The EU and American imperialism: Europa capta ferum victorem cepit (Captive Europe captured Her rude conqueror)
Julien Rochowicz was an exchange student at UNC during the 2018–19 year.
“The transnational Europe is Europe under American command. Germans, Italians, Belgians, the Dutch, are all dominated by the Americans. (…) Only France is not yet dominated. To dominate Her as well, they toil to make Her enter a supranational machine controlled by Washington” (2)
With these words, in 1961 General de Gaulle defined the spirit of first-generation euroscepticism, which haunts Europe to this day. The General’s view of European integration as an instrument of American hegemony continues to resonate with political commentators and European voters alike. It was cited approvingly by renowned French philosopher Régis Debray in an interview with Le Figaro (3) regarding Europe’s future after the election of notorious europhile Emmanuel Macron for President of France: “When de Gaulle proposed the Fouchet Plan to Germany, he had this idea in mind. But the Americans have sensed the threat. They reprimanded the Bundestag, which then emasculated the Élysée Treaty. There could be no European Europe, independent of her trans-Atlantic protector”. Debray further asserted that “today, Europe has the status of a dominion: She has internal sovereignty, but no external sovereignty. This is very convenient to Europeans, who have constructed Europe so as to absolve themselves of the tragic world of power-conflict”.
The spirit’s earlier apparitions in the popular press have been more sensationalist, and arguably more consequential. In the year 2000, the UK-based Daily Telegraph published an article titled Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs4, which introduced the general public to a selection of Cold War-era declassified American files. These revealed, inter alia, the existence of the American Committee on United Europe and its financial ties to leaders of the European Movement (Józef Retinger, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak…), today seen as the Founding Fathers of the European Union. The article’s author asserts that they “were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government”. The main thesis being that “the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe”, which it apparently intended as a US client-state and a centrepiece in its power struggle with the USSR. How much influence such revelations have had on the European public is difficult to ascertain, but it is likely no coincidence that the 2004 elections to the European Parliament saw a historic rise in representation for eurosceptic parties as well as a failure to achieve a majority for any pro-European party (5). The article’s proclamation that “America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state” could probably also be correlated to more recent events.
Traditional wisdom would dictate that where there is smoke, there ought to be fire. So is there truth in these bleak assessments? Is the EU’s continued existence truly emblematic of the Old World’s resigned deference to the New?
Historically, there can be little doubt that the US had a vested interest in Western Europe achieving a substantial degree of political unity, which would reduce collective action problems among European states that the Soviet Union could exploit for its own ends. But how relevant is this fact today? Even if American fingerprints can be found on the European project, does that mean that an American hand continues to puppeteer the modern-day European Union?
If the American intelligence community had in fact hoped that the founding of a politically united Europe would make Europeans subservient to American interests, it has clearly committed a grave miscalculation. Had such an endeavour been successful, nothing should have been easier for the United States than to obtain some fairly standard trade concessions from its supposed client robbed of external sovereignty. Yet this proved to be no easy task for the 45th President of the United States. When President Trump declared the EU “a foe” on trade (6) and demanded it levy its tariffs on American automobiles lest it be struck with massive tariffs on its exports (7), the EU responded with a reciprocal threat of equally punitive tariffs of its own (8). This led to negotiations wherein both parties committed themselves to a mutual effort of relaxing trade barriers (9). Such bargains are quite uncommon in master-vassal relationships.
This is illustrative of that what those who diagnose Europe with Stockholm Syndrome vis-à-vis the United States have seemingly failed to account for: that the same rationale which motivated American Cold War strategists to push for a united Europe applies just as much to the United States as it did to the Soviet Union. In other words, if European integration was detrimental to Soviet power as it limited the scope of inter-state divisions, and potential defections from common interest to that of the USSR, then the same must be true for American power as well. If uniting European states under the blue star-spangled banner allowed them to better coordinate themselves against Soviet imperial ambitions, that effect should persist when the US is concerned. Which, as the story demonstrates, is indeed the case.
Some could protest that America’s military prowess ensures its perpetual patronage over the European Union. In so doing, they would effectively miss the forest for the trees, since the EU is Europe’s most viable alternative to US guardianship. As it stands, Europe’s common defence can only be provided by NATO which, as President Trump pointed out, “the US subsidises greatly” (10), and wherein it occupies a position of preeminence, or by “a true, European army” as advocated by President Macron and Chancellor Merkel (11), conceivable only through European integration.
What emerges from these recent events is that the EU currently represents Europe’s best hope of resisting American influence, both economic and military. It allows its constituents a capacity for collective bargaining and protection, the absence of which would drastically increase European states’ propensity for collective action problems, and render American hegemony virtually unchallengeable.
The choice is thus between European self-determination through integration, or European submission through division. Or, to paraphrase the aforementioned Paul-Henri Spaak, “if you don’t want integration, then we need the United States, and if you don’t want the United States, then we need integration. We need one or the other” (12).
1 A reference to Horace’s Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, “Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror (Rome)”.
2 Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle (2000), pp.269
3 Charles Jaigu, Régis Debray: « L’Union européenne nous permet de jouir du bonheur de quitter l’histoire »
(Le Figaro, 06/02/2017)
4 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs, (The Daily Telegraph, 09/19/2000)
5 BBC News: EU-wide results (06/13/2004)
6 Donald Trump: European Union is a foe on trade (BBC News, 07/15/2018)
7 Jon Stone, Donald Trump threatens EU with 20% tariffs on European cars in major escalation of trade war (The Independent, 06/22/2018)
8 Jan Strupczewski, Philip Blenkinsop, EU warns U.S. of boomerang effect if Trump imposes car levies (Reuters, 02/07/2018)
9 Trump and EU’s Juncker pull back from all-out trade war, (BBC News, 07/26/2018) 10 Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump Twitter account, 10/09/2018)
11 Jennifer Rankin, Merkel joins Macron in calling for a ‘real, true European army’ (The Guardian, 11/13/2018)
12 Paraphrase of Paul-Henri Spaak’s response to General de Gaulle’s simultaneous opposition to supranational European integration and the United Kingdom’s entry into the European Economic Community, « Si vous ne voulez pas l’intégration, alors il faut la Grande-Bretagne et si vous ne voulez pas de la Grande-Bretagne, alors il faut l’intégration. Il nous faut l’un ou l’autre » (“If you don’t want integration, then we need Great Britain, and if you don’t want integration, then we need Great Britain. We need one or the other”).
This essay is one of three winners of the 2019 EU Today Essay Contest, supported by a Getting to Know Europe grant from the Delegation of the European Union to the United States.
