WORLD VIEW:As Irish-EU relationship comes under spotlight, principles that set up union remain relevant, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
IN A week when Ireland’s critically important interdependence with the European Union became so central, it is worth recalling the origins and philosophy of this transnational policy-making.
Max Kohnstamm, aged 96, died in Amsterdam last week. With Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, he was a founding member of the group that created European integration after 1945 and remained active in it as a diplomat, official, lobbyist and ceaseless advocate.
At a Dublin seminar in 2001, Kohnstamm talked about their method. “Within it you organise a constant dialogue between the national interests and the European interests, with the European interests being defended by the commission and the national interests by the nations. That kind of system, that structure of law, forms a possibility of continuing to build.”
Without this “regular interchange between a European body, responsible for suggesting solutions to common problems and the governments of the member states which put national points of view”, there is a constant danger of losing “the race with international anarchy”, he said in 1963.
That phrase comes from Monnet’s memoirs. Quoted by Kohnstamm at his parting lecture in 1981 as first president of the European University Institute in Florence, it dealt with the imaginative novelty of the community method they invented and its enduring relevance.
Both men insisted on the necessity of creating institutions to organise international co-operation based on equality, against anarchies of power and markets – an “organised peace” for an “organised world” – to avoid another war. In Monnet’s famous words: “Nothing is possible without men: nothing is lasting without institutions.”
Kohnstamm worked with Monnet for nearly 30 years, after they first met when negotiating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950. He was on the Dutch delegation to the talks and often spoke of how the proposal to pool these key war-making powers solved the problem of how to renew German production without endangering others. The talks were more like a group discussion than a negotiation.
Born in Amsterdam in 1914, Kohnstamm’s father was a famous educationalist, his mother from the family that owned the Shell oil company. Multilingual, they had many contacts with German and Jewish culture. After his Dutch education, he spent a year studying in Washington.
Returning home to German occupation, he was held first in a concentration camp and then with well-known figures held as hostages avenged for any attacks on German targets. This proved an influential group after the war, arising from which Kohnstamm became private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina until 1948.
His daughter Barbara, who lived in Ireland for 35 years, recalls how surprised he was to get this request when a black car arrived at their door.
So Kohnstamm was very much a child of his time, entangled in Dutch, European – and Irish – life. He met his wife Kathleen, a nurse for the hostage group, and they married secretly then. The queen insisted on arranging a public ceremony when she heard the story. Kathleen’s grandmother was Rose Phibbs from Sligo, whose family was a partner in the celebrated solicitors firm Argue Phibbs.
Tommie Gorman made a marvellous film for RTÉ on their life story, during which they stayed at his home next to the Phibbs’s former Lisheen estate.
Visiting the Ruhr Valley in 1947-1948, Kohnstamm was utterly shocked by the devastation. In the foreign ministry he drafted a policy paper on Germany, calling for a new co-operative relationship within a wider European setting. He was secretary of the ECSC 1952-1956.
When Monnet stepped down as its head, Kohnstamm joined the Action Committee for the United States of Europe from 1956 to 1975. It comprised political parties, trade union and business groups committed to integration, opposed to Gaullist and communist defenders of state sovereignty. Kohnstamm’s linguistic and lobbying ability, notably with German social democrats and US and UK networks, was indispensable.
They were similarly in play as the first European University Institute president from 1973. Paddy Masterson, an Irish successor, remembers his “diplomatic skill and persistence in persuading the governments of the participating countries that it should happen” – as an independent European postgraduate social science university, not a technological or policy think-tank for Brussels.
As a founding member of the Trilateral and Bilderberg groups, he maintained those contacts. They were revived when he refounded the action committee in 1983 to lobby Delors , Kohl and Mitterrand over the single market, economic and political union and in the 1990s as a founding director of the European Policy Centre in Brussels, where I met him.
Asked how he got on so well with his mentor, Kohnstamm quoted Disraeli on Queen Victoria: “I never contradict. I never disobey. I sometimes forget!” He liked recalling how his summer holiday in 1957 was interrupted by Monnet to urge the creation of a stabilisation fund and a single currency – “via money, Europe could become political in five years”.
Now there’s a thought . . .