journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen
text and makes little effort to help the reader distinguish between what is essential and what
is not. Yet the very amorphousness of the book is a source of strength and an aid to discovering
the man behind the myth.
Roussel’s Monnet is the figure familiar to readers of the Memoirs – the practical visionary
of few but powerful ideas centering on the need for a United States of Europe; the activist
without office but endowed with immense powers of persuasion; the autodidact unbound by
pedagogic and academic convention; the New Man, forward-looking, internationalist, and,
at least partly, Americanized, in short, l’Inspirateur. The author, an eager disciple, finds little
to criticize or even discuss concerning Monnet’s innumerable campaigns, projects, proposals,
interventions, and other diverse activities. Their merits are mostly taken for granted and
failure or shortcoming ascribed, sometimes tacitly, to a persistence of less advanced outlooks.
This book is far from being an exercise in hagiography, however, and in particular lacks
the aphoristic slickness that lends a prophetic quality to the figure presented in the ghostwritten,
indeed team-written, autobiography. In drawing extensively from Monnet’s personal
letters, the so-called notes rose (which he apparently is the only researcher yet to have
consulted), Roussel has allowed the man, for the first time posthumously, to speak on his
own behalf. The Inspirer is by no means always eloquent, logical, or technically expert. The
letters cited by Roussel nevertheless impress one with Monnet’s sheer doggedness. Students
of the man have long been struck by the intense loyalty he commanded from his devoted
band of followers. Roussel reveals the effort that went into winning over the skeptical, or
only partially converted, like Kissinger, Couve de Murville, and Beuve-Méry. It is now
clearer how among policy-makers, Monnet gained the respect of the many as well as the
devotion of the few.
The last four chapters of the book add much to our understanding of Monnet. He can no
longer be written off after the mid-1960’s a meddlesome senior statesman even though obvious
indicators point to that conclusion. His greatest contribution, the ECSC, belonged to the
past. His main interventions in the 1950’s and early 1960’s – EDC, Euratom, and MLF –
failed. With the collapse of Kennedy’s Grand Design his political power-base in Washington
eroded. The Kiesinger and Brandt cabinets were less interested in Westintegration than Ostpolitik.
De Gaulle, the arch-enemy, was in power, had blocked the British bid to enter
Europe, eliminated supranationalism, indeed all but immobilized the EC.
This book provides a convincing mass of evidence that in these years of inaction and
frustration Monnet deserves unique credit for having kept alive the European idea. Roussel
shows that in making converts like Helmut Schmidt and Harold Wilson on the one hand and
post-De Gaulle gaullists like Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on the other,
“Europeanism” became the shared property of all but the communist parties. Thus the basis
was laid for subsequent annual meetings of heads of state at the European Council as well as
special relationship between Giscard and Schmidt and Kohl. The author further suggests
that the specialized studies carried out under the aegis of the Action Committee for the
United States of Europe accomplished much of the spadework for the Werner Plan for economic
and monetary union. His evidence lends credence to the conclusion that Monnet’s
tireless advocacy did succeed, as always hoped, in changing mentalities. It was only just that
The Inspirer lived long enough to experience the incorporation of the integration idea into
Europe’s political culture.
Roussel’s approach to portraiture is incomplete, however. Monnet was more than political
operative and visionary. He was, or at least was thought to be, an institution builder – a
man who could provide workable solutions. What is remarkable, in light of his immense
achievement in transforming Europe, is how many of them failed. The book has little to say
on this point, or in general about anything on the operational level. We learn very little about
how Monnet ran the French Plan. Roussel takes the ECSC’s success for granted even though