Madonna in Glory by Carlo Dolci, c. 1670 - Twelve Gold Stars and Royal Blue
PLATO WAS a bit of a fascist, really; his ideal society would have been a nightmare state to actually live in. Nevertheless, he inspired (on and off) two millennia of philosophers and thinkers, so he must have been doing something right. Take, for example, the passage in The Republic in which Plato writes on the differences between internal “discord” and external “war.” When Greeks fight with barbarians it is “war” but:
“When Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas is then in a state of disorder and discord.”
In other words, Plato was emphasising the shared culture of all Hellenes (Greeks). Almost two thousand year later, in The Education of a Christian Prince, the scholar Erasmus would quote this passage from Plato and add:
“What word, then, do we think should be used when Christian draws the sword against Christian?”
Just as Reformation scholars such as Erasmus built upon Plato and other ancient sources (or their interpretation of those sources), I’m pretty sure the so-called “founding fathers” of Europe were heavily influenced by a long and well-established tradition of Christian thought on “European unity” that stretched back through the 19th Century to at least the Middle Ages – and arguably even earlier. Europe’s founding fathers were not re-inventing the wheel when they began the project of European integration. The year 1945 and the end of the Second World War did not mark a stunde null for European history – a tabula rasa upon which to build a new society. Instead, as Daniel Elazar has argued, “the idea of federalism was initially a religious one, applying the idea of a covenant to political organisation.”
The ancient idea of “European unity” would strongly influence the way the European Coal and Steel Community was perceived by Schuman and his fellow Christian Democrat statesmen (especially De Gasperi and Adenauer) when they “founded” Europe in the early post-war period. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff; I’m not claiming that the EU is all a Papist plot or offering up an alternative theory of European integration. I’m just suggesting that the strong religious beliefs of the politicians who “founded” the European Community should be considered another important factor when studying the history of the EU. I should perhaps also mention I’m writing this as a secular humanist and atheist, without any personal religious motivations.
The Ancient Origins of European Unity
IDEAS of European unity go back a loooooooong way. Indeed, the germs of the philosophical idea can (admittedly tenuously) be traced back to Ancient Greece, possibly to Socrates, who referred to himself as a cosmian - a citizen not of Greece or Athens, but of the universe. Plato – Socrates’ most famous pupil – taught the philosopher Aristotle, who would himself later go on to tutor Alexander the Great. Whilst Plato drew a distinction between Greeks and barbarians, the 19th Century scholar William Tarn argued that Alexander was closer to the Socratic spirit, and that he dreamt of an eventual “Brotherhood of Mankind.” Through actions such as arranging the mass-marriage of 10’000 Macedonian soldiers to Eastern brides, marrying a Bactrian princess himself, or incorporating Persians youths into his elite Companion cavalry, Tarn believed that Alexander was taking steps to unite the different peoples of Earth into one race.
Tarn’s scholarship, however, has been largely discredited today. It is now believed that many of his own Victorian values were projected upon Alexander. Still, re-examinations of Tarn’s hypothesis have concluded that, though “Alexander never envisioned a unity of mankind… his actions were immediately understood in this sense” by contemporaries and successors (especially Cassander), and that “the concept of the unity of mankind becomes commonplace in Greek thought after the death of Alexander.” As we shall see below, these early Greek ideas of the unity and brotherhood of all mankind (definitely “man-kind” at this point) would feed into later Christian thought.
Plutarch wrote that Alexander was a great admirer of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope – once exclaiming: “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” Whether Alexander’s admiration is apocryphal or not, Diogenes is often credited with being the first to actually describe himself as a “citizen of the world” (a cosmopolitan) – a term most famously employed by the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant when he later wrote about European unity as a solution to perpetual anarchy. Cosmopolitanism was an idea that would also go on to influence the classical Stoic school, which the scholar A.A. Long has described as “far and away the most influential [school] during the Hellenistic and early Roman period.”
The Stoics – whose work would be spread East by Alexander’s successors and West across Europe by the Romans (especially under the much-admired Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius) – would go on to influence early Church philosophy (although the exact nature of this influence is disputed by scholars). Stoicism and Christianity already shared similar ideas of “humankind’s persistent evil, the need for self-examination, humanity’s kinship with the divine, denial of the world’s values, and emphasis on inner freedom” but, through Hellenistic Judaism, some scholars argue that Stoicism would find its way directly into the New Testament – from Romans 1-2 and Acts 17 to the Pauline Epistles.
A.A. Long has even gone so far to suggest that Christianity itself was the result of a “complex amalgam of Judaic and Greek teaching” – with strong Stoic influences – brought about in the melting-pot of ideas that was the Levant after Alexander’s conquests. The reason it is so important to stress this Stoical influence is because ideas of cosmopolitanism – so important to federalist thought from the Enlightenment onwards – have their most distant origins in this tradition. The compatibility between Greek philosophy and Christian theology in this respect should not go unremarked. As Anthony Pagden has argued:
“Universalism – incorporation of all people through baptism in the Christian community, irrespective of color, ethnic origin, place of settlement, or previous beliefs – was a central element of the ideology and objectives of the Catholic church.”
Such universalism is taken for granted now, but the idea of a transnational religious community worshiping the same God, encompassing all of humanity and overseen by a central hierarchy (though the actual degree of centralised control exercised by the Catholic church would wax and wane down the centuries) was new. Multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires had existed in the past, but polytheism had allowed local religions to be incorporated, absorbed or ignored; this time the aim was for all of humanity to eventually be (re)-united beneath a single church. The very word “Catholic” is derived from the Greek καθολικός, meaning “universal.”
Europe, however, was to be united politically as well as spiritually. The Roman Empire – which spread both Stoic and Christian thought – would represent one of the few times in history that the entire continent of Europe would be united beneath a single political authority (though even then not in its entirety). When that political authority fractured into Eastern and Western empires (and then, ultimately, collapsed in the West) it left behind a spiritual authority that would eventually spread across all of Western Europe in the form of the Roman Catholic Church. For a long time, as Pagden has pointed out, it was by this spiritual authority that the people of Europe defined themselves:
“People who thought about toponymy at all, even mapmakers who thought about it all the time, rarely used the word Europe (Latin, Europa) to describe the geographical or cultural entity we now call Europe. The word of choice among the dominant groups in society, at least from the eleventh century on, was Christianitas (Christendom).”
In fact, one scholar has gone so far as to argue that:
“Christianity’s diffusion throughout Europe from its centers of Rome, Constantinople and Ireland was so complete and so integrated into the continent’s cultural, political, and economic life that the history of the religion can be said to be simultaneously the history of Europe.”
Whilst this might be putting it too strongly (history can be defined through any number of perspectives – and not all of Europe was Christianised to the same extent or at the same time) it is certainly true that whatever common European identity existed historically in Western Europe during the Middle Ages was defined religiously. There was also, from around the late 14th Century, the beginning of a series of calls for formalised European unity as a way to overcome the constant warring between Medieval Christian states. The frequency of these calls for unity increased after the Reformation and during the bloody European Wars of Religion.
European Unity from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
IN THE 14th Century, Dante Alighieri proposed in his De Monarchia the complete separation of Church and State – represented by the twin authorities of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. He argued that supranational authority was the only way to secure lasting peace, because wars were ultimately caused by the desire of rulers to obtain more and more territory and property. Logically (according to Dante), if there existed a supreme Holy Roman Emperor of Europe who already possessed all of the land and property, there would be nothing left to conquer and so no reason for war. Dante prefigures, in this respect, the work of Thomas Hobbes, who wrote in the 17th Century in his Leviathan of the need for humanity to submit to a single ruler in order to avoid the problem of anarchy and war.
One of the earliest serious proposals for European unity, however, came in the 15th Century, when the Bohemian King George of Poděbrady proposed a treaty between all Christian nations – with its members pledging to settle disputes between themselves peacefully and concentrate military efforts against the Turk. There were to be supranational institutions common to all Christian countries, with a common Christian parliament. “Europe” was not mentioned – this was to be a Christian entity – and it was envisioned as a union standing in opposition to the encroachment of “non-Christian” forces (i.e. the Ottoman Empire) upon Christendom.
In the 16th Century, however, the Protestant Reformation would come to represent a serious threat to the idea of united (Roman) Christendom standing against a Muslim foe. The Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, writing during the Reformation, did his best to remain neutral on the division between Catholicism and Protestantism. Ultimately, he did not reject the Caholic church – but instead worked to reform it from within. He did, however, reject the concept of nationhood, and saw nationality as a superficial label or “name.” In his Querela pacis, written in 1516, he argued that the “entire world is one common fatherland” and questioned why “such foolish names still exist to keep us sundered, since we are united in the name of Christ?”
By no means was the idea of European unity unique to Catholic thought. Still, the absence of a transnational, universal authority is possibly the single greatest difference between Protestant and Catholic political philosophies in this respect (note, I have not touched upon Orthodox philosophies – alas, I have neither time nor space nor sufficient expertise). The Calvinist philosopher Johannes Althusius is sometimes credited as the “intellectual father of modern federalism” – yet his federalism is a local or regional federalism, not a universal “brotherhood of man.” He wrote his Politica in 1603, in which he proposed a contract between a ruler (or “supreme magistrate”) and populace – the whole arrangement facilitated by an administrative class of “ephors” subject to popular control (including direct elections) who had the authority to depose the ruler if he overstepped his constitutional boundaries. Coming from the Protestant tradition, however, Althusius invested the supreme magistrate – and not the Pope – with “ultimate responsibility” for establishing and conserving the “true Christian religion and uncorrupted worship of God.”
Protestant federal philosophy – in the tradition of Althusius – was strongly influenced by “covenant theology” (also known as “federal theology”); the idea that God’s relationship with mankind is defined by pacts – or “covenants” – similar to the notion that a ruler’s relationship with his subjects is moderated by a social contract or constitution. This contractual view of reality emphasises individuality, for it is the individual that enters into contracts voluntarily. It sits in opposition to the more universal, organic and hierarchical approach of Catholic theology – which sees the “Brotherhood of Man” as the natural order of things, only fractured into different warring tribes because the natural order has become corrupted by sin.
By the 17th Century, the ideas of the Reformation were well-entrenched. A proposal for a “European Parliament” was put forwards by the Quaker William Penn – who suggested that the Princes of Europe should meet annually in a European “Sovereign Assembly” – based upon a shared Christian identity. Decisions in Penn’s “European Parliament” would be taken by qualified-majority voting, with votes weighted depending upon the economic power of the various states. Yet this period also saw the publishing of the “Grand Design” of the Duc de Sully, Minister to Henry IV of France. The plan proposed the division of Europe into 15 Kingdoms of equal geographical size and military power, supervised by a supranational “Very Christian Council of Europe” and protected by a common army. Sully’s plan for redrawing the borders of Europe took no account of existing linguistic, cultural or denominational borders – instead viewing the citizens of Europe uniformly as “Christians,” united by this designation (almost as if the Reformation had never happened).
In the 18th Century, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre would draw upon the “Grand Design” of the Duc de Sully to add weight to his proposal of a European Union of Christian States. Europe was now being defined properly as “Europe” rather than “Christendom.” Increasingly, since the Reformation, Christianity was being recognised as a sectarian cleavage between Europeans as opposed to a unifying factor common to all. From the 18th to the 19th Century, a veritable slew of intellectuals – from Stanislas Leszcynksi, King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine, to Immanuel Kant, to Victor Hugo – proposed various models of European unity with different degrees of emphasis on religious unity.
Catholic Transnationalism in the 19th and 20th Centuries
WOLFRAM KAISER, in his study of the influence of Christian Democrat parties on the formation of the European Union, has argued that Catholic transnationalism evolved during the long papacy of Pope Pius IX. During this papacy, the Catholic church grew increasingly centralised and heterogeneous, partly as a reaction to industrialisation and an increasingly secular liberal-capitalist world. This anti-modernism and hierarchical centralisation reached its apex with the announcement of the doctrine of papal infallibility in the 19th Century – effectively cementing the role of the Pope as the direct agent of God on Earth.
Catholics during this period increasingly saw themselves as part of struggle between two transnational movements – each pointing towards a Utopian future and a promised land in which mankind was united in universal brotherhood. On the one hand was Catholicism itself, and on the other was the new threat of International Socialism – whose vision of Europe was encapsulated in Trotsky’s 1923 article on a “United States of Europe.” There was, according to Kaiser, “a conflict of the two Europes… an almost binary divide between two fundamentally opposed world views.”
Catholics everywhere saw the future in terms of “apocalyptic visions” encouraged by “widespread existential fears about the future of Christian European civilization as it had been shaped not least by the Catholic Church for hundreds of years.” The increasing secularisation of society – and the threat of atheist Bolshevism – was deemed a threat not just to the Church, but to the future of humanity as a whole.
Christian Influences on Robert Schuman
ROBERT SCHUMAN was born in Luxembourg in 1886, with German citizenship by virtue of his parents. In 1919, when Alsace-Lorraine was transferred from Germany to France, Schuman acquired French citizenship. He would go on to serve twice as Prime Minister of France, and as Foreign Minister he would announce the proposal for a European Coal and Steel Community in his famous Declaration of 1950. He was a devout Catholic all his life, and certainly the most religious of the so-called “founding fathers” of Europe. Konrad Adenauer noted how “Schuman lived a celibate, ascetic life, attending Mass daily – a ‘Saint in an official’s suit’”
The question is, however, to what extent was Schuman influenced by the long history of ideas of European unity? Certainly, he was well aware of their existence and made direct references to some of them in his speeches. One of the most important speeches Schuman gave in this respect was on 16th May 1949, at the Strasbourg Festival Hall to mark the signing eleven days earlier of the Statutes of the Council of Europe. He announced that “We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfilment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace.”
That phrase “eternal peace” is also associated with the 4th Century Catholic theologian St. Augustine, who wrote in his City of God of the “eternal peace, which constitutes the end or true perfection of the saints” and held this concept up as the “supreme good,” the ultimate goal of both the individual and humanity as a whole, and the true embodiment of the City of God. Through the new supranational institutions of Europe, did Schuman believe Europe could create a “City of God” to rise above the base nationalisms of the “City of Man”? Schuman certainly had a strong interest in Medieval theology. In Pour l’Europe, he writes about his debt to Catholic thinkers such as Blondel and Jacques Maritain, who introduced him to the writings of earlier theologians – particularly St. Thomas Aquinas.
There is evidence to suggest that Schuman, although inspired by religious thinkers of the Middle Ages, was at heart a pragmatist grounded in contemporary realities. In the Strasbourg speech, Schuman goes on to make more direct reference to the history of philosophy on European unity; he lists “audacious minds such as Dante, Erasmus, Abbé de St-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant and Proudhon” that had “created in the abstract the framework for systems that were both ingenious and generous.” Schuman suggests, however, that these earlier philosophical attempts to construct European unity were idealistic and unworkable. He argues that the “title of one of these systems became the synonym of all that is impractical: Utopia, itself a work of genius, written by Thomas More, the Chancellor of Henry VIII, King of England.” Schuman then contrasts these earlier “Utopias” with the Council of Europe – which he believed would be a much more realistic proposal for European peace.
Yet Schuman also speaks in the language of apocalypse when talking about European unity. He has no doubts that European supranationalism “constitutes probably the supreme attempt to save our Continent and preserve the world from suicide.” In the age of the atom bomb (and after two World Wars had exposed the barbarity of modern civilisation), apocalypse had perhaps never seemed so real and so possible. It was the terrible power of atomic fire (the first nuclear test was codenamed “Trinity”) that moved Oppenheimer to make reference to a Hindu religious text – the Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” and “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
For Schuman, this was a question of the survival of humanity – the culmination point of centuries of violence since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the end of unity beneath a single Church and a single political authority in Europe. He spoke of the failure of previous attempts to unite Europe, by Book and by sword:
“The Roman church of the Middle Ages failed finally in its attempts that were inspired by humane and human preoccupations. Another idea, that of a world empire constituted under the auspices of German emperors was less disinterested; it already relied on the unacceptable pretensions of a ‘Führertum’ (domination by dictatorship) whose ‘charms’ we have all experienced.”
In his 1963 testimony, Pour l’Europe, Schuman would write about his Christian beliefs and the way they influenced his ideas about European unity. He wrote about how the “dismemberment of Europe has become an absurd anachronism” a vestige of a barbaric past which was unfit for the modern world.
He also wrote about the importance of Christianity to the development of democracy. For Schuman, democracy was “bound to Christianity, doctrinally and chronologically. It took form with it, by stages, after long hesitations, sometimes at the expense of mistakes and collapsing into barbarity” and democracy was “in essence based on the Gospel because it has love as its motor.” Schuman saw Christianity as the embodiment of the spirit of democracy through that Stoic conception of cosmopolitanism – the “universality”of the Christian faith. He wrote that:
“Christianity has taught the equality of the nature of all people, children of the same God, reconciled by the same Christ, without distinction of race, colour, class and profession. It has proclaimed the dignity of work and the obligation of all to submit ourselves to it. It recognized the primacy of inner values, the only ones that ennoble humankind.”
The American scholar Brent F. Nelsen has written several papers investigating the influence of Christianity on the European Union. He argues that Schuman, De Gasperi and Adenauer shared three common beliefs that allowed them to develop a close friendship and more effectively coordinate the founding of the European Community. First, they all believed that Europe represented the central core of “Christian civilization” – and that the destruction of Europe would lead to the downfall of humanity. As Adenauer put it: “the world cannot exist without a Christian and Occidental Europe… For Europe is in truth the mother of the world, and we are her children.”
Secondly, they each believed that the Christian virtue of “forgiveness” would be paramount to preventing the collapse of Europe. Europeans had to do more than just co-exist – they had to live in friendship and brotherhood. This spirit of forgiveness was part of the doctrine of Christian universality – the hope for a “Brotherhood of Man” that can be traced back through European history to Socrates.
Finally, they were united in their contempt for the nation-state and the danger it represented to the cause of eternal peace. Schuman even went so far as to “cast the international system of nation states in theological terms by calling it a ‘heresy’ – thus endorsing the Counter-Reformation charge against Protestant nation-builders.”
The evidence suggests that, though Schuman was a pragmatist and determined that his united Europe should not represent another “Utopia” like the work of William Penn or the Duc de Sully, he honestly believed that he was carrying out the will of God. Europe – the heart of Christian civilization – was about to be reborn in a spirit of forgiveness and brotherly love which would sweep humanity into a new and golden age. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in his memoirs of watching Schuman speak, recalling that “as he talked we caught the enthusiasm and the breadth of his thought, the rebirth of Europe which, as an entity, had been in eclipse since the Reformation.”
Schuman’s writings on Christianity make it clear the depth of his feelings on this matter. He was intimately familiar with the history of philosophy on European unity, and his private life reflected his heartfelt Christian convictions. It would be extraordinary if these beliefs did not impact in some way upon his political life.
I have tried to demonstrate that there is a long and well-established history of thought on European unity that stretches right back to the ancient world. Whether that chain of philosophy is coherent and unbroken is beside the point. The scholars of the Renaissance believed themselves to be the inheritors of the Greek philosophical tradition, even if they had (like William Tarn when he wrote about Alexander the Great) framed everything according to their own preconceptions. Likewise, the scholars of the 19th and 20th Century drew upon Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, and they were aware of this tradition and made use of it in their rhetoric. Whether they truly were “standing on the shoulders of giants” is neither here nor there. They clearly believed they were.
Finally, it is possible to trace, beginning in the 19th Century as a reaction to industrialisation, an increasingly apocalyptic bent to Catholic thought (though this dimension had always existed to a greater or lesser extent within Christian philosophy). After the disaster of two World Wars and the threat of a third (one burning with the light of a “thousand suns”), there is every reason to believe that Schuman was sincere in his rhetoric when he argued that what was at stake was the fate of the world itself.
