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From his experiences during the First World War and then as Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations, Frenchman Jean Monnet developed a practical plan for uniting countries of Europe under a supranational authority. After a number of failed attempts, in 1950, Monnet used the conflict between France and Germany as an opportunity to present a plan for the European Coal and Steel Community. This eventually grew into what is now known as the European Union. The success of this venture was heavily reliant on the Méthode Monnet, in that he deliberately created unstable institutions that demanded reform by gradually extending supranational authority over European markets and politics. The instability in the eurozone today is a legacy of the Méthode Monnet, in which Europeans face a stark choice between accepting greater integration or winding back the experiment in supranational governance.

This chapter initiates the discussion of the legal-historical effort to translate elements of the postwar constitutional settlement into supranational form over the last half-century. The focus here is on the establishment of national executive leadership over the integration process. This development ran contrary to efforts by Jean Monnet to construct, purportedly on the New Deal model, a system of supranational technocratic autonomy in the High Authority of the European Coal and Steal Community. Monnet was ultimately curtailed significantly by the creation of the Council of Ministers in the Treaty of Paris of 1951. The institutional role of the Council of Ministers grew as a consequence of the Treaty of Rome of 1957, which established the European Economic Community. The crises of the 1960s further marginalized the Commission as an autonomous technocratic policy maker. But these crises also brought to the fore differing conceptions of national leadership that would play themselves out in the ‘empty chair’ crisis and the Luxembourg Compromise at mid-decade. France, under de Gaulle, favored control by particular national executives exercising a veto over supranational policy making; the remainder of the national executives favored shared oversight via consensus politics in the Council of Ministers. This later position prevailed, and found further expression in the creation of a dense bureaucracy of nationally dominated committees (COREPER, comitology). This process of national-executive ascendancy and shared oversight culminated in the creation of the European Council in 1974, which was to become the central institution of plebiscitary leadership in the process of European integration over the remainder of the century.

This chapter provides an account of why the EU system of governance presents such serious shortcomings in terms of political responsibility. It starts by going through the principal theories of European integration, in an effort to see what kinds of explanation could be derived from them with regard to the EU's alleged failures of political responsibility. Neo-functionalist, liberal intergovernmentalis and new institutionalist approaches are shown to yield different accounts. By adopting a historical-sociological institutionalist framework, the chapter goes on to show, more specifically, why the problems of political responsibility in the EU emerged: it looks at the legacy of Jean Monnet, whose ideas and methods for European integration exerted a strong influence upon the building of Europe. The main question that is addressed is whether there was something in Monnet's system of thought and action that could have caused problems for the development of political responsibility in the EU, insofar as the rationale behind his approach was influential in the building of the Union.

EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty. The Schuman Plan and supranationalism. The United Kingdom's early attempts to join. The 1972 debates. The 1975 referendum. The Single European Act and its incorporation into domestic law. Factortame and the destruction of parliamentary sovereignty.

Chapter 6 analyzes whether opaque legal rules can survive domestic changes among foreign policy elites in one signatory-state (or more) of a treaty. This chapter demonstrates that there is a price to opacity: namely, by providing a public interpretation of the treaty that differs from its confidential interpretation, the opaque and multi-leveled interpretation of a legal obligation enables one member-state (or more) to ignore its secret interpretation while avoiding sanctions. It takes the case of the opaque Euratom rules and focuses on how changes among government officials and experts in France and the U.S. affected the interpretation of key Euratom rules in the 1960s. It shows that these new strategists had little training or patience for the complexity of the opaque rules drafted by Monnet’s associates, and they were prone to relying only on what was publicly said about these treaty obligations. They thus used the public interpretation of Euratom, which had been presented as a nonproliferation treaty, to exclude any cooperation in dual-use nuclear activities in Western Europe. In so doing, new governmental officials rejected the secret goal of the drafters of the Euratom Treaty who wanted to produce a European nuclear force, without facing any reprisal.

Chapter 5 analyzes how opacity, which consists in interpreting differently the meaning of a treaty rule in public and in private, is produced, and how it works in treaty negotiations. It takes the negotiations of the Euratom Treaty and the U.S.-Euratom Treaty in the late 1950s as a case study. It shows how opacity postponed controversies (mostly in France and in the U.S.) until after the entry into force of the treaty. Indeed, publicly, Euratom was presented as a nonproliferation treaty: in the U.S., it was mostly seen as another instrument of Cold War politics, which ensured the U.S. dominance over nuclear affairs in Europe. But privately, Euratom Treaty negotiators interpreted key “nonproliferation” rules in a quite opposite way: in their interpretation, Euratom created the legal conditions for supranational nuclear proliferation from the U.S. to a united Europe. Opacity thus allowed the European diplomats gathered around Jean Monnet to postpone controversy over Euratom’s controversial rules of control until after the entry into force of this treaty instead of during the process of ratification.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about visions of European unity since 1945 delivered by the author at the 2007 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses Jean Monnet's Memoirs, wherein he expressed the hope for a United States of Europe, and comments on the French and Dutch rejection of the draft Constitutional Treaty of the European Constitution in 2005.

This chapter examines the early British and French efforts to procure war materiel from the United States and the positive influence of those negotiations on the development of Anglo-American collaboration. The account first establishes the intense anti-interventionist sentiment that set the conditions for the negotiations. The narrative outlines the initial confused nature of the British and French purchasing commissions. Using the development and purchase of aircraft as the primary case study, the chapter outlines the fits, starts, and frictions that plagued the initial supply negotiations. Although shared mutual interests facilitated collaboration, the fact that Anglo-French purchase orders developed the U.S. industrial base and contributed to lowering unemployment still lingering from the Great Depression helped as well. Over time, the negotiations slowly intertwined the two powers’ industrial efforts, promoting an increasing spiral of collaboration that included war planning based on allocation decisions.

After the Second World War, the French Planning Office was tasked with two goals: short-term reconstruction and long-term economic modernization. At the heart of these two goals was the agricultural sector. In the short-term, getting agricultural back online would put a stop to rations; in the long-term, a competitive export-led farm sector would fix balance-of-payments deficits and fuel modernization in the secondary and tertiary sectors. Land use policy was key to agricultural modernization. In the early years of the postwar period, remembrement was the primary mechanism used to consolidate farms and improve productivity. To consolidate and increase the size of their holdings, farmers took on massive amounts of debt, betting that the new markets of European integration would improve their revenues. When it became clear that only a small handful of farmers would benefit from modernization, farm unions organized protests and the public media took notice of the "farm problem."

Since its origins in the 1950s, European integration has entailed the creation of institutions whose rationale is to advance and maintain certain policy ends, notably the ‘four freedoms’ of the common market. As this chapter argues, the effect is that policy commitments have tended to be privileged over procedural arrangements. Rather than self-standing entities that can be put to different ends, broadly on the model of the modern state, one sees institutions evolving with the policies, and liable to be side-stepped should they fail to serve those ends. A non-hierarchical constitutional structure does little to inhibit these restructurings, indeed arguably gives further encouragement. The ideas and practices of emergency become ways to galvanize action, coordination, and innovation across a diverse and potentially recalcitrant institutional field.

In seeking to reach a verdict for the EU's responsibility deficit, this chapters attempts to summarise findings and evaluate the current state of affairs by looking at three interrelated questions. First, what can we make of the current shortcomings of responsibility on the institutional side after having examined the EU from the point of view of accountability, identifiability and openness? Second, how do recent developments, and particularly the failure to ratify the Constitutional Treaty and the agreement to forge ahead with the Lisbon Treaty, affect our assessment? Finally, what might be the long-term effects of the latest developments for the deep rooted Monnet conception of legitimate ‘responsible technocratic’ governance?