June 1940, Great Britain and the First Attempt to Build a European Union, by Andrea Bosco

Abstract

This is a book with a strong and challenging thesis, explicitly aimed at the post-Brexit world. It is that ‘the European Union is very much the creation of the British political tradition, as opposed to the Continental one’ (p. 3). Consequently, Brexit is seen by the author (Jean Monnet ad personam Chairholder on the History of European Integration at the School of Political Science at Florence) as not only a lamentable error, but as a renunciation of Britain’s own offspring. The climax of the book is the abortive proposal in June 1940 of an ‘indissoluble union’ of Britain and France, by which ‘France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union’ (an idea briefly and unsuccessfully resurrected by the French prime minister Guy Mollet during the 1956 Suez Crisis). This well-known episode has rarely (probably never) had such historic significance attributed to it as here. It is generally considered as a desperate stratagem seized on by Churchill to try to keep a tottering France in the war following the devastating German advances the previous month. The author, Andrea Bosco, sees it in a very different light. Rather than being an ad hoc improvisation, he sees the Union proposal as the culmination of a long-maturing development of federalist ideas within the British political and intellectual establishment, and potentially the seed of a united Europe. Indeed, the federalist vision retained enough momentum to inspire post-war British sponsorship of the Western European Union, the Council of Europe and, of course, the United Nations—all beyond the scope of the present book, which presents 1940 instead as a psychological break between the British and Europe. Besides, Bosco seems to see Monnet’s European Community as the sole legitimate heir to inter-war federalism.