Ideas of European Unity Before 1945 - 19th Century

19th Century

In the 1800s, customs union under Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental system was promulgated in November 1806 as an embargo of British goods in the interests of French hegemony. Felix Markham notes how during a conversation on St. Helena, Napoleon remarked, "Europe thus divided into nationalities freely formed and free internally, peace between States would have become easier: the United States of Europe would become a possibility."

The French socialists Saint-Simon and Augustin Thierry would in 1814 write the essay De la réorganisation de la société européenne, already conjuring up some form of parliamentary European federation.

In the conservative reaction after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the German Confederation (German "Deutscher Bund") was established as a loose association of thirty-eight sovereign German states formed by the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon had swept away the Holy Roman Empire and simplified the map of Germany. In 1834, the Zollverein (German, "customs union") was formed among the states of the Confederation, in order to create better trade flow and reduce internal competition. An extension of this customs union may have been become the model for a unified Europe, as alluded to by Fritz Fischer in Germany's Aims in the First World War. The then current ideas of geopolitics and a Mitteleuropa were also influential in providing an intellectual framework for European Union in Germany.

United States of Europe was also the name of the concept presented by Wojciech Jastrzębowski in "About eternal peace between the nations", published May 31, 1831. The project consisted of 77 articles. The envisioned United States of Europe was to be an international organisation rather than a superstate.

Italian writer and politician Giuseppe Mazzini called for the creation of a federation of European republics in 1843. This set the stage for perhaps the best known early proposal for peaceful unification, through cooperation and equality of membership, made by the pacifist Victor Hugo in 1847. Hugo used the term 'United States of Europe' (États-Unis d'Europe) during a speech at the International Peace Congress, organised by Mazzini, held in Paris in 1849. Hugo favoured the creation of "a supreme, sovereign senate, which will be to Europe what parliament is to England" and said "A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas." However, he was laughed out of the hall, yet returned to his idea again in 1851. Victor Hugo planted a tree in the grounds of his residence on the Island of Guernsey he was noted in saying that when this tree matured the United States of Europe would have come into being. This tree to this day is still growing happily in the gardens of Maison de Hauteville, St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Victor Hugo's residence during his exile from France.

The Italian philosopher Carlo Cattaneo wrote 'The ocean is rough and whirling, and the currents go to two possible endings: the autocrat, or the United States of Europe'. In 1867 Giuseppe Garibaldi, and John Stuart Mill joined Victor Hugo at a congress of the League of Peace and Freedom in Geneva. Here the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin stated "That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe". The French National Assembly, also called for a United States of Europe on March 1, 1871.