Canonising Schuman: does the European Union need a saint?
Robert Schuman (centre), London March 1949 (PA Images)
The efforts to sell the European Union to the British people were put to the most savage test five years ago in the Brexit referendum. Might it all have worked out for the better if we had had a saint identified with Europe, whom all might venerate, in place of the false gods of anti-Europeanism, placed on a pedestal by Nigel Farage and the evangelists of Europhobia?
That seems to be the thinking in the Vatican, where Pope Francis is reported to have given his blessing to the decades-long campaign to bestow sainthood on Robert Schuman: not the German composer, but the French conservative and very Catholic postwar politician. It was his famous “Schuman Plan” that in 1950 gave rise to the first European Union of coal and steel industries.
Britain, then in the dying days of the 1945 Labour Government, stayed miles away from this first embryonic effort at European integration. Denis Healey, a communist at pre-war Oxford, but a keen supporter of the UK being America’s junior partner in geopolitics after 1945, wrote all the papers for Clement Attlee to justify saying “No” to this early version of Europe.
Healey considered the Schuman Plan to be “Capitalist. Conservative. Catholic”, echoing the words of the then German Social Democratic leader, Kurt Schumacher. Having spent ten years in Nazi concentration camps, Schumacher was admired in Labour circles. He opposed the tilt to America, as well as the fierce anti-communism and embrace of partnership with France of his rival, the devoutly catholic conservative West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. By contrast, Adenauer admired Schuman and embraced his plan as an opportunity to rebuild German prosperity and prestige.
Schuman had grown up in Lorraine, which was part of Wilhelmine Germany between 1870 and 1918. Like most of his compatriots in Alsace-Lorraine, he felt French but his first language was German. In 1914 Schuman was called up as a German citizen to fight for the Kaiser, though a weak heart meant he never wore uniform. Between 1918 and 1940 he was a lawyer-politician on the moderate Right. Like Britain’s most high-profile pro-European Prime Minister, Edward Heath, Schuman never married. He lived a devout life of daily Mass-going, with a house-keeper cooking and cleaning for him.
Schuman was a good Catholic but an open-minded one. His language about Europe invoked that very political saint, Thomas More, but also Rousseau and Kant, whose Enlightenment arguments for making reason, not faith, the basis for human existence did not endear them to church authorities. Schuman was also a fan of the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose line “Property is theft” was a founding slogan of 19th-century socialism. Proudhon was imprisoned in the 1860s for his attacks on the church.
The Coal and Steel Community was equally the brainchild of Jean Monnet, a very different character who seduced a married woman 20 years his junior and even arranged for her to become a Soviet citizen in 1934, so they could have a civil marriage in Moscow. It was a lifelong marriage, but not exactly Catholic behaviour.
Schuman’s 1950 proposal laid the foundations for today’s EU, but at the time it was seen as a right-wing move to bind Germany and France together with the blessing of the Vatican in an anti-Soviet alliance. For many, even some on the Brexit right in England, Schuman’s anti-communism may indeed be praiseworthy — but is it saintly? Twenty years ago, in the debate over the proposed EU constitutional treaty, the Vatican’s influential diplomatic team in Brussels and EU capitals made a great push to get a reference to Europe’s Christian roots into the new treaty.
It was never going to work. Jack Straw, then the British Foreign Secretary and a strong Anglican, was sympathetic. He thought making the EU an explicitly Christian project might ease the growing anti-Europeanism from UKIP, the BNP, increasing numbers of Tory MPs and the many Catholic commentators who seemed obsessed about the EU.
As Europe minister at the time, I remonstrated with Straw. I pointed out that France, whose very being as a modern state was based on a strict separation of church and state, the famous läicité principle, could never accept references to God or Christianity in the new EU treaty. I said that Islam had been a major European religion for nearly a millennium and was important in the Balkans and for millions of European Muslim citizens in France, Germany and the UK.
I added that you could not write out the Jewish heritage in European history either. “Alright, alright”, Straw said. “Tell them to get in some language for the Muslims and the 4 by 2’s.” He was just making the common sense point that the push by the Catholic Church to claim Europe as a Christian project was ahistorical.
Schuman certainly served the Vatican’s (and Washington’s purpose) in his idea of a Europe based on free nations, sharing some sovereignty. He envisaged a clear role for workers and their unions (but only non-communist ones), in the fashion of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum encyclical of 1891, which backed workers’ rights and democratic trade unions.
He was a conservative Catholic bachelor, but no more a saint than Jean Monnet or Jacques Delors. There is no evidence that Schuman was responsible for any miracles, unless one considers that the European partnership process he initiated in 1950 has grown and grown and is still functioning. Some may think that is indeed a miracle, given the number of grave-diggers that the European partnership has had to live with since 1950.
The EU is now the world’s biggest multi-faith, multi-cultural, multi-nation project. It is full of sinners and will have to survive its next 70 years without a saint.
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