Extracts from an Article: The Campaign of the European Congresses

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 23, Heft 1, S. 109-124

Abstract

JUST AS THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 WAS PRECEDED BY A 'campaign of banquets', so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a 'campaign of congresses' spread over the years 1947–49. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogeneous and many-sided movement — a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.Historians may argue that the congresses achieved nothing — and indeed we do not normally expect congresses to achieve much. Members of the same profession meet together to sit through tedious sessions and enjoy themselves all the better afterwards. But in those days, a strange driving passion, unknown to this generation, inspired the militants of Europeanism, and induced them to prefer the nightly labours of commissions and operas. It is the sense of this driving passion which must be communicated, if we are to convey the psychological and historical reality of the campaign of congresses, and pay due tribute to the influence it exerted. Their action should not be considered as that of a general seizing a military position, a law-giver imposing a legal structure, or even a medicine effecting a cure. Rather should it be regarded as a concerted concentration of psychic and psychological factors which prepare the ground and enable the organism to resorb certain poisons, overcome certain inhibitions and liberate new energies. It is such profound metamorphoses which really deserve the name of revolution.