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The campaign of the European congresses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Denis de Rougemont
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Extract

Just as the revolution of 1848 was preceded by a ‘campaign of banquets’, so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a ‘campaign of congresses’ spread over the years 1947–1949. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogenous and many-sided movement – a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1967 , pp. 329 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1967

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References

1 Reports and collected Resolutions of Montreux, the Hague, Westminster, Lausanne; and two small books: Europe Unites (The Hague Congress and After), and European Movement and the Council of Europe, edited by the secretariat of the European Movement, London, 1949. On the Hague, see also Le Problme de L' Union Europdenne by O. Philip, 1950, and my Europe en Jeu, 1940.

2 Published in London by Federal Union, British Branch of the World Movement for Federal Government.

3 Rapport du premier congres annuel del' UEF, 27–31 August 1947, Montreux, published by UEF, Geneva, n.d. (1948) 142 pp.

4 ‘Plan Monnet’ was then the name attached to the measures designed to restore the French economy.

5 Delegates from the Resistance had already met secretly in Geneva in spring 1944, to draw up a European federalist manifesto; cf. L'Europe de demain ed. La Baconnire, Neuch$ACtel, 1946. The main ideas expressed in Montreux and the Hague, will already be found there.

6 Unpublished document from the archives of the European Union of Federalists, 24 September 1947.

7 The political Resolution (paras 9–13) deals in very similar terms with the same points, Charter and Supreme Court, as the cultural Resolution (paras. 4 and 5).

8 Cf. Political Resolution, al. 3. and Political Report, III, 26, a.

10 Theoretically, Duncan Sandys was right: the Reports asked for a common defence, but the Resolutions no longer spoke of this. I notice that the theme of security there‐fore played no part at the Hague. And I add that two years later at the Strasbourg Assembly, Sandys made the first speech asking for a European army!

11 Summary of Recommendations, in European Movement, chapter on Westminster conference, p. 97. In the leaflets containing the texts of the congress, published in 1949, I read: ‘It is urged that European organizations should be formed to which governments will agree to hand over some part of their sovereign powers in certain defined spheres of economic activities.’