Panzer Division arrived on the outskirts of Calais and the British Expeditionary Force was in headlong retreat. The Zimmern draft was again explored, with the discussion enlivened by a comment from Treasury representative, Mr T. K. Bewley. He noted that a common currency ‘had never been possible historically without a common government’.⁶¹

Although Hankey’s committee was never to meet again, the Honnorat/Zimmern plan was not entirely dead. Towards mid-June, when the French collapse was imminent, Monnet seized on the crisis to propose immediate implementation of a ‘Franco-British Union’. With Salter, he prepared a text that was sent to Sir Robert Vansittart, formerly the permanent head of the Foreign Office, and thence to Lord Halifax who, with Charles de Gaulle and others, put the plan to Churchill.

On 16 June, the War Cabinet discussed the draft and Churchill made only one substantive change, striking out a reference to ‘a common currency’. However, the initiative came too late. On 14 June, the Germans entered Paris and the French government was back in Bordeaux. On 16 June, Prime Minister Reynaud read the text of the declaration of ‘indissoluble union’ to his Cabinet, which unanimously rejected it. Pétain, hero of Verdun, described it as ‘fusion with a corpse’. Reynaud resigned, to be succeeded by Pétain, who promptly sued for a humiliating peace with Germany.

Monnet’s proposal proved to be the high-water mark for the hopes of federation during the war. It was not quite the end of the affair though. Paul Reynaud, like Monnet, became committed to the cause of European unity. In 1951, he wrote of the British offer:

I have continued to think that a Franco-British Union, as Churchill proposed it, could have served as the basis for the unification of all Europe, And I become more and more convinced, during my years of enforced reflection, that after the Allied victory, it would be necessary, in order to win the peace, to take up again the offer Churchill made to win the war.⁶²

As for Monnet, appointed a member of the British Supply Council in Washington, he threw himself into transferring French contracts with America to the British. In 1941, Salter was asked by Churchill to head a British mission to Washington, allowing him to continue liaising with Monnet.⁶³ Based in Washington until 1943 (and again in 1944–1945), Monnet’s talent for ‘networking’ soon won him influential friends in the US establishment, from Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court to Dean Acheson, later US Secretary of State. Both men would lend active support to his post-war campaign for European integration.

While in Washington in 1941, Monnet met Paul-Henri Spaak, the pre-war prime minister of Belgium. To him, he expounded his underlying philosophy for a united Europe and explained in rough outline plans for a European coal and steel union.⁶⁴ It marked the beginning of another personal alliance that was to become hugely influential.

At the end of February 1943, after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, Monnet was sent by President Roosevelt to Algiers, nominally to arrange for arms shipments to the Free French forces. Here he found bitter rivalry developing between the two French generals who could claim to act as leader of the Free French, de Gaulle and Giraud. In his efforts to resolve this dispute, Monnet formed a close alliance with Churchill’s political representative in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan.⁶⁵

Macmillan records extensive conversations with Monnet about the future of France and post-war Europe. Despite reservations, they agreed that de Gaulle was the only man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile. Between them they laid the foundations for what amounted to a provisional French government, the Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN), to be led by de Gaulle.⁶⁶ As a co-opted member, Monnet then, on 5 August 1943, produced a memorandum declaring that there would be ‘neither peace, prosperity nor vital social progress until the nations of Europe formed a federation of a European entity, forged into a single economic

Reviews for The Great Deception

[cwhouston_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the most important book that I have read. It provides an exhaustive history of the EU combined with a coherent and cogent series of arguments that persuasively describe how and why it was established and continues to operate against our national interest.This book has been described as polemical by some of the other reviewers; perhaps so, but that does not make the content incorrect or the analysis wrong. The text is, in places, rather hard going owing to the level of detail but this does serve to underline its intellectual rigor. The final chapter provides a wonderful summary of a book that someone needed to write and everyone in the UK should read.