Optimism among Communism

"...it is a disgrace that Europe had to wait for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty lay."
Dr. Henri Brugmans,Chairman of the European Union of Federalists, August 1947.
To achieve peace,freedom and an end to "all crimes and follies of the past" Winston Churchill said, "we must build a kind of United States of Europe."
Churchill renewed this message in London in 1947, at The Hague in 1948 and at Strasbourg in 1949. Churchill's world stature helped inspire the steps to create the European Union.
But the type of European Federation envisioned by Churchill and that which would become to take shape in the 1950's were distinctively different. He made this clear by his references at Zurich to the "pan-European union" worked on by the French patriot Aristide Briand and the "immense body which was brought into being amidst high hopes after the First World War- the League of Nations. Churchill had envisioned an internationalist idealism for Europe from the 1920's based on an alliance of sovereign states.
Conversely it was this type of "intergovernmentalism" which the founders of what was to be the European Union regarded as their greatest obstacle. When the project was finally launched ,the man chiefly responsible was openly dismissive of Churchill's type of "United Europe". Monnet was convinced that the goal could only be teached in a wholly different way.
Churchill had clarified in Zurich and later that any "United Europe" was a rooted partnership between Germany and France. There was no question of direct participation with Britain. "The British Empire and Commonwealth" were to remain separate.
All the essential ideas of the European Union had come into being from essential ideas made in the 1920's , before the rise of Hitler, as a way to prevent a recurrence of a First World War. In that sense they failed.
Chiefly, since the ideas were disinterred after 1945 the political balance of Europe had changed the world out of recognition. The internal fighting between France and Germany paled into significance against "an iron curtain descended across the Continent",in that respect Europe's national enmities were specifically addressed to solving a problem which no longer existed.
The end of World War Two was to act as a spur to scheme more international co-operation than the end of the Great War 25 years earlier. Many of the international institutions which were to provide a framework for the post-war world were called into being at this time. Foremost among them was the United Nations, set up in 1945 to replace the League of Nations(which was only formally dissolvedin 1946). The first UN General Assembly was held in London in January 1946 under the presidency of Belgium's foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak. From the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as instruments of post-war financial and economic reconstruction, came the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In October 1947, indirectly through the UN, came the signing of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs designed to work for the progressive liberalisation of World Trade. All these were intergovernmental structures based on co-operation between sovereign governments. As with the League of Nations before them, their prime mover,closely supported by Britain, was the United States of America. Americans would not again retreat into isolationism. The US firmly committed to playing a central role symbolised by the new HQ was positioned in New York and not in Switzerland.
US isolationism was impossible because of the post Second world war re-shaping of power. Leading Western European nations had their imperial possessions scattered across every continent.But the US and USSR had become superpowers with two potentially deadly conflicting political idealogies.
Far from being the centre of world politics, Europe was to become the reservoir in which the two new superpowers would act out their greater rivalry.
The division of Europe was to become deeper. In 1944 the Moscow conference had agreed that most of central and Eastern Europe ,from being liberated from Nazi occupation by the Red Army, would fall after the war into "the Soviet sphere of influence".
Pre-war democracies ended after hostilities including Czechoslovakia,Poland, Hungary and Romania who then re-established democratic, multiparty forms of government. Although under the shadow of Soviet occupation,the full political ambitions of the Communists were not yet obvious. Yugoslavia came under one-party Communist rule by Tito,then still Stalin's ally. Albania followed suit, and played an active role in promoting an attempted Communist take-over of Greece only narrowly averted by Britain's armed intervention in the Greek civil war of 1944-1945.
However, there was still grounds for optimism to re-establish self-governing institutions in all those occupied countries that had been liberated by the Western Allies; despite the presence in Italy and France of large Communist parties, which were to provide a constant reminder of how fragile the re-born democracies of Western Europe might prove if economic recovery was not successful.