La méthode fonctionnelle d'intégration de Jean Monnet: dernier héritage de la culture de guerre?

Abstract

In this article I explore the historical and intellectual origins of the functional theory of European integration. By drawing on a dual body of scholarship, one dedicated to World War One and the other to the political process of European integration, I identify the socio-economic and cultural context which gave birth to the influential functionalist paradigm first theorized explicitly by David Mitrany. However, the biography and autobiography of Jean Monnet -the principal architect, administrator and promoter of the European Communities in the first decades after World War Two- support the idea that the intellectual rudiments of the functionalist approach go back to the practical experience of joint (Atlantic) Allied economic war planning during World War One. These executive economic committees acted indeed as a training ground for a new type of technocratic European elite, who will afterwards populate the interwar executive bodies of the League of Nations and, finally, the new (Western) European institutions.