America has always been the secret ingredient of European integration

Forget Jean Monnet. When it comes to naming founding fathers for the EU, the list should start with President Harry Truman.

The EU: Made in America (America is an engine of European integration, intentionally or not) is the title of an Economist piece a few years ago.

One American innovation from [20th-century America] receives [little] attention: the European Union.

The EU is an American creation, as much as a European one. In the middle of the 20th century, there were more European federalists in Washington than in Brussels. Senators bashed out resolutions declaring: “Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe.” The Marshall Plan, a torrent of post-war funding for the crippled continent, came on the condition that European countries meld themselves together. George Kennan, an American diplomat, summed up American policy: “We hoped to force the Europeans to think like Europeans, and not like nationalists.” Forget Jean Monnet. When it comes to naming founding fathers for the EU, the list should start with President Harry Truman.

 … America has always been the secret ingredient of European integration. In the aftermath of the second world war, unifying Europe made sense for America. A divided continent could hardly resist Soviet domination. Nor would it be able to fix the “German problem” that had resulted in two wars in three decades. Instead, in a novel experiment by a victorious power, America opted to try to unite a traumatised continent, even though it could be a potential rival.

Skip forward 70 years and America is now a more subtle force for European unity. State-building can be a messy business, but American history provides one of the few guides for creating a continent-sized democracy. 

 … The EU still falls far short of the federal mini-me imagined by the likes of Marshall, Kennan and Truman.

  … On paper, America wants a more capable EU. In practice, it may find such a development unsettling. At the turn of the century, the euro was talked of as a rival to the dollar. The euro’s near-collapse a decade later put paid to that idea. A stable euro zone with the ability to issue collective debt at will would be a much stronger potential challenger to the dollar’s supremacy. Where the EU does have power, such as over competition policy or privacy rules, it has delighted in whacking American firms. Such areas are rare but becoming less so. A more unified EU is a more powerful one and, almost inherently, a more independent one. America may, with time, come to regret what it has wrought.