"Fortress Europe"

Salter never gave up hope of his plans for a European steel and coal union. During a meeting in Washington in 1941 he met Paul-Henri Spaak, the pre-war prime minister of Belgium. It marked the beginning of a personal alliance with a dream of a united Europe that was to become extremely influential in the forming of post-war Europe.
As the tide of war swung to the Allies favour, Monnet's attention turned more and more to the shape of a Europe he wished to see emerge in the post-war era.
At the end of February 1943 after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, Monnet was sent to Algiers to arrange for arms shipments to the French Free Forces. Here Monnet formed a close alliance with the politician sent out by Churchill, Harold Macmillan. They had extensive talks about the future of France and post-war Europe, and agreed that, as high-handed as he was De Gaulle was a man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile.
They laid down there the foundations of a provisional French government, the Comite Francais de Liberation Nationale (CFLN), to be led by de Gaulle. In their first meeting they produced a memorandum which declared:
"There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty with all that implies in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism. If the nations of Europe adopt defensive positions again, huge armies will be necessary again. Under the future peace treaty, some nations will be allowed to re-arm; others will not. That was tried in 1919;we all know the result..
The nations of Europe are too circumscribed to give their peoples the prosperity made possible, and hence necessary, by modern conditions. They will need larger markets. And they will have to refrain from using a major proportion of their resources to maintain "key" industries needed for national defence...
Prosperity and vital social progress wil remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation of a "European entity" which will forge them into a single economic unit..Our concern is a solution to the European problem. The British, the Americans, the Russians ahve worlds of their own into which they can temporarily retreat. France cannot opt out, for her very existence hinges on a solution to the European problem..."
This vision was being developed by Monnet in which European peace could only be maintained if Europe was organised by a supranational authority sufficient to overrule the fractious impulses of national sovereignty. This would forge the member states into a "single economic unit", based on integrating those "key industries needed for national defence", such as coal and steel. Moreover, despite his earlier attempts at Anlgo-French union, it would also be a Europe where no direct involvement of Britain would be involved than that of America or Russia.
In 1942 Europe was politically united. In Hitler's "Fortress Europe", the Fuhrer dismissed European unity as a "presumptious irrelevance". He loathed the early European movement and banned all "European Unity" associations as soon as he had had the chance.
But downscale in the Nazi hierarchy some spent the war years conceiving plans for a federal European unity. Werner Daitz, a leading Nazi economist launched a society for the European Economic Planning and Macroeconomics (Grossraumwirtschaft) and produced a book, "What the New Order in Europe Brings to the European Peoples." His ideologue added to many of the time that attacked "outmoded" notions of national sovereignty and the nation state.
In 1938 Daitz had declared that the idea of the state derived from British political theory and the French Revolution. He held the nation to be small and selfish compared to the "great common undertaking" which was Europe.
Another enthusiast for unity was Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. In late 1942 he headed a Committee on the Restructuring of Europe, giving a number of academics and politicians free reign to discuss the creation of Europe's future.
The Nazi finance minister, Walther Funk, also held "common interests" had to take precedence over particular ones. He reconstructed the post-war economy within the framework of a "New European Order" and a new world economy.
With Germany in occupied lands and charging the occupied lands for it, Goebbels remarked, "It is only right and just that we take the leadership of Europe into our own hands..The German people...have actually won the hegemony of Europe and have a moral right to it."
Goebbels then recognised that the rhetoric of "Europeanism" could serve a useful propaganda purpose. With the tide of war, he projected Germany as the protector of "European" culture against the barbarians from the east. This sought to encourage occupied countries to "volunteer" their young men to join the Waffen-SS and to mobilise their economies against the Bolshevik hordes in what was increasingly styled a "European war of liberation."
The propaganda had its effect. 50,000 non-Germans from every part of occupied Europe fought on the Eastern front, under the bannerof the Waffen-SS. Many believed they were defending "Europe" rather than serving the interests of Germany.
The disparaging persistent theme from the many disparate themes though, was still one to proclaim the end to the nation state and it's absorption into a greater European identity; and that the emerging "New Europe" could now recover its old self-confidence and compete with any power in the world.