The Birth of a Communist Idea 1918-1932

"Europe is being liquidated, and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate." 1918 (Jan Smuts)
If there was one historical event which more than any other inspired what was eventually to become the European Union, it was the battle which waged around Verdun in the First World War. For the British the defining battle was the Somme in the summer of 1916. For France and Germany it was the colossal battleof attrition launched in February the same year, when the French Commander, General Philippe Petain, pronounced that the fortresses on the hills overlooking Verdun on the River Meuse were where the advance of German armies into his country would be brought to a halt. His legendary words "Ils ne passeront pas" were endorsed the same day by France's prime minister Aristide Briand.
For nearly a year, the French and German armies battered each other to destruction in the most intense and prolonged concentration of violence the world had ever seen. French artillery alone fired more than twelve million shells, the German guns considerably more. The number of dead and wounded on both sides exceded 700,000.
The impact of this battle on France was profound. Because of the way in which her citizen soldiers were rotated through the front line,scarcely a town or village in France was untouched by the slaughter. Among the two and a half million Frenchmen who fough in the battle were France's future President Charles De Gaulle, and Louis Delors, whose son Jacques would one day be president of the European Commission. Present for several months fighting for the other side was the father of Germany's future Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
So deep was the wound Verdun inflicted on the psyche of France that the following year her army was brought to mutiny. Its morale would never fully recover. And from this blow were to emerge two abiding lessons.
The first was a conviction that such a suicidal clash of national armies must never be repeated. The second was much more specific and immediate. It came from the realisation that the war had been shaped more than anything else by industrial power. As the battle for Verdun had developed into a remorseless artillery duel,trainloads of German shells were arriving at the front still warm from the factories of the ruhr. The battle, and the war itself, became less a trial of men and human resolve than of two rival industrial systems. And the French system had been found sorely wanting.
Particularlyy inferior had been the heavy huns, many dating back to the 1870's, able to fire shells at only a seventh of the rate of their German counterparts. More and better guns became vital. But, as France's politicians found to their consternation, manufacturing them and the huge quantities of ammunition needed was beyond the cpacity of an industry which compared equally poorly with Germany's. This had since August 1914, under the inspiration of Walter Rathenau, been put on a fully integrated war footing, under the control of a War Raw Materials Department.
In the summer of 1916 therefore, a crisis-stricken French government gave an industrialist, Louis Loucheur, near-dictatorial powers to reform and develop the manufacturing base. Before the war, Loucheur had been one of the early pioneers in the use of reinforced concrete. In a national economy dominated by artisan manufacture, he was one of the few French technocrats familiar with the techniques of mass production.
With all the power of the state behind him, Loucheur succeeded in his initial task, even building new factories to make the new guns. But improvements in production precipitated critical shortages of steel and coal, exacerbated by the German seizure in the first weeks of the war of around half France's industrial base in the north-east of the country.
Remedying these shortages required massive imports from Britain, and then from the United States. In turn this placed considerable demands on shipping. All this required unprecedented economic co-operation between the Western Allies, leading Loucheur to conclude, like Rathenau befor him, how far success in modern warfare demanded industrial organisation.
Thus, Loucheur came to reflect, industrial organisation was the key to waging war. From this he developed the idea that, if key industries from different countries, above all their coal and steel industries on which modern warfare so much depended, were removed from the control of individual nations and vested in a "higher authority", this might be the means of preserving peace.