The Historical Inheritance of Democracy in the European Union, 1948-1957

This paper examines the democratic inheritance of the first institutions of European unity immediately after World War II. How did centrist political elites in Western Europe interpret Europe’s – or their nation’s – history of democracy, and how did those interpretations influence the first debates on European unity? These questions are critical to understanding the original institutional architecture of what eventually became the European Union, as well as how political officials initially considered popular political participation in European unity. Although the practice of democracy, especially liberal parliamentary democracy, returned to much of Western Europe after the war, divergent interpretations of Europe’s democratic past became embedded into the initial trajectory of European integration. On a practical level, attention centered on how best, if at all, to engage European voters. No one could escape that parliamentary elections and referendums each possessed a blemished history, yet officials across Western Europe employed the history of each to justify whether it belonged, or did not belong, at a level beyond the nation state. The period 1948-1957 was a foundational era in which the memory of the past carried profound policy and institutional implications for the development of European integration. Today we see that direct elections to the European Parliament, national referendums, and initiatives have all been incorporated into the democratic mechanics of European integration, but these developments stem in part from contrasting historical interpretations of Europe’s political past in the immediate post-war period.