ABSTRACT
Many intellectuals agreed with Paul Valery’s verdict in 1919 that the First World War had sent ‘an extraordinary shudder’ through the ‘marrow of Europe’. Scholars have taken such statements seriously, challenging the assumed continuity of ideas about Europe and asking where the plans for a European Community, realised in the 1950s, came from. Much of the existing literature on ‘the European idea’ after the First World War starts with the inability of the European movements of the interwar years either to agree on a realistic programme of European cooperation or to convince governments to carry out their ideas. The fact that European cooperation was conceivable in the 1920s arguably owed most to the changes wrought by the First World War. Less than fifteen years later, on 5 September 1929, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and former premier Aristide Briand could be found presenting his plan for a European Union to the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva.
