Jean-Marc Lieberherr / Jan 2026
Before the year-end break, Antonio Costa, President of the European Council, sent an unusual Christmas gift to EU leaders, together with a recommendation. The gift was Jean Monnet’s Memoirs, his autobiography written in 1976, and the recommendation was to read - or read again – three specific chapters that ‘unfortunately, the note said, are a true manual of great current relevance.’ In the selected chapters, Monnet recalls how he helped secure vital joint Allied action during the two world wars and was then defeated in his attempt to create a European Defence Community.
The first chapter recommended by Antonio Costa talks to the World War I decision by France and Britain, later joined by Italy and the USA, to establish joint Allied Committees in charge of procuring and allocating jointly critical war supplies, from wheat to shipping. The role Monnet played in convincing the Allies of the necessity to act together and set up this supranational machinery is well documented. It is the story of a 26-year-old cognac merchant who had understood that ‘the basis of power had changed, the war machine now had to mobilize a nation’s whole resources, and new forms of organization had to be invented.’ Armed with this conviction, he persuaded French and British leaders that the two Allies should not be competing for resources but instead ‘set up joint bodies to estimate the combined resources of the Allies, share them out and share out the costs.’
By March 1918, after much toing and froing, seven joint ‘Executives’ had been established, including the ‘Allied Maritime Transport Committee’ controlling centrally all Allied shipping resources. The Allied Committee soon became the nerve-center of the whole war economy and allowed the timely transportation of US troops and materials, sealing the victory of the Allies.
The second passage pertains to Monnet’s role in Washington during World War II. In June 1940, France had surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Franco-British supply council Monnet had set up on the model of the WWI Executives became obsolete. With Churchill’s backing, he moved to Washington, convinced that only the US could produce the military equipment required to defeat Hitler. There, he soon realized that the country had little sense of the danger represented by Germany and that production capacities were totally insufficient. To make things worse, a US law stipulated that weaponry purchases had to be paid for upfront, which Britain had no cash for. A novel approach was needed.
The first step taken by Monnet was to convince the administration of the existential risk for the US of a German victory over Britain: it was not about selling weapons to an ally but about defending US vital interests. The second step was to quantify in no uncertain terms the massive production effort required for a certain victory over Germany. The final step was to establish a central planning and execution body capable of bringing about the required output at the desired speed. By December 1940, Roosevelt declared that America had to become the ‘Great arsenal of democracy’. A year later, the Victory Program was in place, supported by a central production planning office. Actual war production ended up very close to Monnet’s projections. US government spending on defence equipment increased from $5 billion in 1939 to $ 90 billion in 1944. John Maynard Keynes wrote that Monnet’s action in Washington probably shortened the war by a year.
The third chapter recommended for reading by Antonio Costa to EU leaders is the story of a failure. It describes Monnet’s failed attempt to create a European Defence Community (EDC) next to the Coal & Steel Community (ECSC). In June 1950, a month after the Schuman declaration, the North Korean invasion of South Korea sparked fears of an imminent open conflict between the USA and the USSR. In this context, the Truman administration insisted on Germany rearming to be ready to contribute to European defence. Knowing that such a perspective, only five years after the war, could potentially derail the ECSC discussions, Monnet proposed to French Premier René Pleven the creation of a ‘European army attached to the political institutions of a united Europe’. The proposed Treaty made provisions for the European army to be placed under legitimate European political authority once the conditions were met for such a political union. In the meantime, the EDC would be placed under NATO command. The EDC Treaty was signed by the six ECSC members and ratified by four before failing in the French Parliament in August 1954. The communists and the Gaullists had campaigned actively against it, pointing mostly to insufferable losses of French national sovereignty. With Stalin’s death, fears of a confrontation with the USSR had also considerably receded.
Many lessons can be drawn from these few pages of History, but none stand out more for me, in our current context, than the following:
- The fear of loss of national sovereignty has been and continues to be a constant barrier to necessary collective action. It held back the creation of the transport Executives for four years in WWI and defeated the European army in 1954. European leaders must understand and have the courage to explain that sharing sovereignty and exerting it collectively is often, for our small European nations, the only way to retain it. As Monnet put it: ‘in the process, no one loses: on the contrary all gain new strength’. European unity is not the enemy of national sovereignty: it is the condition for continuing to exert it.
- Extraordinary outcomes can be achieved if European nations take a shared view of their common challenges and organize themselves to act as one according to the principle Monnet repeated constantly during the victory program: ‘the philosophy of action which concentrates on what is necessary is more realistic than one that takes account only of what is possible’. It is nowhere truer today than with regards to the Russian threat. There is no other path for Europeans today than joint action based on a shared, robust view of reality and the collective mobilization of necessary resources. History tells us that misalignment, division, and under-resourcing of our priorities will kill us – literally.
- Finally, we must learn from the fact that Monnet’s greatest failures and disillusions, like the EDC and the League of Nations, were recorded in times of peace. The European army project probably came too early, there may have been design flaws, and the political implications were probably not well evaluated. But mostly, when it came to ratifying it, the urgency of necessity was no longer burning and the appetite for change had receded: ‘people accept change when they are faced with necessity and only recognize necessity when a crisis is upon them’. Today, there is again an imperative for Europeans to take collective responsibility for their own defence. Reading Monnet should convince us that time has come for decisive collective action that transcends what individual European nations may see as their immediate interests. History teaches us that the price to pay for failing to act in time can be catastrophic.
Clearly, President Costa was well-inspired to encourage EU leaders to take some time off their holidays to read Monnet’s Memoirs. Let’s hope that they did, but in case they did not, this article could come in handy.
