ABSTRACT

The burden of rhetoric: inside the European institutions After the Second World War, when the early institutional steps towards European regionalism were conceived, there was no European past to be ‘regretted’. Nazi and fascist Europe, the great depression and the upheaval of total war could hardly be viewed as idyllic bygone times to which one might wish to return. On the contrary, that period of European history had optimistically and definitively been left behind, and substituted by a better and more humane society regulated by new ‘enlightened’ supranational institutions designed to contribute to peaceful coexistence, political stability and economic growth. The rhetoric of European ‘unity’ was an integral part of the recasting of postwar European discourse. However, despite expressing a fundamental discontinuity with the past and being embedded in a modernizing vision of European organization, the new regional institutions were also the outcome of a more general conservative attempt to ‘contain’ the postwar drive for social change in a divided Cold War Europe. This apparent contradiction, and the tension arising from it, partly explain the discursive ambivalence in which new-born European institutions were rooted, and somehow cast subsequent institutional rhetoric as a legitimizing device meant to compensate for the lack of a direct popular mandate. The second part of this volume is an attempt to develop an explanation for this ambivalence, and its four chapters deal with the role played by supranational European institutions in the discursive construction of an ‘organized’ Europe. They are based on the assumption that the burden of rhetoric is one of the conservative legacies of early European integration and among the enduring difficulties that prevent European institutions from adopting and communicating more forward-looking attitudes. As a result, and somehow paradoxically, institutional rhetoric has often turned out to be an obstacle to legitimization. This second part is informally divided into two subsections. The first two chapters, focused on military institutions and nuclear energy, deal with the discursive rhetoric of early European integration in the immediate postwar years and in the 1950s. In the aftermath of the Second World War, European countries engaged in a profound and unprecedented revision of the hierarchy of power and eroded the

traditional references to homelands and nations, since the new security framework of the West was built on a Euro-Atlantic axis. However, military traditions, both national and continental, did not disappear, and a new European perspective was proposed as part of a rhetorical discourse that intended to offer an identity to integrated organizations that were called to stand alongside the American giant. Taking into consideration, with particular reference to the Italian and French contexts, the assumptions underpinning the plans made by military institutions prior to the failure of the EDC project in 1954, Chapter 4 shows that ‘Europe’ and the ‘West’ were notions that challenged the internal culture of national military institutions, and measures the resilience of the traditional reference to the ‘fatherland’ against the drive to give ideological content to the notion of ‘the West’. While, in Italy, the internationalization of armed forces guaranteed a route towards a gradual reacquisition of sovereignty, the military in France was forced to confront imperial decline and the difficulty of integrating national priorities, European geopolitical imperatives and surviving ambitions of ‘grandeur’. Until the end of the Algerian crisis, anti-communism mixed geopolitical issues and the surviving values of the old European and white ruling powers under the someway ambiguous brand of ‘the West’. The challenge of the Cold War also affected the discourse surrounding the launch of European techno-scientific integration through Euratom, the Community created in 1957 to develop a new European atomic energy capacity. Little investigated by historiography, the Euratom experience raises a series of questions on the ways atomic technology – the epitome of postwar modernization – contributed to a language of Europe and of European integration in an advanced industrial sector. The rhetorical construct at the origins of ‘nuclear regionalism’ in the early phase of Euratom sheds light on how the development of civilian nuclear power promoted discourses on Europe, both as a new regional institutional framework and as a project of modernity, albeit one embedded in a language that took up ideas dating from nineteenth-century scientific internationalism yet revisited in the light of Cold War confrontation. The following two chapters concentrate on discursive practices in the European Parliament through analyses of the language of parliamentary debates in two different, more recent and heated discussions. Chapter 6 deals with the institutional reform of the European Community/European Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, taking into consideration the shifting views and positions adopted by the two main political groups, the European People’s Party and the European Socialists, from the first direct elections of the EP to the adoption of the Treaty of Amsterdam. Chapter 7 focuses on the disintegration of Yugoslavia between the outbreak of the crisis in 1991 and the Dayton Agreement of 1995, which marked the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. References to Europe’s historical role in the Balkans, to the profound legacy of the Second World War, and to the role of the United States in that early post-Cold War phase show both the inadequacy of the Union’s foreign policy tools when faced with the challenge of the return of war on Europe’s borders, and how the resort to rhetorical practices was part of that inadequacy.