For some reason I never can wrap my head around the idea of the European Union as the child of the Second World War. I'm not sure why, since I've read Orwell calling for a "Socialist United States of Europe" in the last years of the war, as well as Robert Kagan in "Power and Weakness" citing the "taming of Germany" as "the greatest accomplishment of Europe."
Colville finally makes it real for me in his entry for December 13, 1940, below.
The P.M. reverted, in some detail, to his ideas for the future. We had got to admit that Germany was going to remain in the European family. "Germany existed before the Gestapo." When we had won he visualised five great European nations: England, France, Italy, Spain and Prussia. In addition there would be four confederations: the Northern, with its capital at The Hague; the Mitteleuropa, with its capital at Warsaw or Prague; the Danubian, consisting of Bavaria, Würtemberg[sic], Austria, Hungary, etc. with its capital at Vienna; and the Balkan with Turkey at its head and Constantinople as its capital. These nine powers would meet in a Council of Europe, which would have a supreme judiciary and a Supreme Economic Council to settle currency questions, etc. Each power would contribute an air cohort — Prussia included — and boys of sixteen would be selected for it. Once enrolled they would be under no national jurisdiction, but they would never be obliged to co-operate in an attack on their own country. All air forces, military and civil, would be internationalised. As regards armies, every power would be allowed its own militia, because Democracy must be based on a people's army and not left ot oligarchs or Secret Police. Prussia alone would, for a hundred years, be denied all armaments beyond her air contingent. The Council would be unrestricted in its methods of dealing with a Power condemned by the remainder in the Council.The English speaking world would be apart from this, but closely connected with it, and it alone would control the seas, as the reward of victory. It would be bound by covenant to respect the trading and colonial rights of all peoples, and England and American would have exactly equal navies. Russia would fit into an Eastern re-organization, and the whole problem of Asia would have to be faced. But as far as Europe was concerned, only by such a system of Confederations could the small powers continue to exist and we must at all costs avoid the old mistake of "Balkanising" Europe.
There would be no war debts, no reparations and no demands on Prussia. Certain territories might have to be ceded and certain exchanges of population, on the lines of that so successfully effected by Greece and Turkey, would have to take place. But there should be no pariahs and Prussia, though unarmed, would be secured by the guarantee of the Council of Europe. Only the Nazis, the murderers of June 30th, 1934, and the Gestapo would be made to suffer for their misdeeds.
But all this was a thing of the still distant future: we might have to give it one hundred years to work. At present he could utter no such ideals when every cottage in Europe was calling for German blood and when the English themselves were demanding that all Germans should be massacred or castrated.