LORD WALSINGHAM (now aged 92) was a Third Secretary in the German Department of the British Foreign Office in 1950, when the foundations were being laid for the first stage of what is now the EU. It was then called the European Coal & Steel Community. He was Secretary of the tripartite study group (The UK, USA and France) which cancelled all denazification to rebuild Germany against communist Russia for the Cold War.
Whilst the project was ostensibly about securing peace in Europe, British intelligence was well aware that there were secret additional agreements in the Coal & Steel Treaty between Germany and France to weaken British heavy industry, eventually to undermine Britain’s defence capability so that the European project would dominate Europe unchallenged in the long term.
Britain did not join the Coal & Steel Community but neither did it make public the ulterior, anti-British intentions of the “Fathers of Europe”. At the time Britain was heavily indebted to the USA which was backing the EU project and funding the European Movement through the CIA.
The European Coal & Steel Community was intended to lead to a united Franco/German European army but the French National Assembly voted that down. Jean Monnet, Schuman and colleagues decided that they needed to proceed more gradually as the nations of Europe were not then ready to assent to their dissolution in a single European polity. The European Economic Community was founded on this principle of small, repeated inexorable steps towards “ever closer union”. The process was called “Engrenage” – like a ratchet, it was irreversible. The Treaty of Rome set this up in 1957.
The name “European Economic Community” is highly significant. As a businessman, Monnet well knew the importance of brand loyalty. Every politically aware German of the Nazi era would recognise the “Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft”, set up to build integration between the countries of Europe after the Nazi victory of 1940 and widely publicised in a collection of papers of the same name, published in Berlin in 1942. Translations of the introduction and main paper are available here. Apart from some descriptions of contemporary events, there is nothing in them which has not come out of the EEC and the EU in the last sixty years. The mindset and geopolitical world outlook are virtually identical.
The post war EU’s biggest project by far, the Common Agricultural Policy, was decided in 1962 but it was based on the clear guidelines, laid down twenty years before in Nazi Berlin (link here). Now, of course, the Nazi EEC turned out to be mostly propaganda because the pressures of war overtook and destroyed it – but many of its intentions, including dominance over central Europe have been carried into effect under the EU flag , since the fall of the Berlin wall.
The Nazis were adapters rather than inventors of the project, which had been on official German minds for generations. On 9 September 1914, the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg wrote:- “Russia must be pushed back as far as possible from Germany’s Eastern frontier and her domination over non-Russian vassal people broken… We must create a Central European Economic Association through common customs treaties to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary and perhaps Italy, Sweden and Norway. This association will not have any common constitutional supreme authority and all members will be formally equal but in practice under German leadership and must stabilise Germany’s dominance over central Europe”.
Monnet, Schuman and colleagues added the “common constitutional supreme authority” in the form of the European Commission but the project is still highly congruent with the remarkably stable, long term objectives of Germany’s political class since the 19th century.
In late 2016 the German government allocated 4 million Euros to an investigation into the influence of Nazi personalities and policies in the post war era. The independent German website www.german-foreign-policy.com has a link at the top of its title page – “History”. Click on this for an account of the development of German policy regarding Europe from the 19th century onwards. it has an extensive bibliography.