Visions of Europe in the Resistance

At the origin of this book and the colloquium that preceded it, there was a question: The current memory deviances, flourishing on the poisonous soil of instrumentalized fears, could be analysed as a perverse effect of this difficulty in understanding and knowing the history of Europe? The crisis of European consciousness is also a crisis of consciousness and historical knowledge of Europe.

In fact, the question of the achievements of European construction and the very idea of Europe develops from a faulty and untimely rereading of history. One seeks to undermine the honorability of the pioneers of this history but also the sincerity and importance of the goals that Europe was supposed to pursue, after the tragedy of Nazism and the war that had covered it with ruins and shame. This rereading proceeds from a revisionist approach that selects the elements of this very complex history in order to reduce it to a manipulation of the American government and a “liberal conspiracy”. It isolates and demonizes figures such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, or Alcide de Gasperi, in order to reduce the European project to the effect of the hegemony of the United States during the Cold War. The new “fathers of Europe” would be John Foster Dulles and George Kennan! Without wishing to take anything away from the importance of the influence exercised by the United States, and in particular by the Marshall Plan, on the start of the process of European unification, it is not possible to remain silent on how historiography has long been subjected to a flat interpretation that made Europeanism and Atlanticism coincide, failing to read and interpret the birth within the bipolar world of a new subject: a united Europe.

This thesis is not new. It was the dominant doxa of the French communists in the aftermath of the World War II, when they dominated the political and intellectual field and presented themselves as the spearhead of anti-Americanism and “anti-imperialism”. What is new is that the hunt for “European supranationalist ideology” is being taken up today by the proponents of an anti-Europeanism thriving in the radical right and the national-populist movement. The communists had not foreseen such heirs.

This revisionist logic leads to a kind of desecration of the ideal represented by the anti-Nazi and antifascist Resistance. It is a contempt for those who fought, at the risk of their lives, for this ideal. It is also a way of diminishing the major event that was the victory of the Allies, that is to say, the fight for the reconquest of democracy and freedom in Europe. Thus, we move from relativization to revisionism by questioning the achievements of this unprecedented struggle against horror and the worst.

Contempt for history is thus combined with contempt for historians and academics in general, even if some of them are sometimes used as a guarantee. The historians of Europe would be suspect. Especially those who hold a European Jean Monnet Chair, like the two directors of this publication. We believe that there is an urgent need to develop the history of Europe in European higher education in order to train minds that will have the capacity and lucidity to detect the traps of the manipulators of history and the conspiracy theorists. It is not a question of teaching a “holy history” but a critical history. It is about moving from opinion or prejudice to knowledge. For one of Europe’s distinctive values is this capacity to distance and criticize oneself. In the face of the enterprises of “disrecognition” of European history, promoted by the ideologues of anti-Europe, it is a question of trying to know what makes up the history and identity of Europe.

The participation to the Resistance during the World War II created in some enlightened individuals and little groups a new feeling of belonging that overstepped the traditional borders of the State in the knowledge of a common destiny for all the European peoples, i.e. in a moment in which the struggle against the tyranny didn’t have any barrier. Men and women in the occupied countries – engaged side by side in the common struggle against the Nazis/fascists opponents – often ended up cooperating regardless of the national borders not just to coordinate the military action towards victory, but also to assure peace and progress for the continent and, in prospective, for all humankind. In every country we were witness to a flowering of movements, actions, episodes, constitutional projects, in which the vision of the United States of Europe was an essential element that enriched the Resistance of a new profound and lasting political and historical dimension and content. In that moment some movements supporting the European unity were born in the six countries of “Little Europe”, in Great Britain, in Switzerland, in Austria and among some politically exiled (Poland, Czechoslovakia, …).

Of course, this desire for Europe was expressed with different intensities depending on the cultures of the countries at war. Of course, the Europeanist projects of the Resistance fighters are indebted to the political and philosophical circles in which they were born before the war, and they are part of currents of thought that existed before the war. Of course, not all the political parties engaged in the struggle against Nazi Europe (e.g. the Communist parties) were mobilized by the European issue. It would be little in line with reality to assert that the peoples of Europe were all ready for European conversion. Far from it.