European Confederation

A European identity of one kind or another has existed since the First Millennium, partly as a contrast between the Christians of Europe and the non-Christians outside Europe, partly as an expression of the common history of the warring European states. It was only in the 19th century, though, as liberals and nationalists became aware of the ties that bound their nations, and as Europeans became aware of the emergence of a powerful non-European world -- in the United States, in the South American republics, and in Asia -- that some people became interested in the idea of a united Europe.

In the 1848 revolutions, for instance, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Magyar nationalists were all aware that their liberal political institutions would be easily destroyed unless they combined. Their failure to do so discouraged pan-Europeans, but it did not destroy the dream of a united Europe. In 1866, the French economist Michel Chevalier wrote an article for the prestigious Parisien weekly Revue des Deux Mondes, wherein he argued that Europe must unite against the "political colossi created on the other side of the Atlantic," since "within thirty years the New World will be a rival to Old Europe, competing with her in everything." Indeed, during the Franco-Prussian War, the French author and political radical Victor Hugo proposed that a republican France and a future republican Germany unite to form a European state of unparalleled power, but the establishment of the Second Orleanist Kingdom in 1871 made that dream impractical.

Ironically, it was the First World War that made pan-Europeanism a force to be reckoned with, as counterintuitively, the Europe-wide devastation wrought by that conflict made Europeans realize that some kind of pan-European structure had to be imposed on the entire continent. Although the League of Nations could be made to serve as such a body, its membership was overly global in scale. A more local organization, then, had to be created. In 1918, Czechoslovak philosopher and president T.G. Masaryk wrote his book The New Europe, in which he described a post-war continent that had indeed been shaken to its foundations by the recent conflict, and which was threatened by the growth of Communism in the Soviet Union. The only solution to Europe's problems, Masaryk argued, was a central European coalition of sorts, one that could stand up both to Germany and to the Soviet Union, as a democratic and even confederal space.

In this, Masaryk was echoed by the later Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, a liberal Austrian aristocrat, who argued in his periodical Paneuropa beginning in 1921 that the rise of new American and Asian powers and the Soviet threat made it crucial for Europeans to unite in a confederal pact that would prevent any future calamities from overtaking Europe. In their own different ways, Masaryk and Coudenhove-Kalergi encouraged the creation of a common Danubian space, thus laying the foundation for the resurrection of a common Europe. It was not until the French premier Aristide Briand, addressing the General Assembly of the League of Nations in September of 1927, proposed the creation of a federal link between European countries that European unification became a major political topic. Although the central European states supported the French initiative, as did Belgium and Luxembourg and the liberal states of Norden and the Baltic States, the reluctance of Britain to join in the effort along with the hostility of the nationalistic German states to Briand's proposal ultimately doomed Briand's suggestion to oblivion.

The subsequent Second World War, with its destruction wrought on a pan-European scale made European unification a seeming imperative. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a surprising number of European governments -- including the Netherlands, the Italian Empire, Spain, and Switzerland, all neutrals that were affected by Nazi aggression -- and European peoples began to support the idea of a federal Europe. Even in the German states, pre-war standoffishness from a European combine of sorts had been utterly discredited, like so many legacies of interwar Germany, by the Nazi reign of terror. As Hans von Shreebronk, an anti-Nazi German executed by the SS in February of 1944, wrote in his famous "Last Testament":

"How wonderful it would be to call Europe one's fatherland, and to think of Krakow, Munich, Rome, Arles, Madrid, Berlin, as one's own cities. I have not had the chance to be educated to a broader nationalism, but I instinctively know that a Union of Europe would command far more of my loyalty than any Fatherland […] There has been a first shattering war in Europe, then a second war -- how can we possibly survive a third?"

At first, the League of Nations was reluctant to countenance the emergence of a potential European competitor. By 1946, though, the growth of an apparent threat from the Soviet Union made it appear that a European union including a military component was essential for Europe's own defense. Even Britain, long opposed to a European combination, expressed an interest in joining. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, "There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great Britain, holding the moral leadership of the continent with our great allies."

The early years of Europeanism were troubled, though, despite this overwhelming response. From the beginning, there was a direct conflict between the French and central European concept of a federal European government exercising sovereignty over its member states, and the British and northern European concept of a confederal Europe bound by treaties but lacking a central authority. In the Amsterdam Conference of 1947, the Barcelona Conference of 1948, and the Turin Conference of 1949, these two camps were directly opposed. In the famous Liège Compromise of summer 1950, a breakthrough was reached when both camps agreed to avoid setting long-term goals for the planned European Confederation, and to simply progress through common stages.

The creation of the European Treaty Organization in August of 1949 marked the beginning of the European endeavour. With the stated aims of defending member states from foreign aggression and supporting the international order imposed by the League, the European Treaty Organization counted as founding members Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the German Bundesrepublik, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Saxony, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The installation of common defense strategies and materiel manufacturing protocols attracted many other European states, worried about foreign aggression -- in the next decade, virtually all of non-Communist Europe save Portugal and Bulgaria joined ETO.

In May 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed the creation of a common authority to regulate the coal and steel industry in the newly-independent German Bundesrepublik and France, leaving membership was open to other members of the League of Nations in Europe. The proposal was welcomed by the Bundesrepublik's government, and by the governments of Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Saxony. Along with France, the nine countries signed the Treaty of Paris in 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community (CECA) in August 1952. In the following year, four different European states -- Brandenburg, Hungary, Spain, and Yugoslavia -- would sign the Treaty of Paris and join CECA. Economically, the Treaty of Paris mandated the removal of trade barriers among member nations over a 12-year period, the development of a common tariff for imports from the rest of the world, and the creation of a common policy for managing and supporting agriculture. Symbolically, the Treaty of Paris gave great impetus to European integration.

In June 1955 the foreign ministers of the member-states of CECA agreed to examine the possibilities for further economic integration. This new effort resulted in the two Treaties of Prague of March 1957, which created the European Economic Community (CEE) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), charged with coordinating the nuclear programs of the various CECA states. The inauguration of the Treaties of Prague marked a new economic boom inside Europe, as trade barriers fell and national manufacturing firms enjoyed a vast domestic market of almost two hundred million people at the beginning of the decade, and three hundred million people after the further eastward expansion of the various treaty pacts. Per capita GDP and living standards in each of the signatory states of these treaties -- called collectively the European Confederation -- rose quickly throughout the 1950's, and substantially more quickly than in the non-members of the Confederation in the British Isles and northern Europe.

The early 1960's saw tremendous changes in the European Confederation's political structure. For one, the terms of Soviet withdrawal from the Baltic States and Poland in 1960 in the Soviet Civil War left those five countries free to join the European Confederation, which they did in 1962. Coupled with the expansion of the European Confederation to include Romania, Serbia, and Yugoslavia in 1958, and of the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in 1961, this created a European Confederation that now included the largest part of the European continent. The roughly simultaneous 1961 joint declaration of the French and German Socialist parties calling for a Franco-German union within the European Commonwealth likewise resulted in the Franco-German State Treaty of 1962, and the formation of an immensely powerful Franco-German Combine inside the European Confederation. Despite these rather stunning internal changes, though, the European Confederation somehow managed to remain a viable force despite national rivalries in trade and military policy. To a considerable extent, this unity was maintained by the continuing European economic boom, by innumerable cross-frontier migrations, and the new pan-European popular culture that had achieved such popularity among the European youth.

The step towards a cohesive, truly federal European confederation was not taken until 1970. Although the Confederation's common institutions and treaties had created the skeleton of a European union, there simply was no centre -- no executive body, no legislative body, no capital, and no judicial body outside of the World Court in The Hague, in the Netherlands. The notable success of the European Confederation to date encouraged pressure for the creation of just such a network of institutions. The European leagues of Christian Democratic, Socialist, and Communalist parties all passed resolutions in the 1967 and 1968 annual congresses demanding the holding of a meeting of Confederation member-states aimed at creating just such a centre. The holding of such a meeting was complicated by the accession of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Portugal to Confederation membership in 1968, since these new members were reluctant to cede sovereignty to a pan-European body, and by the gradual decomposition of the Italian state. Despite the odds, though, the governments of the member-states of the European Confederation were assembled in Paris, in the spring of 1969, to discuss the creation of a federal Europe.

As expected, the main conflict at the Paris Conference was centred upon the old Anglo-French dispute on the merits of a decentralized versus a centralized European Confederation. Although France could now command the support of the German states and Italy in calling for a centralized Europe, Britain's acquiescence to whatever changes came out of Paris was essential. French Socialist Prime Minister Georges Pompidou proposed the creation of a moderately asymmetrical European Confederation, that is to say, to divide the European Confederation between an inner union of those states ready to push towards full unification, and an outer fringe of those states that sought to continue to advance. Pan-European federalists disliked the temporizing of the Paris Conference, while nationalists in the Confederation's member states resented any progress towards a united Europe. Nonetheless, the Treaty on European Confederation was drafted out of the proceedings of the Paris Conference, and on the 1st of January, 1970, it was signed by the heads of state of each Confederation member state.

The Treaty on European Confederation created for all Confederation member-states a permanent financing arrangement for Confederation affairs, the pan-European Agricultural Development Fund which subsidized Europe's declining population of farmers, and the European Monetary System (SME), established as a first step toward achieving a single European Confederation currency and to limit currency fluctuations inside Europe. For the hard core of Confederation member-states, the Treaty on European Confederation marked the beginning of a five-year transition to a single European market without tariffs or barriers on movement of any kind, a ten-year-long countdown towards the adoption of a single European currency for the entire hard core, the beginnings of a common foreign policy, and -- perhaps most importantly -- a European Parliament, a European Secretariat, and a European Court of Justice, all headquartered in Paris and intended to serve as the much-needed legislative, executive, and judicial arms of the Confederation.

The 1970's were a troubled time for the new European Confederation. Going against the demands of conservatives and nationalists in the member states, each country's membership in the Confederation was not automatically approved by referendum save in the case of the Nordic Council's member states, which all narrowly approved the membership of this bloc of eight Confederation member states. Even though the European Parliament maintained a high profile and European parliamentary elections had a high turnout, the Confederation suffered from a lack of legitimacy. In turn, this complicated the task of creation a single European currency, called the écu at French insistence. Although the currencies of the western, central, and northern European members of the hard core fluctuated to only a limited degree, thanks to their high degree of economic integration, countries on the margins of Europe suffered from limited economic growth and moderate inflation. Despite the passage of the European Development Act by the Parliament in 1972, which established a fund charged with subsidizing industries in countries and regions less productive than the average figures for the European Confederation in its entirety, the need for strict financial measures also made the Confederation somewhat unpopular. At the same time, the moves towards a common foreign policy were resisted by the member states save in the broadest detail . Although the Confederation could organize broad foreign policy initiatives -- for instance, the subsidizing of the Ukrainian and Russian governments inside the Soviet Union, the condemnation of violent Sinophobia in post-colonial Southeast Asia, and efforts to engage the United States in the League of Nations framework -- it could do no more. In 1980, despite the adoption of the écu across the Confederation, and the 1979 accession to full membership of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Constantinople, the outlook for the European Confederation was decidedly mixed.

It was the catastrophe of the Third World War and the immediate aftermath in 1982 and 1983 that made the Confederation a cohesive entity. In the face of catastrophic famine, uncontrolled international floods of refugees, premature and severe global winter, and general economic collapse, no one Confederation member state could cope alone. For all of its problems, the European Confederation was the only force in Europe that could possibly respond to the challenges of the post-War era. Quite apart from the dominant role of the European Confederation in the Tripartite Alliance, the emergency extension of Confederation membership to the states of Eurasia -- to independent Armenia, and to post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, and Caucasia -- in 1985 prevented the complete collapse of the western Soviet Union into anarchy.

The gradual economic recovery of the European Confederation and adjoining areas in the Middle East that began around 1985 can be largely attributed to the presence of the single European market for labour, goods, and capital, and to the Confederation's role in coordinating the region's gradual neo-Keynesian reflation. As the 1980's progressed, the role of the Confederation government in making economic recovery possible was realized by many Europeans -- including erstwhile Euroskeptics! The international migrations -- to the European Confederation, and within the Confederation -- precipitated by the Third World War helped to knit together European societies. By 1990, the European Confederation had achieved an unparalleled degree of popularity, perhaps best symbolized by the majority votes in the member states of the Confederation of the Isles that saw the accession of the Euroskeptic British Isles to full membership inside the Confederation.

The solidification of the European Confederation that occurred during the 1990's was briefly threatened by the Holy Alliance invasion and occupation of the entire Confederation save Algeria and Libya. Captured Holy Alliance documents suggest that the European Confederation was seen by the occupation authorities as simply too large and unwieldy an entity to control. If the Holy Alliance occupation of Europe had continued, the Confederation might well have been dissolved into its component states, which would have varying degrees of autonomy under the Holy Alliance yoke. Fortunately for the Confederation and Europeans, though, the expulsion of Holy Alliance forces left the Confederation free to resume its normal existence, with European populations convinced even more strongly of the necessity of European unity.

In the post-contact environment, the European Confederation quickly took up a role as the leading representative of Tripartite Alliance Earth in interdimensional councils -- for instance, the écu was quickly accepted as the main currency of the world by interdimensional money markets, while Confederation representatives figured prominently in League of Nations' embassies and consulates elsewhere in the multiverse. The Deccan Traps Soviet Union's invasion of the Federated Russian Republics in the summer of 2000 initially seemed to threaten the Confederation's stability, but it in fact proved the Confederation's stability, as Europe was able to drive out the Deccan Traps Soviet forces with only minor military commitments from elsewhere in the world and the multiverse, and even managed to incorporate the post-war Russian successor states into the Confederation's structures.

Though it is quite possible that future troubles might destroy or at least damage the Confederation, to all appearances the Confederation looks assured of a long future. The Confederation's structures have served as models for like confederations elsewhere on Tripartite Alliance Earth, while the populations of the Confederation's member states -- located, as the recently-penned lyrics for the Confederation anthem, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, claim, between the Atlantic's shores and the Siberian plains -- accept the Confederation as an institution. At last, after millennia of disunity, Europe is one.