European Union – Part One – Come Together

Description

Hello and welcome to season nine of Origin Story. After last season’s history of socialism, we’re returning to our usual format of taking on a completely different topic each time, and we’re starting with a big one. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the UK voting to leave the EU, we’re telling the three-part story of European union itself: not just the 33-year-old organisation — an incredible achievement that is too easily taken for granted — but the much older concept. We begin by explaining how Europe came to think of itself as an identity as well as a continent. For centuries, Europe was synonymous with something else, whether it be the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church or the values of the Enlightenment. The only efforts to unify its peoples were through imperial domination, from the Pax Romana to Charlemagne to Napoleon. It was the desire to avoid war between nation states that inspired the dream of the United States of Europe, and the cataclysm of the First World War that gave that dream real urgency. We meet two extraordinary and visionary men who dedicated their lives to bringing Europe together. Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the so-called grandfather of the European Union, was an Austrian-Japanese aristocrat and ardent internationalist whose Pan-European Movement kept the dream alive between the wars, inspiring the likes of Einstein, Freud and Churchill. Jean Monnet was the brandy merchant, diplomat and wartime fixer who came out of the Second World War with a serious plan to realise it: the European Coal and Steel Community. Churchill, who co-founded the Council of Europe, famously said that Britain should be “with Europe but not of it”. This ambivalence kept Britain outside the European project for more than 20 years but the real story of this period is the psychodrama between France and Germany: eternal enemies who became tense allies. We close part one in 1955, when the political aftermath of the war is finally resolved but the trauma still shapes Europe’s fears and desires. What did it