Jean Monnet

File:JeanMonnet.jpg

Jean Monnet

Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (November 9, 1888 – March 16, 1979) is regarded by many as the architect of European Unity. Never elected to public office, Monnet worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected pragmatic internationalist.

Early years

Monnet was born in Cognac, France, into a family of cognac merchants. At the age of sixteen, he abandoned his university-entrance examinations part way through and moved to London where he spent some years in City of London with Mr. Chaplin, the agent of his father's company. Subsequently, he travelled widely — to Scandinavia, Russia, Egypt, Canada, the United States — for the family business.

World War I

In 1914, Monnet was excused from military duty for health reasons but he set to making himself useful in other ways, namely by tackling the looming problem of organizing supplies, which the Allies were unable to resolve and which could have compromised the outcome of the conflict. Monnet believed that the only path that would lead to an Allied victory lay in the merging of France and Britain's war efforts and he proposed a plan that would co-ordinate war resources. The French government agreed upon its implementation.

Due to his success in the war efforts, Monnet, at the age of thirty-one, was named Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations upon its creation in 1919 by French premier Clemenceau and British statesman Balfour.

Soon disillusioned with the League because of its laborious unanimous decision-making processes, Monnet resigned in 1923 in order to devote himself to managing the family business, which was experiencing difficulties. Later, as an international financier, he proved to be instrumental in the economic recovery of several Central and Eastern European nations, helping to stabilise the Polish zloty in 1927 and the Romanian leu in 1928. In 1929, his experience in international finance led him to found and co-manage the Bancamerica-Blair, a bank in San Francisco. From 1934 to 1936, at the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek, Monnet lived in China, assisting with the reorganization of the Chinese railway network.

World War II

In December, 1939, Jean Monnet was sent to London to oversee the collectivization of the two countries' war production capacities. When the French government fell in June 1940, Monnet's influence inspired de Gaulle and Churchill to accept a plan for a union of France and the United Kingdom to enable the two countries to stand up to Nazism.

In August 1940, Jean Monnet was sent to the United States by the British government as a member of the British Supply Council, in order to negotiate the purchase of war supplies. Soon after his arrival in Washington, he became an advisor to President Roosevelt. Convinced that America could serve as "the great arsenal of democracy" he persuaded the president to launch a massive arms production program to supply the Allies with military material. Shortly thereafter, in 1941, Roosevelt, with Churchill's agreement, launched the Victory Program, which represented the entry of the United States into the war effort. After the war, the British economist John Maynard Keynes was to say that through his co-ordinating Monnet had probably shortened World War II by one year.

In 1943, Monnet became a member of the National Liberation Committee, the French government in exile in Algiers. During a meeting on 5 August 1943, Monnet declared to the Committee:

"There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation..."

The Monnet Plan, an European superstate

Following World War II France was in severe need of reconstruction. To rebuild, France was completely dependent on coal from Germany's main remaining coal-mining areas, the Ruhr area and the Saar area (The German coal fields in Upper Silesia had been annexed by Poland). In 1945 Monnet proposed a plan, named after him, to take control of these German areas and redirect the output of German coal production away from German industry and into French industry instead, permanently weakening Germany and raising the French Economy considerably above its pre-war levels.

As the head of France's General Planning Commission, Monnet was the real author of what has become known as the 1950 "Schuman Plan" to create the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), forerunner of the Common Market. Merry and Serge Bromberger write in their admiring biography of Monnet that the ECSC scheme was "an idea of revolutionary daring" aimed at the gradual creation of a "superstate". They note that Monnet and his fellow insiders planned for national governments to make "a whole series of concessions in regard to their sovereign rights until, having been finally stripped, they committed hara-kiri by accepting the merger."

Right from the beginning the EU was not intended to be about sharing or cooperation between sovereign governments. It is not inter-governmental, but supranational. The dividing line is the veto: where there are vetoes, there is still inter-governmentalism, still independent, sovereign nations; with vetoes gone, there is only a new, supranational form of government beyond all democratic control. Governments and parliaments are left in place, but are subordinated to the EU. This was Monnet's plan.

Jean Monnet described the EU's method: "Europe's nations should be guided towards a super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation." The single currency was the most important of these steps: as Monnet said, "Via money Europe could become political in five years." (Christopher Booker and Richard North in their book "The great deception").

European Coal and Steel Community

Following liberation, Monnet proposed a "global plan for modernization and economic development" to the French government. Appointed Planning Commissioner by de Gaulle, he oversaw the revitalization of the French economy. It was from this position that, in 1949, Monnet realized that the friction between Germany and France for control of the Ruhr, the important coal and steel region, was rising to dangerous levels, presaging a possible return to hostilities as had happened after the First World War. Monnet and his associates conceived the idea of a European Community. On 9 May 1950, with the agreement of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman made a declaration in the name of the French government. This declaration, prepared by Monnet for Schuman, proposed integration of the French and German coal and steel industries under joint control, a so-called High Authority, and open to the other countries of Europe. Schuman declared:

"Through the consolidation of basic production and the institution of a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and the other countries that join, this proposal represents the first concrete step towards a European federation, imperative for the preservation of peace." [1]

Shortly thereafter, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands responded favorably, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was born. Britain was invited to participate, but it refused on grounds of national sovereignty. In 1952, Jean Monnet became the first president of the High Authority. In 1953 Monnet was awarded the Karlspreis by the city of Aachen in recognition of his achievements.

Common Market

In 1955, Monnet founded the Action Committee for the United States of Europe in order to revive European construction following the failure of the European Defense Community (EDC). It brought political parties and European trade unions together to become a driving force behind the initiatives which laid the foundation for the European Union as it eventually emerged: first the European Economic Community (EEC) (1958) (known commonly as the "Common Market"), which was established by the Treaty of Rome of 1957; later the European Community (1967) with its corresponding bodies, the European Commission and the European Council of Ministers, British membership in the Community (1973), the European Council (1974), the European Monetary System (1979), and the European Parliament (1979). This process reflected Monnet's belief in a gradualist approach for constructing European unity.

After retiring to his home in Houjarray, Monnet wrote his memoirs. He died in 1979 at the age of ninety. In 1988, by order of the president François Mitterrand, Jean Monnet's remains were transferred to the Panthéon of Paris.

His marriage

In August 1929, during a dinner party in Paris, the 41-year-old Monnet met the 22-year-old Italian painter Silvia Giannini (born in Bondini in 1907). She had recently (6th April 1929) married Francisco Giannini, an employee of Monnet when he was a representative of "Blair and Company" in Italy.

In April 1931, Silvia had a child, Anna. Legally the father was Francisco Giannini.

Divorce was not allowed in France and many other European countries at that time. In 1934, Silvia and Jean Monnet met in Moscow; he was coming from China with the Trans-Siberian, she from Switzerland. He arranged for Silvia to obtain Soviet citizenship; she immediately divorced her husband and married Jean Monnet.

The idea for the Moscow marriage came from Dr. Ludwik Rajchman whom Monnet met during his time at the League of Nations (Rajchman was connected to the Soviet Ambassador to China, Bogomolov). It seems that the American and French ambassadors in Moscow, William Bullitt and Charles Aiphand, also played a role.

The custody of Anna was a problem; in 1935 Silvia with Anna took refuge in the Soviet consulate in Shanghai, where they were living at the time because Francisco Giannini tried to obtain custody of the child. The legal battle continued with a ruling in favour of Silvia in 1937 in New York, but this was not recognized in some other countries. The Monnet family only came back to France 1945. In 1941, they had another child, Marianne.

After the death of Francisco Giannini in 1974, they married canonically in cathedral of Lourdes; both were devoutly Catholic.

Quotes

• "There is no real peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on a basis of national sovereignty. (...) They must have larger markets. Their prosperity is impossible, unless the States of Europe form themselves in a European Federation." — Jean Monnet (1943)
• "There is no future for the people of Europe other than in union." — Jean Monnet
• "Nothing is possible without men; nothing is lasting without institutions." — Jean Monnet
• "People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognise necessity when a crisis is upon them." — Jean Monnet
• "[Monnet was] someone with a pragmatic view of Europe's need to escape its historical parochialism." — Dean Acheson
• "Building Union among people not cooperation between states"
• Credited with coining the phrase "Arsenal of Democracy" which was used by, and credited to, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Miscellaneous

The Jean Monnet Building of the European Commission, rue Albert Wehrer, L-2920 Luxembourg is named after him. The building code is JMO.

See also

• History of the European Union

Reference

• Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence by Francois Duchene (1994); ISBN 0-393-03497-6

External links

• Foundation Jean Monnet for Europe
• Multimedia biography
• Jean Monnet - European NAvigator