Ten years ago, I wrote a book of which the first chapter examined Nazi and fascist arguments in favor of a united Europe. I used this Nazi pro-Europeanism scurrilously to discredit the claim made by today's pro-Europeans that the European idea was born out of reaction against Hitler, and to show that hostility to national sovereignty has an antidemocratic pedigree. Most of the quotations dated from 1941, European propaganda having been emphasized when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By 1942, a conference was organized in Berlin by leading Nazi party officials and industrialists, entitled "European Economic Community."
Of course the Nazis did not invent the idea of a united Europe. That dream has been around since the collapse of the Roman Empire, gaining new attractiveness after the Reformation and after the First World War. But Nazi pro-Europeanism was very detailed, concentrating on many of the technical aspects which we associate with the EU today, especially the Europeanization of industry and agriculture.
However, in the course of writing A History of Political Trials From Charles I to Saddam Hussein, I have now discovered that another European statesman had conceived ideas of European unity even before they became popular in Berlin in 1941. On 11th October 1939, Germany's Polish campaign having come to an end, a Norwegian politician sent a telegram to the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in which he made a last-minute plea for peace between Britain and Germany. The only way to achieve this, he said, was
to fuse British, French and German interests into a European Confederation on the initiative of Great Britain, in order to create a community of interests and cooperation, beneficent to all parties. Under these circumstances … I deferentially appeal to your immense authority and responsibility to suggest that the British government – in accordance with the method of federalization in America, South Africa and Australia – invite every European State to choose ten representatives to a congress charged with the task of preparing a constitution for an empire of European nations, to be submitted to a plebiscite in each country for acceptance or rejection.
The author of this imaginative idea was a then relatively obscure former Norwegian Minister of Defense, Major Vidkun Quisling, CBE. Quisling had been decorated for his services as British chargé d'affaires in Moscow from 1927 to 1929, at a time when the United Kingdom had broken off relations with the USSR and when Quisling resided temporarily in the British embassy on the banks of the Moscow river. As a friend of Britain and Germany alike, Quisling paid fulsome tribute to Chamberlain's "peace in our time" speech of 30th September 1938, the one he delivered on his return from Munich, and promptly sat down to write a detailed draft for an armistice between the two countries.
Quisling was catapulted into notoriety six months later when he installed himself as leader of Norway following the German invasion of that country on 9th April 1940. As a result of certain unfortunate misunderstandings, the German Chancellor had been obliged to send troops into Norway preemptively to prevent the British from violating her neutrality by mining her ports. The first collaborationist leader in Western Europe, Quisling's surname passed into the language as byword for all that is most contemptible about treachery. The Times coined the term within days of Quisling's assumption of power: "To writers, the word quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters."
Quisling got no reply from the British for his imaginative proposals about European confederation. Perhaps Chamberlain thought that the idea would never work, much as Sir Anthony Eden was to shun the Messina conference of 1956 which led to the creation of the EEC. The only thanks he got was to be stripped of his CBE after noisy protests in the House of Commons. But he continued to believe, like modern pro-Europeans, that a united Europe was the antidote to war. In 1944, he drew up detailed plans for a "European Community of Peoples" with a Federal President, a European Congress composed of two representatives from each government, a rotating presidency and a General Secretariat – all in the name of creating "lasting peace in Europe." He even fantasized that "in the politics of ideas, I considered Hitler my subordinate and my tool." After the war was over, on 21st June 1945, in a statement prepared in prison for the court which was to execute him, Quisling recalled his pro-European initiative with pride. "I referred," he wrote, "to the joint declaration, which had been notified at Munich between Great Britain and Germany as a basis for world peace and appealed to him [Chamberlain] in the most earnest manner to summon a European Congress that could come to an arrangement." In a further statement on 7th August 1945, Quisling again evoked his federalist ideas, mentioning his 1930 essay, "Russia and Us" in which he had called for a Nordic Union to include Scandinavia, Britain, Holland, Germany and eventually the British dominions and even North America." This latter idea has recently resurfaced among some British and American Euroskeptics, notably in The Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, who regard such a grouping as a realistic alternative to today's EU.
Quisling died before his ideas could come to fruition. Being on the losing side of history, his career did not culminate as a European Commissioner or as the Chairman of a U.N. committee. Instead he fell under a hail of bullets on 25th October 1945 in the same Akershus Fortress in which he had sat as Minister-President of Norway. But the idea to which Quisling gave his name, namely that it is better to collaborate than to sit carping on the sidelines, has had a better fate. Not only does it carry the day among British pro-Europeans now, it was also widely held during the Second World War itself, even among Quisling's personal enemies: the President of the Supreme Court which sent Quisling to his death was his old rival in collaboration, Paal Berg, who immediately after the German invasion proposed that the Supreme Court appoint a collaborationist council to govern the country under German occupation, and who was a member of it when it took over from Quisling on 15th April 1940. (The Council was a short-lived affair and Quisling was back in the driving seat by September.)
On the other hand, the idea that parliamentary powers should be handed over to executive bodies like the EU Council of Ministers was popular with Quisling's enemies. The Nygaardsvold government was able to return from exile in London to execute him (on the basis of retroactive legislation to reintroduce the death penalty) only because, on 9th April 1940, the Norwegian parliament had voted to transfer all its powers to the government. This was, of course, precisely what the French parliament was to do on 10th July 1940 when it voted to hand full powers to the then Prime Minister, Marshal Pétain.
This is a slightly amended version of the article originally published in The Spectator on 5th May 2007.
May 12, 2007
