ABSTRACT
Since the early 1950s and the formation of the European Community, opponents of European integration have warned of the risk of a ‘Teutonic Europe’. According to them, the European Coal and Steel Community would help to promote the rebirth of the German military-industrial complex, while the project of creating a European defence community involved German remilitarisation. In the following decades, fears of increasing German economic hegemony were spurred on by the creation of the European Economic Community, and the mooting of the first European monetary union projects in the late 1960s. Indeed, for Euro-critics, European integration was (and still is) an environment conducive to German dominance. In their view, the Maastricht Treaty and the Economic and Monetary Union set the seal on what amounts to a blueprint to establish a ‘German Europe’. Anti-Germanism is not the only reason explaining the opposition to the European Community and then the European Union, yet it has served to strengthen the current opposition to the European Union. This chapter addresses the historical development of anti-German Euroscepticism in three Western European countries, namely France, Great Britain and Italy.
