What if the European Union was Founded During The Cold War?

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The European Union is massively important for the worldwide diplomatic and economic scene. It's influence is felt everywhere. Despite that, in its current form, the European Union is a very young organisation. Only being founded in 1993, almost 30 years ago. But this raises the question. If the EU is this young, what if it was significantly older.

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[possiblehistory]

I didn't think this video was strong enough for the usual Saturday release, so here it is as an extra video now, hope you enjoy!

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[arthurbriand]

Maybe this political victory for France in the 50's would keep the fourth Republic alive and prevent the need for Charles de Gaulle. Also you assume that Germany would go for it no questions asked. Those are strong concessions that they may be not ready to make.

[leometz]

The EFTA in our timeline didn't really fail because of economic reasons, but because of geography. Most memberstates didn't have a land connection to one another. I don't think in that timeline it would work much better

[bfedezl]

Nice idea but as a Spanish I can tell you are dead wrong with Spain somehow preferring EFTA over the EU. Remember that Spain also had a bloody civil war and has several regionalist movements that ultimately expressed their own hope for the future in a shared Europe.

[DaDunge]

I think Spain would join the EU anyway while Portugal would likely join EFTA. Spain has never been super friendly with the UK because of Gibraltar. Also can't see csechoslovakia joining the EFTA since they are landlocked by the EU.

[fruitshuit]

4:35 oh wow, that's a blast from the past! Don't think I ever expected to see one of those maps again in my lifetime.

Matthew White's Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, in case any other internet senior citizens are trying to remember where they've seen that before.

[MrAlsachti]

A much more integrated European Community during the cold war is not very far-fetched: the European Community of Defense was very close to happen and would have seen the creation of a European army and a bicameral parliament. Also, a common currency was initially planned for the 80's (but the project failed due to the economic situation in the 70's).
I think that this version of the European Union would formed, like in our timeline, a European Economic Area with the EFTA countries. This would evolved into a two-speed Europe, with a stronger centre and a less integrated periphery.

[BelugaTheHutt]

Prosperity can be a pretty convincing argument. I wouldn't be as surprised as you have described yourself if at least some members of the Eastern Bloc would have agreed to conditions to join this alternate EU which initially prioritize the decision-making power of the established members. Their concerns could be mitigated to some degree by provisions which delay a member's ascension to full voting member for a certain period of time, but do not deprive it of EU influence indefinitely.

[republicofkoreaball]

This is a very interesting and yet semi-realistic scenario. Thanks!

[KaiReddy]

Thank you for all the high quality videos. In case you need more scenarios, two alternate history ideas I had were "what if operation valkariye or a similar plot to kill hitler succeeded" and what if the Russian Empire won the Japanese-War".

[spdfatomicstructure]

The EU was in fact founded during the Cold War. 25 March 1957, under the terms of the Treaty of Rome signed by France, West Germany, Italy and the three Benelux countries. By the end of the Cold War it had expanded to include most of Western Europe (UK, Republic of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, East Germany) as well as Denmark in Northern Europe and Greece in Eastern Europe

[lucius]

The European Union actually formed in the 50ies. Treaty of Rome 1957

[TheArakan]

France did not leave NATO - it just left its command structure.

[dariotoska]

Loved the video! The only possible suggestion I would make would be that the EU still expands into culturally similiar and rich nations, such as austria, denmark and sweden

[nathansky]

As a European Studies university student, I find your video hilarious as a thought process, but I also wanted to dissect your arguments, so here we go:

1) 5:03: You mention that it would be easy to get the USA on board this early EU boat. That is, to put it mildly, high fantasy. Yes, the US wanted "EU recovery", but it wanted it in its own terms. In our own timeline, even the weaker EEC (by 1968 EC) caused tons of headaches for the USA. One area of it was its independent (and often unnoticed) diplomacy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe (see 1970s bilateral EEC trade relations with Romania, Hungary, Poland in Romano, 2014), but the most important area of tension would be the debates between the two entities over GATT's existence with regards to an economic entity that allowed its Member States to benefit from 'most privileged country' status while making everyone outside of it suffer the consequences. A US emerging out of WW2 with as much production as in our own timeline (talking about the 1950s, after Marshall Plan aid had dried) would be pissed with the arrangement of selling its products for less money, especially when it had not yet discovered the allure of new markets in the East.

2) 5:20: Your arguments for France are sound, but only on the surface. You are not just ignoring France's strategic position, but the French electoral preferences, and most importantly parliamentarians' position on Germany and crucially supranationalism. I just wrote a 3000 word essay on how Germanophobia was actually extremely present in the French National Assembly in 1952 when the European Defence Community was being negotiated. Interestingly, all parties used an anti-German argument both for and against the EDC. The EU, in many parliamentarians' eyes, would not "solve the German question". It would instead provide the now-recognised West Germany now-controlling the Saarland and the coal mines and metal factories of the Rhine (by 1951 the three occupiers had not signed any document recognising the FRG, and France still owned rights to many German factories) with a framework to dominate Western Europe and France by allowing as many of its better produced goods to be exported and its army to be built up within the EU (remember the EU's Common Foreign Policy is not as common as one thinks). France would be seen as being tied down to institutional chokeholds of a Commission working for Germany (which was a major problem in the 1960s and 70s, especially with the DG of Commerce having a majority German workforce and going against French wishes of 'neo-dirigisme' for more 'ordo-liberal' policies, see Warlouzet, 2019). Concluding, only Schuman's party, the MRP, as well as some fringe factions within other parties, would support this initiative, and that would not be enough for a victory in the Parliament.

3) 6:00: Again, you are missing the point about European Unification. You are correct about the fact that supranational ideas of European integration had been circulating for centuries. But what is important to understand is those ideas were perpetrated by a select group of people, politicians who at some points had power (and thus could shape the trajectory of integration through coalition-building) and at others had no or little power to affect change. Take for example the quote you show of Churchill's speech in 1946. Churchill, albeit very famous, was not in any way able to direct the UK's foreign policy, since he was not the Prime Minister. You make it sound as if everyone in every government supported European integration in one specific way, yet as Craig Parsons (2002) shows, the French had three distinct attitudes (community, confederalism, and traditionalism) which all played a key role to shaping (and in the case of the EDC, ruining) attempts at European integration.

4) 8:15: Wait wait wait, you're backtracking now XD. The main point of the video is the EU as it is today being formed (through absurd ways, but anyhow) in the late 40s early 50s. Now you're saying there is no European Parliament and it is just a guideline??? You're just giving a revised history of the ECSC --> EEC --> EC --> EU. And even then, you're not taking into account things like how one country having just a tiny bigger post-war industrial boom (like cough cough W. Germany) could put the rest of the Community in tatters due to trade deficits. After all, no tariffs, and even worse, no quantitative restrictions, no barriers for better and (crucially) cheaper German goods to replace French, Italian, and Dutch ones! So when you say it would be 'extremely beneficial' (9:07), you're not actually doing your research.

5) 9:42: I find you mentioning the possibility of France re-entering as an exchanging for a supranational European army hilarious. I would like to remind you that it was not the USA that blocked proposals for the EDC, but rather jumped on the train a few months after France proposed it in the New York 1951 meeting. The USA's support also pushed the Benelux to agree, and W. Germany was already on board. It was only French parliamentarians that had mental issues about it. The idea that General de Gaulle of all people, a man famous for stopping the European process with the Empty Chair Crisis, Luxembourg Compromise, and numerous vetoes on UK entry and EU expansion in the 60s, would suddenly favour a European army where the principle of equality (ie German units are not subordinate to French) exists, is a joke.

6) 11:30: While I don't know enough to (dis-)agree with your thesis on 'sovereignty and Brussels' for candidate countries, I would like to point out this one singular fact that would have made the EU (as it did the EEC/EC) much more appealing than you make it out to be. This small thing called the 'Single Market'. As we're seeing now with Brexit, and as E. European countries saw in the 70s, it is so much easier for a European country to just have access to it then face the red tape and be effed over by extremely high external tariffs. That, as well as the hypothetical EU's stronger use of foreign investment (think of nowadays projects in the Western Balkans, or PHARE in the 90s for Poland and E. Europe) and its stronger promotion of democracy would make a lot of countries want to at least sign Association Agreements. Lastly, if one excludes the UK and Belarus, there is not a single country at the moment in Europe that is not either in, has tons of clauses allowing access to, or attempt to enter the EU. And questions of sovereignty, which should be even bigger today due to the many crisis our EU has faced, don't really matter for candidate states in our world. In an alternate universe where the EU has not faced any major pains, trust me, everyone is trying to get their hands on that market like it's cocai** and the 80s.

7) 12:00: Not fascist Spain joining EFTA XD

8) 14:00: The dichotomy of options you give is just...plain wrong. The EU in our timeline had the same choice of "deepening & widening" vs "expansion" in the 1990s, yet it rEmArkABly chose...BOTH. Heck, even after 2009 and Lisbon, it still promoted expansion along with deepening, and even now, with new policies being negotiated on the field of AI and the Environment, it's still looking at the accession of Ukraine, Switzerland, and the Western Balkans. To say it could only focus on just two, would be wrong.


So overall, a pretty badly thought out video by you, Mr. Possible History. I would've preferred if instead of trying to discuss absurd (and tbh weak) explanations for your video, you instead just said "hey, this is a crazy idea, but might as well!" and went on with explaining how the wonkiness would play out. Also, there are so many stuff you only briefly mentioned (or didn't even bother), like Monetary Union, the Single Market, Diplomacy, relation to the US, relation to the Eastern Block, China, the Global South, Colonialism (for example how does Francafrique work in this scenario???) that could have just been much more interesting than "economic growth --> political growth --> relation to EFTA --> expansion ???"

Hope you take my comment as constructive criticism. I often enjoy your videos, but as a European Studies student, I can't help but attempt to improve (in my opinion) your work! Maybe a part two revising things???

[gifs_for_the_peasantry]

One point you only touched on in the end but which would be in my opinion a big factors even earlier on is a kind of two tier system. In which you have the Core members who act nearly as a Federation and the other newer members who join with much more independence and slowly integrate more and more over the decades (or are free to choose not to). Like most ideas about European Federalisation today

[danielsantiagourtado]

Your videos breath life to the Alt History Commuity! Keep them coming!

[Butter_Warrior]

Definitely an interesting thought experiment.

[valerias]

Goede video! Ik kan niet echt veel begrijpen, maar de graphics helpen veel.

[XescMainzer]

Spain not joining as it did IRL would be extremely unlikely. Since the end of WWII, democratic oposition in exile (with the notable exception of the Communist Party) quickly adhered to the European Movement and in some cases even European Federalism was enthusiastically embraced. Not to forget that Spain was a strong supporter of the institutional reform under the Maastricht Treaty only 6 years after accession (even being the flagbearer of the then-new notion of "European Citizenship").