Talk:Jean Monnet

Quotes about Monnet

 * Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.
 * Perry Anderson, "Depicting Europe", London Review of Books (20 September 2007)
 * That is why despite its imperfections, the European Union can be, and indeed is, a powerful inspiration for many around the world. Because the challenges faced from one region to the other may differ in scale but they do not differ in nature. We all share the same planet. Poverty, organised crime, terrorism, climate change: these are problems that do not respect national borders. We share the same aspirations and universal values: these are progressively taking root in a growing number of countries all over the world. We share “l’irréductible humain”, the irreducible uniqueness of the human being. Beyond our nation, beyond our continent, we are all part of one mankind. Jean Monnet, ends his Memoirs with these words: “Les nations souveraines du passé ne sont plus le cadre où peuvent se résoudre les problèmes du présent. Et la communauté elle-même n’est qu’un étape vers les formes d’organisation du monde de demain.” (“The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present. And the [European] Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organised world of the future.”) This federalist and cosmopolitan vision is one of the most important contributions that the European Union can bring to a global order in the making.
 * José Manuel Barroso, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture of the European Union, 10 December 2012


 * Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war.
 * Martin Feldstein, "EMU and international conflict", Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, n. 6, p. 62, November/December 1997


 * Europe was built in a St. Simonian [i.e., technocratic] way from the beginning, this was Monnet’s approach: The people weren’t ready to agree to integration, so you had to get on without telling them too much about what was happening. Now St. Simonianism is finished. It can’t work when you have to face democratic opinion.
 * Pascal Lamy, after the initial rejection of ratification in the Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1992


 * NATO was a triumph of organization and effort, but is was also something very new and very different. For NATO derived its strength directly from the moral values of the people it represented, from their high ideals, their love of liberty, and their commitment to peace. But perhaps the greatest triumph of all was not in the realm of a sound defense or material achievement. No, the greatest triumph after the war is that in spite of all of the chaos, poverty, sickness, and misfortune that plagued this continent, the people of Western Europe resisted the call of new tyrants and the lure of their seductive ideologies. Your nations did not become the breeding ground for new extremist philosophies. You resisted the totalitarian temptation. Your people embraced democracy, the dream the Fascists could not kill. They chose freedom. And today we celebrate the leaders who led the way—Churchill and Monnet, Adenauer and Schuman, De Gasperi and Spaak, Truman and Marshall. And we celebrate, too, the free political parties that contributed their share of greatness—the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and Labour and the Conservatives. Together they tugged at the same oar, and the great and mighty ship of Europe moved on.
 * Ronald Reagan, Address to a Special Session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, The American Presidency Project; 8 May 1985


 * But symbolic gestures alone cannot cement peace. This is where the European Union’s “secret weapon” comes into play: an unrivalled way of binding our interests so tightly that war becomes materially impossible. Through constant negotiations, on ever more topics, between ever more countries. It’s the golden rule of Jean Monnet: “Mieux vaut se disputer autour d’une table que sur un champ de bataille.” (“Better fight around a table than on a battle-field.”) If I had to explain it to Alfred Nobel, I would say: not just a peace congress, a perpetual peace congress! Admittedly, some aspects can be puzzling, and not only to outsiders. Ministers from landlocked countries passionately discussing fish-quota. Europarlementarians from Scandinavia debating the price of olive oil. The Union has perfected the art of compromise. No drama of victory or defeat, but ensuring all countries emerge victorious from talks. For this, boring politics is only a small price to pay. Ladies and Gentlemen, It worked. Peace is now self-evident. War has become inconceivable. Yet ‘inconceivable’ does not mean ‘impossible’. And that is why we are gathered here today. Europe must keep its promise of peace.
 * Herman Van Rompuy, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture of the European Union, 10 December 2012


 * Even more important was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was formed by France, West Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries in 1951. The plan was the brainchild of the former French prime minister Robert Schuman, who also served as foreign minister from 1948–53. He and his collaborators designed a supranational authority with control of a common market in mining and steel production in all the member countries, which meant mainly in France and Germany. The ECSC was intended as an alternative to a long-term French occupation of parts of Germany to harness its industrial potential. Instead, Schuman believed, all of western Europe could benefit from cooperation between France and Germany, both in Cold War terms, by increasing and regulating strategic production, and in terms of economic development. Jean Monnet, the Frenchman who was the first head of ECSC, also made sure that it had a social purpose, through subsidies for miners and workers, and that its institutions pointed toward wider European integration in other fields as well.
 * Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (2017)