In Europe

hinterland was still in ruins, it was impossible really to reconstruct our country. We all knew that. But how could we keep history from repeating itself, how could we keep the industry of the Ruhr from once again producing bombs to destroy Rotterdam? That was our dilemma.
    ‘Then, on 9 May, 1950, the Schuman Plan was launched. That date is now regarded, rightly, as the start of the process that ultimately led to today's European Union. For us, that plan, which was named after the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was truly a revolutionary breakthrough in the vicious circle we found ourselves in. It abruptly changed the whole context, it made the problem of Western European coal and steel production an issue that could and should be arranged together. Conflicting interests were suddenly transformed into a common interest that had to be dealt with jointly. Because, don't forget: in those days Germany could easily have become a plaything between East and West, any enduring subordination of Germany carried the risk of a new war. We had to safeguard that country for the West, at all costs.
    ‘I was invited to join the Dutch delegation which was negotiating for all this, and it was there that I first heard a speech by Jean Monnet, the chairman of the French delegation and the plan's intellectual father. That was in June 1950. I was deeply impressed. It was very clear that this meant so much more to him than simply the regulation of coal and steel production. It meant putting a lasting end to the conflicts that had twice plunged Europe into war, turning national issues into common European ones. As everyone knows, a compromise is not always the best solution. And now we were truly trying to achieve the best, for all Europe.
    ‘This way of working was ultimately to embrace the entire international community. That too was one of Monnet's premises, from thevery start. “The six European countries have not launched a great enterprise intended to tear down the walls between them, in order only to build even higher walls between themselves and the world around them,” he wrote in the early 1950s. “We are not connecting states, we are connecting people.”
    ‘His “Algiers memorandum” of 1943 showed that, even in the throes of the Second World War, he was toying with the first rough draft of the Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). That community was meant, in any event, to include Germany, France, Italy and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). He wanted to make sure that Germany, France and the other European countries could never fall back into their old pre-war rivalries. But his ultimate goal went further than that: he was aiming for “an organisation of the world that will allow all resources to be exploited as well as possible and to be distributed as evenly as possible among persons, so as to create peace and happiness throughout the entire world.”
    ‘The contacts at those meetings were extremely personal, there were only six small delegations present at the negotiations. The atmosphere was also very different from the rock hard bilateral negotiations we'd been accustomed to, especially in those poverty stricken post-war years. It was a liberating experience for us as negotiators: we were engaged in creating completely new structures. Everyone saw that this was about much more than just a coal and steel community involving a handful of European countries. The discussions were open, it was about the goal itself and not about all kinds of hidden agendas; it generated a dynamism we hadn't seen before.
    ‘That wasn't easy for the Netherlands. In essence, we were not a continental country, we had always focused more on the sea and the west. When the enemy came, we relied on the water to make an island, at least of Holland. In 1940 we still had strips of land that could be flooded as lines of defence. Would the Netherlands now, for the first time in history, have to establish unequivocal ties with the European continent?
    ‘The first European communities were therefore the product of a generation which had experienced first-hand what international insecurity and instability could mean, and how important concepts like freedom, civil-isation and the rule of law could be. We knew what it meant: law as theonly barrier between us and chaos. I wrote to Kathleen that this was what, in a certain sense, I had been preparing myself for in all the years that had gone before,