# The Lost History of European Federalism Ask the average European what they think about European unification, and you will most likely hear — in the positive cases — that it is a reasonable and useful project. Especially nowadays you will hear a lot of instrumental reasons why the EU is a very good thing: it gives us Europeans more weight in trade negotiations, it helps us protect our democracies against foreign threats like Russia and so on. European unification and shared sovereignty are the trending issues of the day because the necessities of geopolitics demand them. Even convinced European federalists often list primarily, and only, these kinds of reasons for uniting Europe further. It seems the European project — and calling it a project already gives it the aftertaste of a corporate whiteboard — is something very pragmatic, very technocratic, very reasonable; but ultimately soulless. A cold bureaucratic machinery. It has Logos behind it, but no Pathos; no emotion, no epic historical weight. It is respected, but it is rarely loved, and few would say they would die for it. This sentiment is common even in eurofederalist circles, [where](https://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/comments/1uw80i4/comment/oxibxk6/?context=3) passionate federalists sometimes lament the lack of philosophical depth, of myth, of pathos underlying European Federalism. But this, while a sentiement felt justifiably by many, is factually wrong. The vision of a united Europe does not lack historical, ideological, mythological or philosophical depth. On the contrary: European federalism boasts one of the richest intellectual pedigrees of any political idea, embedded in a civilisational and philosophical matrix of ideas reaching back millennia. The problem the European idea has is, as so often with anything Europe and EU, not a lack of depth or substance, but simply abysmal PR and a barely existent marketing department. Unlike Marxism, which got decades of massive amplification and institutional entrenchment from Soviet propaganda; or neoliberalism, which was massively amplified and entrenched in institutions by the USA and UK; eurofederalism and paneuropeanism never had a superpower boosting them (yet). Even today, the European nation-states prefer to teach and spread their own national history, their own national heroes and their own nationalism in their classrooms. You will not learn in a German Gymnasium that Rousseau spent years wrestling with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's plan for a European federation; or about Kalergi's and Spinelli's visions of Paneuropa; nor that the idea of a united Europe has been around for over a millennium. European federalism has a lot of philosophical, historical and mythological depth to it. We are standing on the shoulders of giants so high that we sometimes mistake the clouds below our toes for the ground. The tragedy lies in most Europeans — including our political elites — being often barely aware of it. Time to change this. ## Roman liberalitas roots The thread of ideas behind European Federalism and European integration begins where so much of our civilisation does: with Ancient Rome, which came to rule most of the lands the archaic Greeks had named Europa. The Roman Republic’s _liberalitas_ — the virtues befitting free citizens — is, as I argued in [[The Education of a European Liberal| my last essay The Education of a European Liberal]], the origin of the moral soul of European civilisation from its very start. Out of this idea of liberty and constitutionalism emerged Roman law and the _Romanitas_ identity. Unlike the tribal city-states before it, Rome understood that a continent-spanning society cannot run on tribal custom alone, and so it developed the _ius gentium_ — the law of nations — a shared legal order stretched across wildly diverse peoples; _united in diversity_, nearly two millenia before the EU put that phrase on its letterhead. This practice started in the Roman Republic and lived through the Empire, where it culminated in 212 AD, when the Edict of Caracalla granted citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. For the first time in European — and as far as we know, world — history, political identity and citizenship were formally decoupled from ethnicity. It is a great irony of historical illiteracy that both the fascists of the twentieth century and today’s far-right activists try to appropriate Rome for their aesthetics and make Rome, and Europeanness, about ethnicity or race. It was and is one of the defining features of Roman civilisation to impose reason, order and liberty and abolish racial and ethnic divisions, replacing nation and tribe with cosmopolitan law. To make Romanitas or European civilisation about race is not to preserve them; it is to break with both. The ancient Romans did not, of course, speak of European federalism. But they built the first large-scale republic and then empire on our continent that united diverse peoples under one political order — and many of the first philosophers of European federalism were looking back exactly to the Roman Republican liberty and to the Roman Imperial unity when articulating their ideas of a European Federation. ### From the Pater Europae to Dante Alighieris Vision There is a long chain of inheritance from Romanitas and the Edict of Caracalla to today; as I also explored recently in [my podcast with Géza Frank](https://nikodemskrobisz.substack.com/p/geza-frank-the-age-of-constantine). Romanitas and Roman liberalitas declined with the end of Antiquity; most symbolically with the murder of the philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob in 415 AD. But even as the Roman Empire scattered, transformed and disintegrated back into tribes, the Roman idea — that citizenship and rights are decoupled from ethnicity — did not die and vanish completely. It was preserved and transformed by the Catholic Church, carried through the Byzantine Empire into the Middle Ages, and inherited, in name and ambition, by the Holy Roman Empire. As the centre of European civilisation moved north and the southern realms of the former empire fell to the Islamic caliphates, European identity began to emerge and define itself through its inheritance of the lost Roman unity. The first recorded use of the term Europenses — “Europeans” — appears in the Latin Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, where the chronicler used it for the diverse coalition of Latin forces under Charles Martel that had halted the Umayyad caliphate invasion at the Battle of Tours in 732. By the time of Charlemagne (748 - 814), celebrated by his court poets as _Pater Europae_, the Father of Europe, the word Europa had become synonymous with Western, Latin Christendom — that understood itself as heir to Romanitas. Through the Middle Ages, Romanitas transformed step by step into the idea of European unity. Europe was politically shattered into a thousand fiefdoms, yet the parts not conquered by the rising Islamic Empires remained one civilisation, that even expanded to Scandinavia and the East: a cultural commonwealth stretched above the fragmented feudal frontiers. Its language was Latin. Its infrastructure were the universities, where a scholar could wander from Bologna to Paris to Oxford and dispute in the same tongue from the same intellectual canon; the monastic networks spanning the continent; canon law, derived from Roman law, standing above local custom. Two institutions even competed quite openly for Rome’s mantle and rule over Europa — the emperors and the papacy — and their rivalry kept the idea of a universal order above the local tribes and nations permanently alive. In some sense, the Catholic Church functioned as a proto-European Union—acting as a supranational authority that arbitrated disputes between rival kingdoms, enforced a shared moral and legal frameworks, and regulated conflict and tried to prevent wars through initiatives like the [_Pax et treuga Dei_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God). It was in this environment that Dante Alighieri wrote _De Monarchia_ (c. 1313): a passionate argument for a single overarching European authority to suppress the fratricidal wars of local princes and guarantee continental peace. Imperial rather than federal in its logic, yes. But the core federalist intuition is already formed: Europe’s wars are civil wars amongst brothers, and only an authority standing above the princes can end them. Nor was Dante alone. The French jurist Pierre Dubois had proposed a council of princes with binding arbitration around 1306. And in 1464 a sitting monarch — George of Podiebrad, King of Bohemia — circulated an actual draft treaty among Europe’s courts for a league of European states, complete with a common assembly, a shared court of arbitration and collective defence. Basically a European union, formally proposed by a head of state, five centuries before Schuman — aristocratic instead of democratic, yes, but we are getting there. ### Renaissance and the Humanist longing for Peace When Constantinople fell to the invading Ottomans in 1453, the last living remnant of the Roman Empire died with it. But this death, actually sparked also a rebirth of Roman thinking. As Byzantine scholars fled westward, they carried the surviving texts of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers with them. Their arrival caused an intellectual explosion and poured fuel on the Renaissance that started stirring in Italy. The revival of Roman thought shifted Europe’s intellectual gaze from the christian divine back to the human. The medieval universalism evolved into the _Res Publica Literaria_ — the borderless Republic of Letters. The humanists did not write as subjects of a single kingdom; they wrote as citizens of Europe. No one embodied this more than Erasmus of Rotterdam — born in Holland, teaching in Cambridge, printing in Basel and Venice, corresponding with half the continent — who in his blistering 1517 tract _Querela Pacis_, argued that the wars among Europeans are the quarrels of brothers. Erasmus wasn’t alone in his vision of an united Europe as a peace project, that would prevent pointless fratricidal wars among Europeans. Émeric Crucé’s _Nouveau Cynée_ (1623) proposed a permanent congress of ambassadors. The Duc de Sully attributed to Henri IV a Grand Design for a federation of fifteen European states held in equilibrium. William Penn, the founding father of Pennsylvania, went even further: lamenting the wars plaguing the continent, his _Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe_ (1693) outlines a European Parliament in which the states of an _European Confederacy_ would settle their disputes — which despite being exactly 333 years old as of today, already reads suprisingly similar to the eurofederalism we know today. You can read it for example [here](https://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/penn.pdf). ### Enlightenment and the first Eurofederalists The first really influential proposal of a European federation came a few years after Penn from Charles Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, known as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who published his [_Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe_](https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-project-for-settling-a_saint-pierre-charles-ir_1714) in 1713: a detailed plan for a permanent European union of states with a common senate, arbitration instead of war, and collective enforcement. This text, in my humble opinion, makes de Saint-Pierre the first true European federalist; it was also one of the reference texts of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Leibniz corresponded about it. Voltaire mocked it. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau took it seriously enough to rewrite it, publishing his own condensed version, the _Extrait_, in 1761 — known in English as [_A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe_](https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125476/5014_Rousseau_A_Lasting_Peace.pdf). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of a European federation was widely discussed across European intellectual circles. And according to Rousseau, _never did the mind of man conceive a scheme nobler, more beautiful, or more useful than that of a lasting peace between all the peoples of Europe._ His only objection to the idea was not that European federation was undesirable, but that the monarchs would never surrender sovereignty voluntarily; peace was rational for peoples and irrational for rulers. Note: One of the central strategic dilemma of eurofederalism we still struggle with still today — how to federate democratically what existing head of states refuse to federate — was formulated even before the French Revolution began. ### The French Revolution, Napoleon and the Republican Dream And then the Revolution came — dressed itself as Rome. The men and women of 1789 had been raised on Plutarch, Cicero and Livy, and when they toppled the monarchy they reached instinctively for the old republican wardrobe: the fasces, the liberty cap of the freed Roman slave, the _citoyen_ as a direct translation of _civis_, David painting Brutus and [the oath of the Horatii](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Serment_des_Horaces_-_Jacques-Louis_David_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3692_;_MR_1432.jpg#/media/Datei:Le_Serment_des_Horaces_-_Jacques-Louis_David_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3692_;_MR_1432.jpg), revolutionaries rebaptising themselves Gracchus, Saint-Just declaring that the world had been empty since the Romans. After thirteen centuries, [_libertas_](https://nikodemskrobisz.substack.com/p/the-education-of-an-european-liberal) and the _res publica_ were political programmes again, not schoolbook antiquities. And Romanitas’ universalism came back with them: _the Declaration of the Rights of Man_ claimed validity not for Frenchmen but for man as such, and in August 1792 the Legislative Assembly conferred French citizenship on foreign friends of liberty — Paine, Washington, Kościuszko, Klopstock, Schiller. The echo of the _Edict of Caracalla_ is unmistakable: once again citizenship and individual right was decoupled from blood and birth, granted by allegiance to a law. The Roman Republic was rearing its head from the history books and back to life, declaring war on all the monarchs of the continent, as the ancient Romans did over two millenia before, when they slayed their last tyrant king in 509 BC. This Roman rebirth was not confined to the european continent alone; across the Atlantic, the American Founding Fathers had just built their own republic on the ideas of Cicero, Livy, and Virgil. Yet, while the American experiment fused classical roman republicanism with a deeply Protestant, Christian moral worldview, the French revolutionaries took a radical, anti-clerical turn — seeking to tear down the Church and build a purely secular, humanist and rationalist _Romanitas_ on its ashes. It was in the middle of these revolutions and coalition wars, in 1795, that Immanuel Kant published _Zum ewigen Frieden_ — perpetual peace not as a truce between monarchs but as a legal condition, secured by an ever-growing federation of free republics. Then came Napoleon, and with him France recapitulated Rome’s entire constitutional biography in fifteen years instead of ten centuries: monarchy, republic, dictatorship, empire. He staged the parallel quite consciously — First Consul, then Consul for life, then [Emperor self-crowned with golden laurels](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacques-Louis_David_-_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_\(1805-1807\).jpg#/media/File:Jacques-Louis_David_-_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_\(1805-1807\).jpg) rejecting the papal authority symbolically; a Senate and a Tribunate in Paris; eagles on the standards; the Vendôme column cast from captured cannon in imitation of Trajan’s; his son titled King of Rome. But Napoleon was not only larping a Roman Emperor, he also revived and spread much of the ideals of Roman Republicanism the Revolution had revived across Europe. Th_e Code civil_ of 1804 was not only inspired by Roman Law, it developed it further, outdid it; it was the most consequential piece of legal universalism since the _ius gentium_: wherever the Grande Armée marched, feudal privilege fell, careers opened to talent, Jews left the ghettos, and one rational, written law replaced a jungle of local custom — in the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Italy, even the Duchy of Warsaw. Sister republics sprouted across the continent. And yet Napoleon failed. He united much of Europe the only way Rome had known how, by violence and conquest, and thereby proved that this road did not work. The French occupation didn’t remain without backlash: Spanish guerrillas, the German wars of liberation, Fichte lecturing a defeated Prussia into nationhood. Later, in exile on Saint Helena the fallen emperor dictated his own legend — that he had really wanted one European people, one code, one currency, one civilisational republic. Most of this was retrospective self-fashioning probably, but the myth mattered, because it fixed in the century’s imagination the idea that European unification under the ideals of the Romans was a task history had left unfinished. The lesson was, that Europe cannot be united by cannon. The Revolution spread the content of Roman libertas across the continent and simultaneously discredited its imperial form for good. What remained was the search for a third way — unity neither imposed by an emperor nor dissolved among monarchs. The Congress of Vienna restored the old dynasties, but the idea of a European federation built on Roman republican virtues kept evolving. In 1814, [Henri de Saint-Simon and Augustin Thierry](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-sociology-archives-europeennes-de-sociologie/article/abs/saintsimons-vision-of-a-united-europe/74C837C79926FA67080067F3DF4553FF) published _De la réorganisation de la société européenne_: a call for a European parliament standing above national governments, beginning with a Franco-British core and expanding outward; basically calling for European Federation and the logic of “two-speed Europe”, which we are still debating today. ## The European Spring and Nationalism After 1815 a whole generation of republicans dreamt of doing democratically and peacefully what Napoleon had attempted by cannon: extending the Revolution’s principles to the entire continent under one constitutional roof. [Mazzini founded _Young Europe_ in 1834](https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-recover-the-radical-vision-of-a-free-and-united-europe) — a brotherhood of free peoples against the Holy Alliance of thrones; explicity with the goal of first gaining national-selfdetermination from the monarchies and then creating an united European Federation based on the republican virtues of liberty and equality. Carlo Cattaneo — the philosopher, entrepreneur and politican who co-led the _Five Days of Milan_ uprising against Austrian imperial rule over Italy in 1848 — explicitly demanded the United States of Europe on genuinely democratic, federalist lines. Victor Hugo hurled the same demand from the podium of the 1849 Paris Peace Congress, prophesying a day when bullets and bombs would be replaced by ballots and a sovereign European senate. Proudhon, in 1863, elevated federalism into a complete political philosophy in his [_The Principle Of Federation and the Need to Reconstitute the Party of Revolution_](https://philarchive.org/rec/PROTPO-27) — which is a full eurofederalist manifesto, demanding for power to be built democratically from the bottom up, ordered by contract and balance rather than by centralised command. The federalist idea was born as we know it today and not a marginal eccentricity of the age. It was one of its great currents. European Federalism was becoming mainstream for the first time in the middle of the 19th century. In 1848, when revolution once again swept the continent, nationalism and european federalism initially marched under the same banner. The Springtime of Peoples understood itself as a European revolution: Mazzini’s free nations were meant to be the building blocks of a fraternal continent. Polish exiles fought on Hungarian barricades; German democrats cheered for Italian liberty. The european peoples were brothers and sisters struggling against the same class of tyrant monarchs; Nation and Europe were allies against the Europe of thrones. Then the revolutions were crushed. And from their wreckage rose a different nationalism — no longer the dream of peoples, but the project of states, of the ruling class, that had discovered the mobilising power of national ideologies. The delegates at the _Paris Peace Congress_ had laughed at Victor Hugo’s vision of a sovereign European senate in 1849. Just thirteen years later, Otto von Bismarck — the arch-practitioner of Prussian statecraft — declared in his famous 1862 address, that the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority resolutions — the failed methods of the 1848/1849 idealists — but by “iron and blood”. His famous _Iron and Blood speech_ was the symbolic death knell of the romantic, peaceful federalism of the mid-19th century. Instead of uniting Germany through democratic paneuropean brotherhood, he united it by launching three wars of aggression. Germany and Italy were duly united — not by fraternal, eurofederalist revolution, as Mazzini had dreamt, but by Prussian artillery and Piedmontese realpolitik, and nationalist propaganda. The chancellorys and throne rooms of Europe drew the same lesson: a centralized nation-state, with soldiers high on national myth and backed by a modern industrial economy, was a far more formidable tool of raw power than the old, clumsy feudal empires. High-minded european federalism was shoved aside; the age of the military-industrial nation-state had arrived. The idea of the nation itself mutated along the way. Herder’s romantic nationalism had pictured each people as a flower in the garden of humanity — difference as harmony, plurality as wealth. By the century’s end the garden had been transformed by state propaganda and nationalist myth building into a battlefield: Social Darwinism, Treitschke’s power-worship, Maurras’s integral nationalism; the newly created nations were now seen as organisms locked in a zero-sum struggle for survival, in which one people’s gain was by definition another’s loss. The federalists’ premise — that Europeans share a civilisation, a Roman heritage of liberty and should therefore strive for shared democratic, republican institutions — was inverted into its opposite: the neighbour as the eternal rival. The Europeans that had risen up against the tyrant monarchies ruling the continent, were divided and conquered by nationalist propaganda, starting to turn against each other instead of joining their forces together against the feudal overlords. Not everyone marched along. The most untimely European of the age watched the nationalist fever and called it out for what it was. Friedrich Nietzsche — stateless by choice, wandering and writing between Sils Maria, Nice and Turin — diagnosed the nationalism of his era as a sickness and a regression, despised the petty-nationstate _Vaterländerei_ of the new _Reich_. In _Human, All Too Human_ and [_Beyond Good and Evil_](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0008) Nietzsche coined a name for those who had, like he himself, never fallen for it or at least outgrown it: the _good Europeans_. Europe, he insisted, wants to become one; the slow merging of its peoples was for him not a threat but the obvious direction of history, delayed only by the dumb fever of nations, instilled by the lies of the new tyrants. Opressive nationalism won ultimatley the 19th century against the republican european federalism for the same reason that today most people aren't even aware of the long and powerful history of European federalism: infrastructure and state power. The federalists had ideals, books and pamphlets; the nationalists had governments, and these governments had armies, schools, universities, machines of violence, indoctrination and propaganda. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the nation-states build the most powerful identity-machines in human history — compulsory schooling that turned peasants into Frenchmen and Germans, conscript armies that drilled millions, a mass press that sold enemy-images, invented traditions, anthems, statues, flags. Pan-European thought had no counterpart to any of this. European federalist thinkers like Victor Hugo had a books, and maybe a podium and a crowd; Bismarck had a school system, a general staff and a printing industry. The masses of Europe were nationalised by the ruling classes of the continent — and then they were weaponised against each other. ## The nationalist implosion Beneath the nationalist flags raised by the ruling class, the late nineteenth century was quietly integrating Europe more deeply than ever before: the Universal Postal Union, the telegraph conventions, the monetary unions, the railway kickstarted the first globalisation. A European could travel the continent from Lisbon to the Russian border without [once showing a passport as result of deliberate policy by the european states](https://www.passport-collector.com/europe-passport-free-travel-1861-1914/) — Tsarist Russia, tellingly, was the exception to this Proto-Schengen, that existed until 1914. In 1910, Norman Angell published _The Great Illusion_, arguing with impeccable logic that war between the great european powers had become irrational, as Europe had become economically and structurally so deeply entangled, that war would amount lead to self-destruction. Unfortunatley, while he was right with his facts, the people didn’t listen. In July 1914, two generations of accumulated national mythology detonated, and the young men of Europe — raised in classrooms that had taught them the neighbour was the hereditary enemy — marched singing into the trenches. What followed was exactly what at this point centuries of European federalists had warned of: a European civil war. Verdun. The Somme. Ten millions dead, four european empires shattered, a civilisation’s confidence bled out in the mud. The French poet, philosopher and essayist Paul Valéry spoke for the profound spiritual trauma of the survivors when he wrote in his 1919 essay _La Crise de l’esprit_ that “_we civilizations now know that we are mortal_”. The comfortable Victorian illusion of guaranteed progress was dead; Europeans suddenly realized that their magnificent cities, high-minded academies, and centuries of culture could vanish into the abyss of history just as easily as Rome, Babylon or Nineveh had. And because the lesson was still not learnt, the whole catastrophe was repeated a generation later — darker, more mechanised, more total and genocidal. But out of the ashes of 1918, the buried tradition of the european idea started to rise again. The peacemakers reached instinctively for the old blueprints — the League of Nations was, in essence, Saint-Pierre’s and Kants projects tried in practice, and the new Permanent Court in The Hague revived the oldest European inheritance once again: Rome’s _ius gentium_, the law standing above the tribes. Europe was slowly groping its way back towards Roman ideals and the Enlightenment. Yet the League preserved full national sovereignty — a club of jealous sovereigns rather than a federation — and europeanist thinkers like Luigi Einaudi saw at once that it was therefore doomed. Something more was needed: not a diplomatic mechanism but a political idea; a story strong enough to compete with nationalism on its own terrain. ## Kalergi, Briand and Spinelli In 1923, Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi — an Austrian-Japanese count, born in Tokyo, raised in Bohemia, a philosopher by training — published the book _Paneuropa_. His arguments read today like prophecy: a Europe of squabbling nation-states is finished as a world power. Squeezed between the American colossus, the Soviet empire and a rising Asia, Europeans can either unite into a single political body — a civilisational state — or become the object of other civilisations’ decisions. _The Paneuropean Union_ founded by Kalergi became a mass movement for European unification (that actually still exists today, over a hundred years later, making it the oldest still existing eurofederalist organisation), drawing in Briand and Stresemann, Albert Einstein, Einaudi and Freud, Thomas Mann and, later, Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer and Winston [Churchill, whose famous 1946 Zurich speech](https://youtu.be/QzkSQnz5YxE) calling for a United States of Europe stood squarely on Kalergi’s shoulders. Kalergi even proposed Beethoven’s _Ode to Joy_ as the European anthem already in 1929. The Nazis banned his books and forced him into exile; Hitler despised him personally. And here lies a bitterest irony of our lost history: ask the internet who Kalergi was, and you will most likely come across texts from the far right, which has recycled his name into a deranged conspiracy theory while Kalergis actual books are today barley printed and read. The man who founded organised eurofederalism survives in public memory chiefly as the villain of far right conspiracy mythology. That is what happens when a movement abandons its own founders: its enemies write the biography. Kalergi was not a lone voice in the wilderness either. In 1930, José Ortega y Gasset closed [_The Revolt of the Masses_](https://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/revolt.pdf) — one of the most-read philosophy books of the interwar years — with the same diagnosis from the Spanish side: the nation-state had done its historical work and was now exhausted, a form grown too small for the life inside it. Europeans, he argued, had in truth lived as one society for centuries; the greater part of what any European carries in his head is common European property, and national borders are a late hardening of something far older and shared. The only enterprise great enough to pull the continent out of its demoralisation, Ortega concluded, was to build Europe itself into a great nation. The best minds of the epoch were converging on the same conclusion from every direction. The politicians were meanwhile busy spiraling into the apocalypse of another world war — with one notable exception. That exception was Aristide Briand. On 5 September 1929, the sitting foreign minister of France stood before the assembled League of Nations in Geneva and formally proposed a “federal bond” between the peoples of Europe. He was the first statesmen on the continent putting European federation on the official diplomatic agenda. In May 1930 the French government followed up with a formal Memorandum on the Organisation of a Regime of European Federal Union, sent to twenty-six European governments — the first time in history a great power officially proposed the political union of Europe. And then history closed the window with almost sadistic timing. Stresemann, Briand’s German partner, died a month after the Geneva speech; that same autumn Wall Street crashed; and by the time the League’s study commission quietly buried the memorandum, the Nazis were already the second-largest party in the Reichstag. The most serious pre-war attempt at a European union died in the chaos that co-birthed the war it was meant to prevent. Almost no European schoolchild ever hears Briand’s name. The Second World War was nationalism's final demonstration — the _reductio ad absurdum_ written in tens of millions of corpses and the ash of a civilisation's cities. And it added one more layer of poison: the Nazis stole the European vocabulary itself. Hitler's propagandists sold the occupation and the war in the East as a European "crusade" against Bolshevism and a European "New Order"; Waffen-SS recruitment posters called on young men to defend "Europe”, while breaking with all the values and traditions that made Europe Europe. This is why historical literacy matters and why unfortunatley, especially nowadays it is easy to conflate reverence for Europes deep historical roots with the made-up bullshit by Nazis and Fascists, who do not understand their own civilisation — and telling the those apart requires actually knowing the tradition and history of Europe. The people who did know it, ended either in exile like Kalergi or in the resistance. In 1941, on the fascist Italys prison island of Ventotene, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi wrote their [manifesto](https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/the-ventotene-manifesto/) for a free and united Europe on cigarette papers, smuggled to the mainland by Ursula Hirschmann. The dividing line of the future, they declared, would no longer run between left and right, but between those for whom the nation-state is the horizon of politics and those determined to build the federation. Across the occupied continent, resistance thinkers converged independently on the federalist conclusion, and in mid-1944 delegates of resistance movements from across Europe, meeting secretly in Geneva, [drafted a joint declaration calling for a federal union of the European peoples](https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/declaration-of-the-european-resistance-movements/) — with a federal government answerable to the citizens directly, not to the national states. After the liberation, the buried tradition finally surfaced in the open: Churchill’s Zurich speech of 1946, and then the [Hague Congress of May 1948](https://www.eib.org/files/documents/the-foundation-of-the-eu.pdf), with some 750 delegates and Churchill presiding: Kalergi was one of the most prominent guests and presented his proposal for a European Assembly elected by national parliaments, which was officially accepted by the congress. This launched the European Movement and forced the creation of the Council of Europe a year later. For one brief window, the philosophers and the politicians were in the same room. ## The takeover of the technocrats This window unfortunatley remained brief and closed quickly. While Kalergi remained a visionary and continued his work, lobbying for the creation of a directly elected European Parliament; the disillusioned post-war era brought forth the pragmatic engineers of European unification: Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, the builders of the European Communities. [The Schuman Declaration](https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/history-eu/1945-59/schuman-declaration-may-1950_en) of 9 May 1950 stated that Europe would be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity, and that pooling coal and steel would be he first step in the federation of Europe. It was not that the post-war generation lacked a the ambition for a complete european federation. They tried to go further, but failed. The _European Defence Community_ — a common European army under a common European defence minister — was signed in Paris in May 1952; alongside it, an assembly chaired by Spinelli and blessed by de Gasperi drafted a _European Political Community_ with a directly elected parliament, a senate and real federal competences. On 30 August 1954 the French National Assembly refused even to debate it and the thing died in an afternoon to the sound of deputies singing the Marseillaise. Schuman and Monnet had to confront the exact dilemma Rousseau had identified two centuries earlier: sovereign powers do not voluntarily surrender their authority. Their answer was stealth. Integrate the seemingly boring, technocratic sectors — coal, steel, tariffs, later currencies — and create facts of legal and economic entangelment that pull politics along behind them, peel sovereignty off the heads of state one directive at a time. We must also not forget that the technocratic EU of the post-war era was built in a fractured reality, partitioned by outside empires. Half of our civilizational family was locked in the chains of Soviet communism, while the western half was sheltered — but inherently subordinated — under American hegemony. The technocratic machinery of the EU emerged as a compromise between the nationstates and as a deliberate strategy to build federation beneath the radar of nationalist backlash; to slowly wiggle power away from the nation states with permissive consensus. It worked: In 1984 the European Parliament — Spinelli, forty-three years after Ventotene, was now an MEP elected on the communist party list — adopted a Draft Treaty establishing the _European Union_ by a crushing majority. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty created a citizenship of the Union — essentially a second Edict of Caracalla, enacted 1780 years later. One of the oldest threads of this entire civilizational story was quietly revived by a treaty article. Yet, characteristically for the Eurocrat method, this profound historical connection was never pointed out publicly and celebrated accordingly. After the liberation of East Europe from communist and russian tyranny, the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the true, continental scope of European federalism could breathe again; paving the way to the European Union Expansion in 2004. But: The methods of the technocrats have a ceiling, and Europe hit it in 2005. In 2005, integration was finally put to European voters in a constitutional form, listing for the first time in a treaty, the symbols of the Union — the flag, the motto, and the anthem Kalergi had proposed back in 1929. France and the Netherlands rejected it. The proposed European Constitution was wattered down and recycled in 2007 as the _Treaty of Lisbon,_ the article on the symbols of the Union was deleted to placate the sovereigntists, and pushed through parliaments instead. Since then, the European Union has mostly stagnated on the path to European Federation. Even when the Union does something genuinely federal — like issuing common debt in 2020 — it does it dressed in the language of legal _instruments_, to timid and restrained by the nationalists to add some europeanist pathos. The Eurocrats successfully built a more united Europe, legally and politically — but along the way they buried the soul and the philosophical heritage of their own idea. The European project does not feel soulless because the idea beneath it lacks a soul; it feels soulless because the builders hid the soul on purpose. They smuggled the body of Europe past the border guards of national sovereignty by leaving its soul at home — and after seventy years of hiding, even the Europeans forgot that this soul exists, or where it is buried. ## Today Reread Kalergi’s diagnosis of 1923: a Europe of squabbling nation-states, squeezed between an American colossus, a Russian empire and a rising Asia, will either unite into one political body or become the object of other civilisations’ decisions. That was written a hundred and three years ago, and it reads like from this morning’s front page in 2026. In the East, Russian imperialism is dying violently, waging the largest war on European soil since 1945 to stop Europeans in Ukraine from choosing Europe and the republican ideas of liberty and democracy. In the West, the American guarantee that sheltered and subordinated Western Europe for eighty years is being withdrawn. The two empires that partitioned our continent in 1945 are, each in its own way, leaving and retreating. For the first time since probably 1914, we Europeans can become the authors of our own history again. Rousseau’s dilemma of 1761 is still the dilemma of 2026: national governments will not federate themselves out of their own importance. But many things have changed since Bismarck smashed the federalists of 1849. The identity-machines the nationalists monpolized in the 19th and 20th century are no longer a state monopoly. Today anyone with a laptop can reach more Europeans in a year than the _Paris Peace Congress_ reached in its lifetime. The asymmetry that killed every previous federalist generation — they had ideas, the nationalists had infrastructure — has cracked open for the first time. ## What to do next This is the story of European federalism: two millennia from the liberalitas of the Romans and their i_us gentium_, through Charlemagne, Podiebrad’s draft treaty, Penn’s proposal, Saint-Pierre’s project, the French Revolution, Napoleon, Kant’s federation of republics, Hugo’s senate, Kalergi’s Paneuropa, Briand’s memorandum, to the cigarette papers of Ventotene and the eurocrat takeover. It is one of the oldest and richest political traditions this continent has produced — and the only major one that never had a state to do its remembering. Every nation on this continent was manufactured, drilled into people by schoolbooks, anthems, conscription and a press controlled by nationalists. Nobody drilled Europe into anyone, it is an idea even older than the Nations. But an idea needs people who remember, retell and live it; especially if this ideas is supposed to become a reality. So live it. Learn the tradition; it is yours by inheritance. Put Saint-Pierre back next to Rousseau, Briand next to Stresemann, Ventotene Manifesto next to Paneuropa. When the far right cosplays Rome, know Rome better than they do. When someone tells you Europe is a soulless technocratic project, tell them about the Roman Republic, the king of Bohemia, the French Revolution, the Young Europe federalists of 1848 and the cigarette papers of Spinelli. Write it, translate it, teach it, argue it at dinner tables in all of our languages — do for the European idea, one retelling at a time, what no ministry of education ever did for it. Don't just keep it alive. Spread it. European federalism survived centuries without an army, without a school system, without a single state using it might to enforce it — carried the whole way in the hearts of us Europeans, by Individuals who refused to forget where we came from and who we are and what it is noble to strive for. The european idea survived wars, genocides, concentration camps and foreign vassalage, and it will continue to survive in our hearts; but it will only start to thrive, when we start living it openly. Europe needs committed federalists who remember it, retell it, and continue its history toward an ever closer union of our peoples. Be one.