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 Jacob Krumrey

The
S Y M B O L I C PO L I T I C S
of
E U R O P E A N I N T E G R AT I O N
Staging Europe
The Symbolic Politics of European Integration
 Jacob Krumrey

The Symbolic Politics

of European
Integration
Staging Europe
Jacob Krumrey
European University Institute
Florence, Italy

ISBN 978-3-319-68132-0    ISBN 978-3-319-68133-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68133-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930132

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Printed on acid-free paper

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 Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many years of research. During that time I have
incurred many debts of gratitude. The greatest of all is to my mentor,
Kiran Klaus Patel, whom I approached, more than a decade ago, wanting
to do research about the history of European integration. Kiran then
joked that what really struck him about European integration was how
insignificant it had been for the longest time in the grand scheme of things.
With this casual remark, he shocked this book into being. He also had the
grace to live patiently through its many ups and downs. Without his sup-
port and constant intellectual challenges, it would not have been
possible.
I also express my gratitude to N. Piers Ludlow, Federico Romero, and
Johannes Paulmann for reading an earlier version of the manuscript very
carefully. I hope they find I made good use of their advice.
I had the great privilege to spend many years at the European University
Institute (EUI) in Florence, where I met and worked with many great
scholars. I am particularly grateful to Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, who sup-
ported this project from the beginning. I owe thanks to Martin van
Gelderen and Steve Smith, who showed me that the history of European
integration can appeal to historians of very different periods and geo-
graphic areas. Further, I benefited greatly from stimulating conversations
with Antoine Vauchez, Cris Shore, Patricia Clavin, and Desmond Dinan.
In Florence I received generous financial assistance from the Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst.
In addition, I was lucky to spend a few months at New York University’s
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. There I greatly enjoyed

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the chance to talk to Larry Wolff, Thomas H. Bender, Mary Nolan, and
the late Marilyn B. Young.
During the research for this book, I met a great many companions
whose intellectual and personal support I acknowledge: Oriane Calligaro,
Antoine Acker, Veera Mitzner (née Nisonen), Jens Wegener, Emmanuel
Mourlon-Druol, Angela Romano, Kenneth Weisbrode, Aurélie Gfeller,
Philip Bajon, Michael J. Geary, Daniel Furby, Christian Salm, Gabriele
d’Ottavio, Alanna O’Malley, Martin Rempe, Veronika Lipphardt, Lorraine
Bluche, and Frauke Stuhl.
For my research, I relied on advice from archivists from many different
institutions. In particular, I thank the German parliament’s press docu-
mentation, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe in Lausanne, and
of course the great people at the Historical Archives of the European
Union in Florence, where I was a frequent visitor. I also thank Pedro
Cymbron, deputy chief of protocol at the European Commission, who
made time in his busy calendar to talk about the work of his long-past
predecessors. Thanks to Alexander Stummvoll, who made this meeting
possible.
At the CDU in Brandenburg, I am indebted to Jan Redmann, Gordon
Hoffmann, and Ingo Senftleben for giving me the time to complete this
book. At Palgrave, I thank Sarah Roughley and Samantha Snedden. James
Longbotham, Madeleine LaRue, Mona Gainer-Salim, and Sofia
Kouropatov helped me to polish my English.
During my time at the EUI, I made wonderful friends who contributed
in one way or the other to this book, especially Marat, Dennis, Sanne,
Mark, Pierre, Daniel, Tobias, Christoph, Samuël, Norman, Georg, Laura,
as well as Sarah and Bas, Federico, Lena, and Claudia. Special thanks are
reserved for Karin Manns, my history teacher in high school, who dared
me, at age 17, to write a history book. Well, it took me nearly 20 years—
but here it is.
Last but by no means least, I thank my family for bearing with me
throughout the often nerve-wracking writing process.
 Contents

1 Introduction: The EC as a Theater State   1

Part I Europe on the Diplomatic Stage  15

2 Statesmen Made in Washington: Official EC Visits

to the United States  17

3 At the Eurocrats’ Court: Foreign Representatives,

Diplomatic Ceremonies, and the Empty Chair Crisis  57

4 Ambassadors from Europe: The EC’s Diplomatic

Missions in Britain and the United States  81

Part II A Parliament for Europe 109

5 The Self-Styled Constituante: From the Council of

Europe to the Common Assembly 111

vii
viii Contents

6 Constitutional Theater: From the Common Assembly

to the European Parliament 131

Part III The Race for the Capital of Europe 155

7 The Provincial Heart of Postwar Europe: The Seats

of the Council of Europe and the ECSC in Strasbourg
and Luxembourg 157

8 A Europe Ruled from Paris? Paris, Brussels,

and the Battle for the Seat of the EC 179

9 Conclusion: The Power of Europe 207

10 Epilogue: Symbolic Surplus and Democratic Deficit 215

References 219

Index 239
 Acronyms and Abbreviations

AAPD Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik

Deutschand
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
BArch Bundesarchiv
CDF Central Decimal File
CSCE Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe
CVCE Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe
DDF Documents diplomatiques français
DG Directorate General
EAC European Atomic Energy Community
EC European Community/European Communities
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community
EDC European Defense Community
EEC European Economic Community
EFTA European Free Trade Association
EPU European Payment Union
EU European Union
EUI European University Institute
FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
FJME Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe
FO Foreign Office
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
HAEU Historical Archives of the European Union
IHT International Herald Tribune

ix
x ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

JMDS Jean Monnet Duchêne Sources

MAEF Ministère des Affaires étrangères françaises
NARA [United States] National Archives and Records
Administration
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NYT New York Times
NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung
OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development
OEEC Organization for European Economic Co-operation
OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
PAAA Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes
RG Record Group
SZ Süddeutsche Zeitung
TNA / PRO The National Archives of the United Kingdom / Public
Record Office
UN United Nations
UNECE United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization
WEU Western European Community
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The EC as a Theater State

“Europe is born!” declared Jean Monnet on 10 August 1952 in the town

hall of Luxembourg City as he inaugurated the bureaucratic creature that
he was to preside over: the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel
Community (ECSC).1 A year into the ECSC’s operation, Monnet even
more candidly revealed what he thought his brainchild’s raison d’être was:
“The true significance of the European Coal and Steel Community,” he
told a group of journalists, “is not coal, and it is not steel; it is Europe.”2
What Monnet claimed for his organization of economists, engineers, and
commercial lawyers was nothing less than a mandate to represent the cause
of a united Europe.
Fourteen years after Monnet’s emphatic declaration, on 25 January
1967, the French daily Le Monde invited Pierre Chatenet to publish an
op-ed piece on its front page. Even though Chatenet headed one of the
ECSC’s sister organizations, his piece dealt critically with the emerging
idiom of European unification. “When you think about it,” he wrote, “it
is surely a singular misadventure of language that has managed to create in
the current vocabulary a quasi-synonymity between ‘Europe’ and
‘Common Market’.”3 At first glance, this observation attests to the success
of Monnet’s politics. But while Monnet had sought to wed his humble
organization to the noble cause of Europe, his editorializing successor
implored his readers: “Why pretend to take the part for the whole?”
Chatenet, a French Gaullist, may have had his own political agenda.
But his question was not without merit. Kiran K. Patel has recently drawn

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Krumrey, The Symbolic Politics of European Integration,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68133-7_1
2 J. KRUMREY

attention to the “synecdochic qualities of the EC/EU integration pro-

cess,”4 the propensity of an essentially economic policy regime to stand in
for the much larger vision of European union. Taking its cue from that
puzzle, this book sets out to reveal the European Community’s (EC) syn-
ecdochic qualities as a product of staging. It does so by putting forth a
cultural history of European integration that focuses on aspects hitherto
neglected in the history of European integration: the EC’s protocol and
ceremonies, and its marketing and image in the media. It claims that view-
ing European integration through the lens of symbolic representation will
help us to understand how coal, steel, and agricultural tariffs became the
stuff the European dream was made of.
From today’s perspective, the EC’s claim to stand for Europe may not
seem too bold. On the contrary, it may seem self-evident, vindicated by
history. No lesser authority than the Norwegian Nobel Committee certi-
fied its truth when it awarded the European Union (EU), the EC’s succes-
sor organization, the 2012 Peace Prize for “the advancement of peace and
reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Even its most
implacable foes do not deny that the EU is a force to be reckoned with.
Even if severely shaken, it is still the world’s most powerful regulator, with
a market of 500 million consumers, an annual budget in the hundreds of
billions, and the power to bail out—or not to bail out—entire countries.
To inquire into the origins of a major fact of contemporary life is surely
a legitimate interest for historians. But it must nor spare them the question
of what today’s EU—greatly enlarged, thoroughly metamorphosed sev-
eral times—has to do with the Coal and Steel Pool and even the Common
Market of the 1950s and 1960s, nor that of whether the ready-made
assumption of significance can simply be projected back to the postwar
period. Even in 1972, the London Times described the organization
Britain was about to enter as “a super-combination of a Board of Trade
and Ministry of Agriculture.”5 Was this description far off the mark? And
if not, in what way could such an organization substantiate its boast of
peace, prosperity, and European union?
The answers historians give turn out to be surprisingly vague upon
closer inspection. Confronted with the popular narrative of the EC as the
miracle of surpassing a realist conception of international politics, the
now-classic accounts of integration history point out that European inte-
gration—even if it implied a partial pooling of sovereignty—was in fact
nothing but realism.6 They argue that European statesmen, along with
their international partners, followed an economic and/or geostrategic
 INTRODUCTION: THE EC AS A THEATER STATE 3

rationale: that is, they sought economic growth by increasing markets and
sought security from Germany (and obliquely, from the Soviet Union) by
pooling strategic resources. This realist view, however, does not shy away
from claiming great accomplishments for the EC. Famously, the economic
historian Alan Milward declared that European integration had done
nothing less than “rescue the nation state.” Curiously, however, such
grandiloquence finds no echo in the master narratives of twentieth-­century
Europe, which often struggle to pinpoint the EC’s exact contribution to
postwar history. In recent textbooks, for example, European integration
appears as little more than an obligatory interlude.7 Perhaps even the most
hard-nosed integration historians have not been able to fully escape the
EC’s own narrative of itself as Europe.
The EC’s claim to Europe ignores the manifold alternative Europes
that were available at the time. If we take a closer look at the front page of
the edition of Le Monde where Chatenet published his critical op-ed piece,
we find one of these alternatives prominently on display. That day’s cover
story was dedicated to British prime minister Harold Wilson, who had
delivered an address to Europe on the eve of a tour through Europe’s
capitals. Although the purpose of this trip was to build support for the
United Kingdom’s membership in the EC, Wilson had not given his
speech in an EC forum, but in front of the Council of Europe, founded in
1949 in the wake of the Hague Congress.8 Because the Council of Europe
had enjoyed the blessing of the European movements at its inception, and
because its membership included many countries left out of the later
Europe of the Six, it was viewed for a long time as the EC’s most potent
rival. The context of Chatenet’s article therefore qualified its message:
The synonymity of EC and Europe was evident enough to become the
object of plausible criticism, but it was not absolute, nor was it
guaranteed.
The Council of Europe was by no means the only competitor. The
creation of the EC was part of what Akira Iriye calls the “new internation-
alism,”9 the surge in international organizations, or multilateral arrange-
ments, in the aftermath of World War II. This new internationalism
occurred on a global scale: notable examples are the United Nations (UN)
and its agencies, but also the Bretton Woods system and the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But this new internationalism
had a particularly profound impact upon the transatlantic space between
Western Europe and North America, where a dense web of overlapping
international arrangements emerged, the North Atlantic Treaty
4 J. KRUMREY

Organization (NATO) the most prominent among them. In the area of

collective security, complementary arrangement on a European scale had
existed before, and continued to exist alongside, NATO—such as the
Brussels Pact, which later turned into the Western European Union
(WEU). On a smaller scale, there were cases of regional integration, such
as the Benelux customs union or, later, the Nordic Council. European
integration was part and parcel of this trend toward institutionalized
cooperation. The term itself was originally coined by US policymakers for
the aims of the Marshall plan and applied to the vast array of organizations
dedicated to Europe’s economic reconstruction, from the European
Payment Union (EPU) and the United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe (UNECE) to the Organization for European Economic
Co-operation (OEEC).10 In other words, European integration had
existed before the EC. Patel even characterized the EC as a “fragile late-
comer,” for which others had paved the way.11
The EC’s own history, too, was more complex than is usually remem-
bered. None of Europe’s mythical founding moments actually created a
coherent institutional framework. In fact, the EU’s institutional precursor
originated in three mostly separate organizations created at different
points in time: the ECSC was founded by the 1951 Paris treaty, which was
inspired by the Schuman declaration of 5 May 1950. The later Rome
­treaties, signed on 27 March 1957, created two sister organizations: the
European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic
Energy Community (EAC). In the meantime, however, there had been
additional, but failed, attempts at integration. The infamous example is
the European Defense Community (EDC) and its associate, the European
Political Community, both of which were voted down in the French
National Assembly in 1954. The eventual trio of ECSC, EEC, and EAC
were merged into a single institution—the EC—only in 1967, after the
ECSC had already been in existence for 15 years.
Does this bewildering array of European communities belie the claim of
the EC’s European monopoly? Only superficially so. It is true that, between
the early 1950s and late 1960s, the torch had passed from the Coal and
Steel Community to the Common Market, but in the public perception,
this underscored, rather than contradicted, the continuity in the two orga-
nizations’ common cause, in spite of considerable differences in institu-
tional design and economic approach. Hence, the six signatories decided
to merge the three Communities into a single European Community.
Revealingly enough, while the EU celebrates 5 May as an official “Europe
 INTRODUCTION: THE EC AS A THEATER STATE 5

Day” in memory of the Schuman declaration and EU member states rou-

tinely stage anniversaries of the Rome treaties, the date of the merger—1
July 1967—has passed into oblivion.
But what about the Community’s special nature? Weren’t its suprana-
tional powers what set it apart right from the start? Isn’t this “institutional
revolution,” as it seemed to Raymond Aron, the path that leads from 5
May 1950 to today?12 That, of course, is the textbook narrative: “The
European Union is sui generis – of its own kind, peculiar and unique in
the word. This is as true today as it has been throughout its fifty-year his-
tory,” write Damian Chalmers and Adam Tomkins in their widely read
textbook.13 Recent historiography has, however, pointed out that even the
High Authority’s vaunted supranationalism differed from earlier prece-
dents only by degree.14 The EEC and EAC, moreover, were hybrid orga-
nizations, in which intergovernmental elements were significantly
strengthened. From a legal perspective, more and more scholars are begin-
ning to emphasize the contingency of the EC/EU’s constitutionalism.
They see it not as an inherent feature of the EC’s setup, but as the result
of a contentious process of “constitutionalization,” in which legal and
political entrepreneurs historicized the treaties as a “constitutional
moment.” The EEC Commission’s first president, for example, the
German constitutional lawyer Walter Hallstein, referred to the Rome trea-
ties as “our Basic Law,” comparing them to the West German constitu-
tion.15 Perhaps, the EC-turned-EU has a constitution today. If it does, it
has been the result of such talk. It certainly was not signed into existence
on Rome’s Capitoline Hill on 25 March 1957.
In conclusion, while there can be no doubt that the EC contributed to
solving some thorny issues in postwar Europe—economic reconstruction,
committing West Germany to Western Europe, providing a sense of secu-
rity—this contribution was embedded into, and crucially depended on, a
much broader framework of cooperation. In the postwar construction of
Europe, the EC was but one pillar.
If the EC “was so much less than was claimed for,” as Tony Judt puts
it, our initial question is even more pressing: Why take the part for the
whole? How has the EC come to monopolize “Europe”?16 This book
seeks an answer from a perspective that is unorthodox in the field of EU
historiography, that of cultural history. From this perspective, it advances
the argument that the EC’s claim to Europe—the symbolic value it car-
ried, the normative appeal Europe conferred, and the legitimacy it lent—
was fabricated, constructed, and staged.
6 J. KRUMREY

This book owes its guiding theatrical metaphor to Cliffort Geertz,

whose ethnographic study of kingship and statehood in precolonial Bali
helped inspire a cultural turn among historians, who, over time, began to
appreciate the “ordering force of display, regard and drama” even in mod-
ern politics.17 Geertz himself intended his study as a contribution to politi-
cal philosophy and as an inquiry into the sources of order. Politics, we can
infer from his work, is not exclusively governed by interests, but by ideas
and identities as well, which are in turn arbitrated by symbols. Symbolic
representation therefore is not distinct from, or even subservient to, the
real business of politics—it is at the very heart of it.
The mainstream of integration historiography, up until very recently,
has focused on the interests and interactions of ministers, diplomats, and
administrators. Some authors have refined this approach into very sophis-
ticated multilateral accounts, thanks to which we now have a profound
understanding of the international history of European integration.18
Their work, though often unacknowledged, is heavily influenced by a real-
ist understanding of international history—all the more so as influential
authors, such as the British economic historian Alan Milward, styled them-
selves with great success as dissident revisionists vis-à-vis a naive idealism
that they associated, not entirely unfairly, with an earlier intellectual his-
tory of the European idea and the political science school of
neofunctionalism.
For all their sophistication, there is a blind spot in mainstream accounts
of European integration history. The EC can perhaps be explained in
terms of economic or security rationales, but neither the contemporary
excitement about it nor its enduring normative appeal can be properly
understood in these terms only. It does not suffice to think of the EC as a
purely utilitarian enterprise whose true character is obscured by an
unhealthy dose of idealism. A concern for identity—long before the term
became fashionable and an express political objective—was at the heart of
the EC from the beginning. In dismissing European rhetoric as an annoy-
ing digression from European realpolitik, historians have for too long
ignored how rhetoric offered a kind of legitimacy for realpolitik that alter-
native Europes could not.
Just as legitimacy is more than a function of performance, power is
more than bargaining between states. European lawyers, for example,
have come to understand that the “transformation of Europe” (Joseph
H.H. Weiler) into a distinct legal order was a socially and culturally condi-
tioned process.19 If historians likewise complemented their research of the
 INTRODUCTION: THE EC AS A THEATER STATE 7

“mechanics” with a study of the “poetics of power,” as Geertz suggests,20

it could help them to understand the condition of possibility of the very
realpolitik they have been studying. A cultural history of European politics
can enlighten us as to how “Europe” soon became a self-evident way of
structuring the world. The Symbolic Politics of European Integration
encourages historians to discover a completely different sort of puzzle
than the one they are used to. Instead of calculating the usual gains and
losses of this or that international regime, it asks historians to marvel at a
maverick polity that soon surpassed any policy regime—including its
own—and long survived the changing realist conditions that had origi-
nally prompted its creation.
This book, however, does not call for a paradigm shift in integration
history. Rather, it sees itself as a contribution to the ongoing pluralization
of the field. A few years ago, historians of European integration went
through a phase of self-reflection.21 Some leading figures lamented the
insular state of integration historiography and found the field’s conceptual
underpinnings wanting. As a result, realism is now increasingly balanced
by a wealth of different approaches. To begin with, quite a few authors
have reached out to the literature of social science, especially insofar as
they study transnational epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions.22
Others have sought to embed European integration into larger contexts,
be it the Cold War, the global North-South conflict, or the history of
internationalism.23 Finally, a number of historians have joined an interdis-
ciplinary group of scholars who share an interest in the role of culture in
European integration. The latter literature combines the study of the EU’s
various cultural policies with an interest in the larger issues of European
identity.24 Only rarely, however, have historians used culture as an analyti-
cal tool to make sense of a domain so far reserved for economic and dip-
lomatic historians: the actions of European statesmen and the politics of
the EC’s technocrats.25 The Symbolic Politics of European Integration sets
out to address this gap.
This book is organized into three parts. Each tells the story of a differ-
ent stage in Europe’s political theater: the European parliamentary assem-
blies, the EC’s early diplomacy, and the contest over an imagined capital of
Europe. These three settings offered opportunities for the EC to present
itself publicly. They are ideal case studies precisely because, at face value,
they have little to do with the EC. From a realist perspective, they were
auxiliary to the geo-economic rationales the EC was meant to follow.
Diplomatic relations, parliamentary assemblies, and seating arrangements
8 J. KRUMREY

were not strictly necessary for the EC, at least no more than for any other
international organization. For that reason, they have been dealt with so
far only in specialist studies in neighboring disciplines such as law, urban
studies, and political science.26 In drawing on these studies and comple-
menting them with fresh archival research and a thorough media analysis,
this book inquires into how these seemingly peripheral aspects contributed
to the process of building a polity—and not just any polity, but one that
aimed to transcend its policies. Each of these three settings, moreover,
echoed, in a distinctive way, the representations of a modern state and so
resonated particularly with the media and the broader public. In modern
European history, diplomatic representations have inextricably been bound
up with conceptions of sovereignty. Parliamentary assemblies have not
only been intertwined with ideas of sovereignty, but also deeply ingrained
in the symbolism of European revolutions, and capital cities were key com-
ponents in the iconography of European nation states. Hence, the EC
navigated a sensitive symbolic terrain. But this terrain also allowed it to
develop an ambitious symbolic program: to upstage its competitors on the
international scene by acting like a state, or at least attempting to.
Part I opens with a closer look at the intricate ceremonies and courte-
sies of the EC’s early diplomatic forays and aligns its findings with the
growing literature on the EC’s external relations. Chapter 2 deals with
official visits by Community actors, particularly to the US capital,
Washington, D.C. It argues that visitors and hosts, along with their respec-
tive media, collaborated to use the ambiguity in the protocol of visits by
this novel type of actor to treat the EC heads as true representatives of an
emerging Europe. Meanwhile, their opponents back home contested and
scandalized this representation—paradoxically giving prominence to the
very figures they sought to degrade. Chapter 3 turns to the diplomatic
ceremonies staged by the EC in Luxembourg and Brussels. From this
angle, it revisits the 1965/1966 empty chair crisis, the pivotal crisis in the
Community’s early history. Historians usually describe it as a dispute over
agricultural policy or attribute it to a covert constitutional struggle.
Chapter 3, however, shows that the symbolic representations of the
Community figured much more prominently in the crisis: Community
and member state actors fought over the ceremonies, titles, and dress
codes devised to receive foreign diplomats and designed to demonstrate
the Community’s state-like qualities in international diplomacy. Chapter 4
investigates the early attempts to create “European” ambassadors in part-
ner capitals, the ultimate diplomatic domain of sovereign states.
 INTRODUCTION: THE EC AS A THEATER STATE 9

Community institutions, national governments, and partner governments

fought over attempts to dispatch representatives to foreign states—with
success in the case of the Community’s most reluctant partner, the United
Kingdom, yet without success in the case of its most supportive partner,
the United States. Chapter 4 helps us understand that paradox.
Part II investigates the European Parliament and its institutional pre-
cursor, the Common Assembly of the ECSC, and embeds them in the
broader history of postwar Europe’s parliamentary assemblies, beginning
with the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague. From the letters of the
ECSC treaty, the Common Assembly could have been something akin to
an interparliamentary economic committee. Instead, its members insisted
it had a much broader mandate: to act as a sovereign parliament for the
uniting Europe. Chapter 5 explores how this extraordinary self-image was
articulated in rhetoric, rituals, and procedures that were often appropri-
ated from the traditions of historical parliaments in order to demonstrate
revolutionary momentum and to appeal to the federalist theories of the
day. To a large extent, this process was driven by the Common Assembly’s
covert rivalry with the Council of Europe’s Consultative Assembly, which
had frustrated the hopes of European federalism. The chapter also dis-
cusses the role party dynamics and media representations played. Chapter
6 charts the evolution from the Common Assembly to its successor orga-
nization, which, in a bold and unilateral move, renamed itself European
Parliament in 1958. Even though it had no decision-making powers, the
European Parliament shaped the EC in ways historians tend to underap-
preciate. Because its symbolism was a striking contrast to the functionalist
nature of European integration, it helped to dramatize the EC’s promise
of a united Europe. Specifically, the chapter focuses on the Common
Assembly/European Parliament’s relationship with Commission and
Council and argues that the parliamentary setting enabled Community
actors to enact a proto-constitutional order. Chapter 6 also discusses the
history of the European flag, which crystalizes the complex relationship
between the EC/EU, the idea of a united Europe, and the larger story of
postwar internationalism.
Part III revisits the largely forgotten story of the race for the “capital of
Europe.” It presents an account of the complex diplomacy of the various
seating decisions, ranging from the 1949 decision to have the Council of
Europe seated in Strasbourg to the acrimonious battle over the EEC seat
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the attendant debates, the speakers—
politicians, journalists, and local activists—discussed the pros and cons of
10 J. KRUMREY

the various candidate cities, Strasbourg, Paris, and Brussels. Chapter 7

shows that activists, journalists, and even diplomats chose not to debate
the site of the Community seat in functional terms appropriate for a tech-
nical organization. Instead, they couched their argument in the normative
language of a “capital of Europe.” Thus, they not only bestowed state-like
attributes onto the EC, but also underscored its claim to represent the
broader cause of a united Europe. The chapter also reveals how these
debates articulated new mental maps of Europe and negotiated its cultural
roots. The chapter also discusses how earlier internationalist ideals of the
seat of an international organizations resonated, if obliquely, in these
debates. Chapter 8 gives an account of the competition between Paris and
Brussels to become the EEC seat. In particular, it explores the larger polit-
ical meaning the seat decision assumed. In deciding against Paris, EC
member states rejected an unspoken French leadership claim and made
Brussels the symbol of the balance of power among them. They also nego-
tiated the EC’s geopolitical role, ranging from French neocolonial plans of
Eurafrica to Europe’s place within the Atlantic alliance. The chapter con-
cludes with a cultural history of Brussels as the embattled symbol of
EU-Europe.
The conclusion revisits the question of the EC’s distinctiveness among
European organizations and compares its symbolic representations to
nation states, on the one hand, and postwar internationalism, on the other.
Even though the EC failed in its attempt to emulate in its symbolic repre-
sentations a sovereign nation state, it still managed to excite the political
and public imagination. Thanks to its symbolic politics, the EC offered a
dramatization and legitimization of European cooperation that other
European organizations could not. The conclusion also looks ahead to the
EC’s evolution from the 1970s on and outlines ways in which symbolism
contributed to the EC’s/EU’s longevity. The epilogue, finally, will reflect
upon the legacy the EC’s staging left for today’s EU. It refutes the critique
that the EU suffers from a symbolic deficit. On the contrary, it argues that
the surge in demagogic Euroskepticism is also a response to the EU’s
symbolic overload.
This book’s narrative begins in the late 1940s when, in the wake of the
1948 Hague Congress, the first international organizations, most vocally
the 1949 Council of Europe, seized the European mantel propagated by the
various European movements. Its end, however, is less clear-cut. To begin
with, the EC had begun to take over the European mantel as early as the late
1950s. Many European activists, disappointed with the Council of Europe,
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