The shadow of the London Bureau

The Paris-based MSEUE began its life as the Movement for the United Socialist States of Europe (henceforth MUSSE), in many respects a revival of the interwar London Bureau. It would take a few years to fully transition from the British-led movement to the better-known French-led MSEUE, and the process illustrates the evolution of a particular strand of socialist internationalism from the outbreak of the Second World War to the consolidation of the geopolitical landscape of the late 1940s.

Transnational left socialism has been often described as ‘largely a marginal phenomenon, as its members found themselves squeezed between the two dominant leftist tendencies during the 1930s: reformist socialism and Soviet-dominated communism’, and this perhaps helps explain the scant attention historians have paid to it.⁴ Still, when scrutinised from the point of view of social network analysis and as a vehicle for ideas, even the smallest splinter group may be worthy of consideration.⁵ This is certainly the case of the London Bureau, whose origins can be traced to 1933, when members of three non-communist, non-reformist fringe organisations – the so-called Bureau de Paris, the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft and the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition – began to meet in a new forum bearing the unwieldy name of the ‘International Revolutionary Marxist Centre’.⁶ The Bureau was managed in London by the Independent Labour Party (ILP), hence the moniker, and was characterised by at least three main ideological tendencies. The first was towards a reconstituted global workers’ movement in the social democratic vein, a position that implied the rejection of the Stalinist model and any sort of coercive unitary structure; the second, led by the ILP, envisioned an independent line with a possible future alignment with the Comintern; the third, largely inspired by Trotsky, strove for a new anti-Stalinist global unitary movement based on strict Marxist-Leninist theory.⁷ Although Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 provided a strong rationale for increasing coordination, turning the fight against Fascism into the common denominator of this otherwise heterogeneous group, some members felt that an effective strategy required collaboration within the existing capitalist national structures, whereas others – who eventually prevailed – espoused a strictly anti-capitalist view and prioritised international engagement.⁸ Another key ideological component was anti-colonialism, which dovetailed nicely with the widely held assumption that the class struggle had to be waged at a global, rather than national, level.⁹ At this stage, collective security under capitalist governments was dismissed as a pipe dream and alternative forms of intra- European cooperation were glossed over.¹⁰

The Bureau was organised under the guidance of pacifist and then former MP Fenner Brockway; his colleagues Bob Edwards, Francis Ridley and John McNair were also leading members. Other parties included the Greek Archeio-Marxist Party, led by Dimitris Giotopoulos, alias Witte; French Socialist Marceau Pivert’s leftist faction of the French Section française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), Gauche Révolutionnaire, which joined the London Bureau in 1935; and the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), also involved from 1935 onwards.¹¹ The presence of POUM delegates is especially significant, as a substantial amount of the London Bureau’s resources in the late 1930s would be directed at supporting the POUM and affiliated anti-Francoist forces in Spain – thus providing a clear example of international solidarity cemented by a common anti-fascist cause.¹² To give a few examples: Bob Edwards drove an ambulance and helped assist British volunteers, Pivert organised transit through France, McNair was briefly arrested in June 1937 as he coordinated efforts in Spain, and Fenner Brockway made a trip in late 1937 to secure the release of some 15,000 prisoners, including 1,000 POUMistas.¹³

By 1938, the Bureau also included independent factions of the German, Italian and Polish socialist parties as well as a number of Eastern European parties, the American Socialist Party and several organisations from non-independent countries, such as Senegal, Indo-China and Madagascar, in an observer capacity.¹⁴ The Paris Congress, held in February 1938, provided a platform to activists such as George Padmore, who – speaking on behalf of the pan-African group International African Service Bureau, which he had cofounded with C. L. R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and other opponents of colonial rule – expressed his disenchantment with both the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) and the Comintern, claiming that only a bottom-up alliance between the working class of the capitalist world and the national liberation movements operating within colonies could end racial oppression.¹⁵

Yet the growing pressure under which the ILP found itself, also because of the highly contentious policy of rearmament, made its position as lynchpin of the network increasingly unsustainable.¹⁶ The last London Bureau meeting was held in April 1939 as the next one, scheduled for September, was rendered impossible by the outbreak of the Second World War. Aside from interrupting the Bureau’s activities, the war also scattered some of its members. Most notably, Pivert and POUMista Enric Adroher (nom-de-plume ‘Gironella’) ended up in Mexico. Gironella had been arrested in Spain and upon release had found passage to Mexico via Bordeaux. For Pivert, a conviction in absentia for inciting insubordination in French troops and a speech he gave at an American Socialist Party rally combined to maroon him in Mexico City. If he and Gironella had not known each other personally beforehand, they did by the war’s end.¹⁷

The fragmentation and lack of operational capacity of the Bureau resulted in greater ideological suppleness and search for new paradigms – and it was in that context that the idea of a socialist united Europe begin to gain traction. In 1944, then-ILP members Francis A. Ridley and Bob Edwards penned a document that would have a huge and lasting impact on the MUSSE/MSEUE, a short pamphlet entitled The United Socialist States of Europe. Both men were deeply entangled with the British far left: Ridley, a Marxist who had ties with Trotsky before entering the ILP, would later become an outspoken critic of colonialism alongside the already mentioned Padmore; Edwards, a trade unionist who had visited the Soviet Union in 1926, would stand out as a pro-European member of the Labour Party, spending more than three decades in Westminster, but – according to Soviet double agent Oleg A. Gordievsky – he would also operate as a KGB informant and agent throughout the Cold War.¹⁸ In Ridley’s and Edwards’s interpretation, the war reflected the inability of the nation-state system to handle the ‘new technology of the Machine Age’, and proved that if the anachronistic nation-state system was not done away with, ‘the inexorable working-out of the laws of Capitalist-Imperialism’ would bring about ‘a Third World-War as much more terrible and total than this most terrible and total of all of wars as this one surpasses all its historic predecessors’.¹⁹ They ridiculed the supposed righteousness of Allied forces, ‘which include the two most ruthless dictatorships on earth, those of Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek’, calling the ‘bluff’ of framing the conflict as a ‘war for “Freedom”, or “Democracy”, or the “Common Man”, or some such high-sounding abstraction’, pinning their hopes instead on ‘the socialist unity of Europe’, which would ‘owe nothing to the criminal ambitions of either the European camps of world reaction, whether in its Fascist German or its plutocratic (pseudodemocratic) American form. The emancipation of the European peoples must be the work of the European people’.²⁰ Although the authors maintained that ‘World-Socialism – the United States of the World –’ was their ‘majestic goal’, the pamphlet emphatically stressed the benefits deriving from the ‘intermediate, but, it would seem, indispensable stage of the United Socialist States of Europe’, warning that ‘should European civilisation die of blood-letting and exhaustion the road to World Socialism would be immeasurably lengthened: for then its attainment would be left to the nations of the East, who still, for the most part, lack its first prerequisites’.²¹ The socialist character of European unity was also heavily underscored: since socialism was, and would continue to be, the only way to break down the dominance of Finance Capital over the international system, post-war European states would be united and socialist.²² Besides, the pamphlet confidently asserted that ‘a Socialist Europe would strike a death blow at world imperialism by proclaiming the independence of the colonial people’, hence reviving the anti-imperialist tropes cherished by the London Bureau.²³ Around the same period, similar pro- European views were articulated by several ILP-affiliated activists and sympathisers, ranging from Brockway to Walter Padley, and fed into a wider discourse on European unity that sprang out of Marxist, left-wing revolutionary milieux, often directly or indirectly influenced by Trotsky’s writings, in the late 1930s–40s.²⁴

Ridley’s and Edwards’s views – popularised also through the ILP’s mouthpiece The New Leader – tackled the fundamental issue of ‘whether socialism could even be attained within the individual nation-state’, reaching a negative conclusion, and thereby struck a chord with a much wider community of left-wing elements who were leaning towards a similar position.²⁵ The ILP held the first meeting of the ‘International Socialist States of Europe’ in May 1946. It was a small affair attended largely by London Bureau veterans, producing at least one resolution and raising a series of questions to be addressed for the next meeting. For the ILP, Edwards chaired, accompanied by Ridley and McNair. Jacques Robin of the SFIO attended – presumably in place of Pivert, who had fallen ill – as did Gironella (POUM), Germans Heinz Heydorn and Willi Dittmer of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and Student Socialist Movement respectively, Witte of the Greek Archeio-Marxists, and the former member of the Dutch Revolutionair Socialistische Partij Jef Last. French socialists Claude Bourdet and Simon Wichené attended as well, representing the Conseil national de la Résistance and the Union Internationale contre le Racisme respectively.²⁶ Once again, the ILP was at the forefront of the organisational effort in July of that year, when at the ILP Summer School it was decided to expand the ILP internal newsletter ‘Between Ourselves’ to France, benefiting from Pivert’s support and editorial assistance, which would last until 1950.²⁷ This helps in understanding why London was again selected as location for the gathering of socialists who, in February 1947, appointed Edwards as chairman of the International Committee for the United Socialist States of Europe, the first embryonic institution of the MUSSE/MSEUE. The event attracted some prominent figures from France, such as Resistance leader and fervent European federalist Henri Frenay and radical pacifist Robert Jospin. In addition, a handful of anticolonial militants took the stage: South-African-born author Peter Abrahams spoke on behalf of the Pan-African Federation whereas Greek journalist Henry Polydefkis weighed in as representative of the International Union against Racism. A common theme running through the speeches that were delivered throughout the two days of the conference was the necessity to focus on major problems rather than quibble over allegedly minor details. As German socialist Heinz-Joachim Heydorn put it with characteristic brazenness in recalling interwar debates, ‘the dispute as to whom the Ruhr mines should belong was idiotic. The issue would not arise if the coal industries of Europe formed a single organism. There was only one real economic problem in Europe and that was how to mobilise its economic resources for the whole continent.’²⁸

It is worth stressing that these meetings occurred at a time when the British Labour Party was pressuring the SFIO not to attend ILP-connected events due to the strained relations with its once-affiliated party and the desire to create a new Socialist International, which the emergence of a competing pro-European group could thwart.²⁹ Yet, while Labour’s hostility arguably affected the attitude of SFIO heavyweights such as Guy Mollet or André Philip, who initially preferred to keep their distance from the MUSSE, it had no impact on figures like Pivert, whose relationship with the ILP and record of revolutionary transnational activism was already well established.³⁰ Even though the MUSSE/MSEUE did not emphasise any kinship – ideological, personal or otherwise – to the London Bureau, the movement could nonetheless build on interwar connections, and could not have come about without them.

Europe as a Third Force?

The idea that a united Europe could establish itself as a Third Force in world affairs – a distinct, autonomous federal bloc capable of successfully mediating between and peacefully coexisting with the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union – was by no means monopolised by the heirs of the London Bureau, not even within the British public debate. If anything, the period between 1935 and 1945 had been marked by a resurgent interest in various integrationist projects wherein future European supranational authorities would be tasked with far-reaching economic powers. The lure for supranational planning that somewhat peaked between 1940 and 1944 originated from the conviction – fairly common within the more internationally minded British elite – that national planning alone, however necessary, would not provide a sufficient guarantee against what E. H. Carr famously called ‘the two scourges’ of the 1930s: mass unemployment and war.³¹ However, many commentators, civil servants and politicians had no qualms about shelving these plans as soon as it became clear that the newly elected Labour government intended to prioritise domestic reform and struggled financially to retain control over the empire, two factors that undermined its chances of taking the mantle of leadership over continental matters. On the other hand, the MUSSE/MSEUE did not jettison that vision, at least until the fading influence of the ILP over the movement, the launching of the Marshall Plan and a change of mind about the EM brought about a significant softening of its thoroughgoingly anti-capitalist stance. The survival of a Third Force discourse, in spite of its impracticability, can be explained with the desire to escape the binary logic of the looming Cold War, which would force self-styled revolutionary – but steadfastly anti-Stalinist – socialists to pick a side between Washington and Moscow, a choice they found unpalatable.³²

The concept of a European ‘Third Front’ featured prominently in the London meeting of February 1947, during which it was presented as ‘a powerful instrument for ensuring friendship with and in between the peoples of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.’ as well as for establishing a ‘planned economy … carried out through the organic structure of a real social and economic democracy, based on workers’ control and not by any authoritarian medium of either monopoly capitalism or totalitarian state bureaucracy’.³³ Given these premises, it is unsurprising that Ridley and his followers had no appetite for the competing vision of European unity that former Prime Minister Winston Churchill had laid out in Zurich (September 1946), which they dismissed as hopelessly reactionary, and that they blamed first and foremost the Truman Administration for provoking tensions over Germany.³⁴

However, by June 1947 – when the MUSSE Inaugural Congress was held in Montrouge, near Paris – some major forces at work were undercutting the appeal of these ideas. Internally, it was becoming increasingly evident that, whatever its ambitions, the ILP lacked the financial resources to operate as MUSSE’s powerhouse. In preparation for the February meeting, Pivert and McNair had managed to overcome the rationing in France by having publications and conference materials for the group’s French audience produced in London. Nevertheless, these modest costs – coupled with the ILP’s campaign to advertise the event, on top of its regular expenses – were enough to exhaust the party’s funds and run a deficit: a clear indication of the ILP being hamstrung by its dismal economic condition.³⁵ The party’s crisis was further heightened by the passing in July 1946 of James Maxton, perhaps the last high-profile ILP member in the House of Commons, by its base’s staunch refusal to seek re-affiliation with Labour and by the subsequent defection of its three remaining MPs.³⁶

The floundering of the ILP goes some way to explaining why the next conference took place in France, and also why the SFIO could now step in as organiser without fear of alienating the British Labour Party. Henceforth, the trajectory of the MUSSE/MSEUE would become more and more entangled with that of the SFIO, and the image projected by the movement would reflect, from time to time, its contiguity with the Parisian cultural and intellectual scene.³⁷ Still, the growing leverage of French mainstream socialists was perhaps less consequential on the evolution of the MUSSE/MSEUE, at least in the short run, than US Secretary of State George Marshall’s speech at Harvard and the launching of the Plan named after him in June 1947. Within many Western European left-wing, non-communist parties, the promise of substantial economic aid led to a reassessment of the contribution Washington could make not only to the economic reconstruction of Europe but also to its political unification, even though there was no consensus about how much interference American dollars would translate into.³⁸ Moreover, the Plan’s inspiring – and carefully crafted – message assuaged fears about America’s supposed willingness to impose old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism abroad.³⁹ Both in France and Germany, a number of prominent socialists were struck by the boldness of the US initiative and negatively impressed by the Soviet refusal to engage in negotiations.⁴⁰ In Britain, left-wing critics who had lambasted the Labour government’s pro-American foreign policy were taken aback and some of them – as MP Richard Crossman, until then an eloquent advocate of a Third Force Europe – reversed course.⁴¹

The position papers for the Montrouge conference, wherein two central tenets of Ridley’s vision – radical anti-capitalism and Third Force rhetoric – were markedly scaled down, indicate that a change of mind was already underway. The MUSSE fell back on the much more practical concerns evoked at the opening meeting of 1946, namely the rational planning of European economic assets like coal, transportation and the banking sector. To be sure, some vestiges of the older orientation, implicit in muted criticism of both the United States and the Soviet Union and a promise of humanitarian socialist planning, had survived but the language would be used to refer to something more akin to non-alignment. The MUSSE’s newly proposed programme now prudently asserted that the primordial practical task would ‘be to … [draw] up a plan of production based on the needs of the people [of Europe] which will previously have been ascertained’.⁴²

Montrouge would attract some 164 delegates from 14 different countries to the MUSSE’s two-day conference, on 21–22 June 1947. Bob Edwards chaired with John McNair as treasurer and secretary. Ridley attended, as did Jacques Robin and Gironella. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, Willi Dittmer, Jef Last and Witte had all been founding members. The Greek Pafsanias Catsotas was a new face, as was Zygmunt Zaremba, head of the exiled Polish Socialist Party, and several Americans. The conference proceedings indicate that some participants clearly viewed Marshall’s speech as a breakthrough. A few, including Robin – who would soon take up the role of MUSSE Co-Secretary – and Brockway, were outspoken about the danger that the Plan might turn into an instrument for an economic colonisation of Europe by American big business; yet they also contended that the risk would be far greater had the Soviet Union and Western European socialists turned down the offer and opted out. In general, participants stressed that Europe’s autonomy rested upon its ability to mediate between the two blocs – the metaphor of bridge-building was used – and acknowledged, in one of the resolutions passed, that ‘the offer made by General Marshall of aid to Europe corresponds to a vital need but it will only constitute a factor of peace if it is unaccompanied by any form, avowed or unavowed, of political or economic domination’.⁴³ When, on 2 July 1947, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov walked out of the Paris conference on the Marshall Plan, thereby rejecting the US proposal, the MUSSE’s newsletter decried ‘the grave responsibility incurred by the USSR, in, on the one hand, provoking the dividing of Europe in two, and, on the other, prolonging the misery of the Eastern European peoples’.⁴⁴ It also concluded that European and American interests were ‘exactly complementary’, though not without some mild conditions: public negotiations managed exclusively via an international organisation, a European-staffed logistic chain and no military equipment.⁴⁵ While MUSSE still resisted the prospect of unreservedly siding with the Western bloc, it no longer aimed to stand halfway between the superpowers.

It took more than another year for the movement to break with the last defining element of the Ridley–Edwards original blueprint, namely the idea that revolutionary socialists were to maintain a strong degree of ideological purity and refuse to band together with non-socialist elements in the edification of a socialist Europe. Although figures like Alexandre Marc, then General Secretary of the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes (UEF), and the already mentioned Henri Frenay, both present at Montrouge, pressed the MUSSE to adopt a more ecumenical attitude, the majority of delegates stood firm.⁴⁶ This self-imposed isolation, further strengthened by Churchill’s ascendancy over the burgeoning United Europe Movement and by the Labour Party’s aloofness, arguably meant that conservative, centre-right federalists were overrepresented within the organising committee of the 1948 Hague Congress.⁴⁷ Around that time, the MUSSE ‘still prioritised socialism over Europe’ insofar as alliances were concerned.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the success of the Hague Congress as well as the fact that one of the Congress’s final resolutions recommended a supranational approach to economic integration prompted many MUSSE members to have second thoughts.⁴⁹

The meeting of the MUSSE’s International Committee in November 1948 marked a watershed in that respect, for it yielded a new programme, released in December, that substantially revised many of the tenets and strategic guidelines laid out in the previous two years.⁵⁰ The MUSSE denounced ongoing efforts by ‘Communists and reactionary forces’ to suppress democratic rule while praising the role of ‘the socialists, Christian Democrats, and non-Communist trade unions’ in buttressing parliamentary institutions, especially in France.⁵¹ However, the document stated that national achievements – including the British Labour Party’s sweeping social reforms – would ‘be of no avail unless they are united in an all-embracing political, economic and social plan at the European level’, encompassing minimum wages, collective bargaining, increased levels of production, centralised planning, economic modernisation in industry – facilitated by Marshall funds – the socialisation of the Ruhr’s key industries and an ‘unshakeable solidarity with all those who are oppressed or threatened in their liberties, in Berlin or Eastern Europe, in Spain or in Greece’.⁵² According to this new orientation, the MUSSE – which also stood for a directly and democratically elected ‘European Assembly’ – would ‘support all initiatives, governmental, parliamentary or of any other kind, that constitute a genuine advance’ towards those goals.⁵³ One month later, the MUSSE changed its name to MSEUE and began reaching out to non-socialist politicians, including French Christian Democrats such as Léo Hamon, who would later serve as delegate.⁵⁴ In December, it even applied to join the once despised EM.⁵⁵ The MSEUE’s embrace of a watered-down centre-left federalism, stripped of any reference to the international class struggle and bent on finding a middle ground with other Europeanist organisations, would substantially broaden the movement’s appeal among moderate socialists, but left the ILP old guard disenchanted and embittered.⁵⁶ By 1950, Edwards – reflecting on the establishment of the Strasbourg Consultative Assembly, the launching of the Schuman Plan, and the foundation of the European Payments Union – was ready to concede that ‘Western European unity in some form or another’ was ‘inevitable’, even though he insisted that ‘only a Europe rebuilt on socialist conceptions’ would ‘guarantee the peace of the world’.⁵⁷

Towards consensus?

The figure who best embodied MSEUE’s new course was the French former Minister of the Economy, Finance, and Industry André Philip, who was appointed Chairman in September 1949.⁵⁸ A Christian socialist from the SFIO and distinguished member of the French Resistance, Philip was also an academic who had cut his teeth in politics during the Popular Front era. His consistent advocacy of far-reaching economic planning and unflinching dirigisme, which triggered his decision to resign from government in 1947, caused him to lose influence at domestic level, up to the point of not being re-elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 1951. Yet these setbacks allowed him to focus on the cause of European unity: already a member of the EM and of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, Philip could raise the profile of the MSEUE through his contacts, experience and aura of respectability.⁵⁹ Besides, his brand of federalism displayed the kind of nuance the MSEUE was craving: a true believer in supranational solutions, he nevertheless acknowledged the advantages of a sector-by-sector pooling of resources, as his 1948 proposal for an authority managing the Ruhr’s coal and steel demonstrates.⁶⁰

Philip’s chairmanship inaugurated a new phase in the activities of the MSEUE: abandoning the rather vague and declamatory statements of the past, its members – divided into small commissions – started hammering out detailed, evidence-based reports that were discussed during congresses. In 1949–50 alone, these addressed topics such as planning in basic industries, Britain’s economic ties with the Commonwealth, the integration of agriculture, the German question and the legal challenges posed by the creation of European political authority, and they benefited from the input of the organisation’s experts, including German economist Karl Kühne, the Director of the French Service National des Statistiques Francis-Louis Closon, and the agronomist and later Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) President Michel Cépède.⁶¹ By and large, except for its unrelenting criticism of the political and economic consequences of nationalism – which did not spare the British Labour Party⁶² – this body of literature fitted the mould of post-war Western European social democracy: well-disposed towards parliamentary rule, anti-communist, mildly technocratic in its qualified endorsement of piecemeal social engineering, supportive of worker representation, a more equitable distribution of wealth, higher living standards, full employment and of the expansion of production.⁶³ Occasionally, Philip too would deploy less idealistic arguments in favour of European integration that echoed the welfarism of the mainstream centre-left discourse.⁶⁴ The same outlook would inform the MSEUE’s flagship publication from 1953 onwards, a monthly named Gauche Européenne, whose first subtitle, ‘Fédération et Démocratie Sociale’, was a far cry from the ILP’s ringing rhetoric deployed in the previous decade.⁶⁵ An array of pamphlets released from 1950 also made the language of MSEUE increasingly indistinguishable from that of the resurgent Socialist International, frequently emphasising the tangible benefits of economic unity and rational management of resources over national autarchy and capitalist anarchy.⁶⁶

Yet, when the MSEUE sought to dig deeper into its own identity and articulate a more coherent ideology, a number of problems began to emerge, stemming from the same theoretical difficulties socialism was grappling with in the post-war years.⁶⁷ Freeing the organisation from the intellectual baggage associated with the London Bureau was one thing; building consensus around a set of principles that a variety of strands of socialist thought, some of which dated back to the 1920s–30s, could espouse was quite another. Although the very limited archival evidence available makes it impossible to gauge how a wide cohort of militants reacted to MSEUE’s decision to venture into the doctrinal field, a few scattered sources can give a glimpse of the unresolved tensions and issues behind the picture of cohesion the MSEUE attempted to project externally.⁶⁸

The MSEUE’s Fifth Congress held in Frankfurt in February 1952 was centred on the analysis and identification of a specifically European form of socialism. As usual, several preliminary reports were drafted, one of which by Philip himself.⁶⁹ In deliberately sketchy fashion, he first illustrated Marx’s failure to predict the evolution of capitalist societies then engaged with the many ‘deviations’ that contemporary socialist parties were bound to challenge, including what he termed ‘economic Malthusianism’, that is, employers and employees joining forces to uphold national monopolies and restrict production.⁷⁰ In the final section, Philip outlined a possible European ‘technical revolution’ based on a combination of supranational planning and workers’ self-government, hinging upon the strengthening of the alliance with ‘American progressive capitalism’ on the one hand, and the forging of a ‘Federal Socialist Party of Europe’ within the recently re-founded Socialist International on the other.⁷¹

The resolution eventually voted at Frankfurt skipped over many points of Philip’s thesis, which he would flesh out elsewhere.⁷² Nevertheless, his text caught the attention of the Belgian sociologist and long-time socialist militant Léo Moulin, who sent him an eight-page letter to take issue with his assessment of the state of socialism, which the more pessimistic Moulin depicted as a crippled movement ‘forced to survive … within Europe, a Europe that is bloodless, enfeebled, decaying, partitioned – because of the failure of socialism – and chopped between the two Leviathans, the American and the Soviet’.⁷³ Despite the friendly tone of the message, Moulin warned that, without a proper ‘doctrinal revolution’ driven by ‘a Christian and realist humanism’, Philip’s technical revolution would amount to a ‘seizure of power by the techno-bureaucratic caste’, fostering a dystopian system run by managers that would be antithetical to true socialism.⁷⁴

In this context, the content of Moulin’s remarks matters less than the way he hinted at the common milieu he and Philip had shared before the Second World War. Both men were personally and intellectually close to the Belgian theorist and politician Hendrik de Man – whom Moulin praised in the letter – an author who had long argued in favour of a voluntaristic renewal of democratic socialism and whom Moulin and Philip still admired, despite de Man’s tarnished reputation and self-exile from Belgium due to his collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces.⁷⁵ Arguably, both men had been attracted by de Man’s anti-materialism and emphasis on the religious underpinnings of socialism, which also impressed many young francophone Catholics: the Protestant Philip and the agnostic but spiritually inclined Moulin had been contributors to the non-conformist journal Esprit, which helped circulate de Man’s ideas.⁷⁶ Moreover, as young socialists frustrated with reformism, they had been won over by de Man’s radical approach to economic planning, better known as ‘planism’: Philip, having disseminated de Man’s critique of Marxism in the late 1920s, became a leading proponent of a French Labour Plan akin to the one de Man had crafted for Belgium and sought to mobilise the SFIO around it in 1934–35, while Moulin entered de Man’s inner circle in Brussels.⁷⁷ Their heterodox background had put them in touch with the French group Révolution constructive, active in the 1930s, which issued one brochure written by Moulin and one prefaced by Philip, and with Dutchman Hendrik Brugmans – another unreconstructed ‘planist’, European federalist, and first rector of the College of Europe who, by 1952, had gained prominence within both the MSEUE and the EM.⁷⁸

The fact that Moulin sent his letter to de Man as well and that he lauded, within it, another distinguished Europeanist and former member of the interwar ‘planist’ network – the Belgian former Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak who, by that time, had started gravitating towards the MSEUE – suggests that Moulin might have hoped to take advantage of the MSEUE Congress to rekindle a much wider conversation about the foundations of socialism, and perhaps resume the intellectual battle de Man had fought two decades earlier.⁷⁹ Although Moulin’s initiative eventually bore no fruit, his text gives insight into the interwar roots of the rich and complex political culture MSEUE members and sympathisers had inherited.

Conclusion

While stressing the benefits of a trans-war approach to the study of the creation of the French welfare state after 1945, historian Philip Nord observed that ‘there are dangers in such a perspective as well, for it might well create an interpretive bias in favour of continuity’.⁸⁰ By the same token, any attempt to interpret the foundation of the MUSSE/MSEUE as a straightforward continuation of the interwar London Bureau is bound to obscure important differences in the way the two organisations understood internationalism and how they seized opportunities offered by the international environment to advance their agendas. Moreover, overstating the role of interwar legacies can easily lead to overlook how the MUSSE/MSEUE adjusted itself to the post-war context.⁸¹ This adaptation involved, among other changes, a shift away from revolutionary phraseology, a less straightforward commitment to a rapid process of decolonisation, and a greater willingness to engage with other political traditions supporting European unity from a non-socialist standpoint, most notably Christian Democracy. The project of a socialist Europe was therefore supplanted by that of a more loosely defined ‘social’ Europe.⁸²

Having said that, highlighting the existence of fils rouges and threads of discussion dating back to previous decades can significantly deepen our knowledge of the complex and multifaceted ways certain blueprints for European unity became appealing to parties and movements that had once been indifferent to them, if not outright hostile. It is no accident that a number of recent, ground-breaking studies have stressed the importance of pre-war debates in informing post-war attitudes by socialist parties and trade unions towards European integration: Patrick Pasture has underscored the impact of the First World War and the Great Depression in turning ‘Europe’ into a meaningful concept and a valuable space for collective action in the eyes of many members of the international labour movement; Christian Bailey has linked Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik to a tradition of German social democratic thinking about Central and Eastern Europe that emerged during the Locarno era; Brian Shaev has shown how interwar economic conceptions supporting trade liberalisation at regional level provided legitimacy to those socialists who endorsed the creation of a European economic community along the lines of that eventually created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome – and so on.⁸³ The more historians investigate the rich, diverse and nuanced sources of socialist Europeanism, the more any rigid, neat distinction between the interwar and the post-war period will come under scrutiny. As this chapter has tried to demonstrate, the study of networks can strengthen this ongoing trend and allow for a more thorough investigation of both European integration and European socialism.

Notes

1. 1.  See for example Luc-André Brunet, Forging Europe: Industrial Organisation in France, 1940–1952 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Conan Fischer, A Vision of Europe: Franco-German Relations during the Great Depression, 1929–1932 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Stephen Gross, ‘Introduction: European Integration across the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017): 205–7; Kiran Klaus Patel and Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Continuity and Change in European Cooperation during the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History 27, no. 2 (2018).

2. 2.  The best published account (up to 1950) remains Wilfried Loth, ‘The Mouvement Socialiste pour les Etats-Unis d’Europe (MSEUE)’ in Documents on the History of European Integration, ed. Walter Lipgens and Wilfried Loth, vol. IV (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991).

3. 3.  On these groupings, see Walter Lipgens, Anfänge der europäischen Einigungspolitik 1945–1950 (Stuttgart: Klet, 1977) and Sergio Pistone, ed., I movimenti per l’unità europea dal 1945 al 1954 (Milan: Jaca Book, 1992).

4. 4.  Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 252.

5. 5.  For instance, Harold Mock has recently linked Willy Brandt’s involvement in the youth branch of the London Bureau to his alleged post-nationalism as German Chancellor: see Harold Mock, ‘A Post-National Europe: Brandt’s Vision for the European Community between the Superpowers’, in Willy Brandt and International Relations: Europe, the USA, and Latin America, ed. Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

6. 6.  For a more extensive discussion of the London Bureau, see Willy Buschak, Das Londoner Büro: Europäische Linkssozialisten in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Amsterdam: Stichting Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1985); Michel Dreyfus, ‘Bureau de Paris et bureau de Londres: le socialisme de gauche en Europe entre les deux guerres’, Mouvement social 112 (1980); Michel Dreyfus, ‘Socialistes de gauche et trotskystes en Europe 1933–1938’, in Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij, ed. Francesca Gori, vol. II (Florence: Olschki, 1982); Willy Buschak, ‘The London Bureau’, in The Cambridge History of Socialism, ed. Marcel Van der Linden, vol. II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

7. 7.  According to a leading authority on Trotskyism, ‘vastly different concepts’ about the New International and the fact that these groups ‘disagreed profoundly on a number of programmatic issues’ made unity of action practically impossible. Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 260.

8. 8.  For a recent overview of the tensions between national and transnational forms of anti-fascism, see Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and David J. Featherstone, eds., Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).

9. 9.  As leading figures of the group believed, the ‘case for an internationalist and socialist struggle against colonialism was underpinned, and reinforced, by its interpretation as one of the logical outcomes of capitalist oppression. All in all, their anti-colonialism was not closed in on itself, but seen as part of the battle for socialism that must be conducted globally’, Quentin Gasteuil, ‘A Comparative and Transnational Approach to Socialist Anti-Colonialism: The Fenner Brockway–Marceau Pivert Connection, 1930s–1950s’, in Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s, ed. Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 136.

10. 10.  See for example the Bureau’s 1936 programme of action: A Lead to World Socialism: on Spain, War, Fascism, Imperialism—Report of Revolutionary Socialist Congress, Brussels, October 31st–November 2nd 1936 (London: POUM for the International Bureau for International Socialist Unity, 1936), 30–32.

11. 11.  For a brief but well-documented account of the early years of the ILP-led London Bureau, see Gidon Cohen, The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II (London: Tauris, 2017).

12. 12.  The best statement of the ILP’s position towards Spain is arguably Fenner Brockway, The Truth about Barcelona (n.d.; Independent Labour Party, 1937).

13. 13.  On the impact of the London Bureau on the formation of the POUM and on the Spanish Civil War in general, see Victor Alba and Stephen Schwarz, Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M. (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988) especially 87–110; Michel Dreyfus, ‘L’Internationale Ouvrière Socialiste, le Bureau de Londres et la Guerre d’Espagne’, in Internationalism in the Labour Movement 1830–1940, ed. Frits L. van Holthoon and Marcel van der Linden (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 355–68; Alan Sennet, Revolutionary Marxism in 1930–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 200–202. On the ILP contingent, see also Christopher Hall, ‘In Spain with Orwell’: George Orwell and the Independent Labour Party Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Perth: Tippermuir Book, 2013) which contains a list of names and useful biographical information.

14. 14.  A list was published in A New Hope for World Socialism (The Resolutions Adopted at the Revolutionary Socialist Congress, Paris, Feb. 19th–25th, 1938, together with the introductory speeches) (London: International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity, 1938), 2.

15. 15.  On Padmore’s anticolonial activism, see in particular Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). C. L. R. James’s involvement with the ILP has been thoroughly investigated in several biographies, including the recent one by John L. Williams, C.L.R. James: A Life beyond the Boundaries (London: Constable, 2022).

16. 16.  On the eve of the Second World War, the ILP was ‘a small, insignificant social democratic party whose freedom of thought meant it was deeply divided on most issues’, Keith Laybourn, The Independent Labour Party, 1914–1939: The Political and Cultural History of a Socialist Party (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), 149. On the ILP’s factionalism, see also Ian Bullock, Under Siege: The Independent Labour Party in Interwar Britain (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2017), 297–314.

17. 17.  On Gironella, see Jaume Fabre and Josep Maria Huertas, ‘Enric Adroher Gironella, vuitanta anys de lluita’, Revista de Girona 126 (1988), 12–22; on Pivert, see Jacques Kergoat, Marceau Pivert: ‘socialiste de gauche’ (Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier/Les Editions Ouvrières, 1994), 132–5. In his notebooks, Victor Serge reported that Gironella and Pivert co-authored a political manifesto in 1944: Victor Serge, Notebooks: 1936–1947, ed. Claudio Albertani and Claude Rioux (New York: New York Review Books, 2019), 433.

18. 18.  On Ridley, see Robert Morrell, The Gentle Revolutionary: The Life and Works of Frank Ridley, Socialist and Secularist (London: Freethought History Research Group, 2003); Theo Williams, ‘George Padmore and the Soviet Model of the British Commonwealth’, Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 2 (2019). On Edwards, see Matthew Broad, ‘Ignoring Europe? Reassessing the British Labour Party’s Policy towards European Integration, 1951–60’, Journal of European Integration History 24, no 1 (2018); Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 710–12.

19. 19.  F. A. Ridley and Bob Edwards, The United Socialist States of Europe (London: National Labour Press Ltd, 1944), 3, 7.

20. 20.  Ridley and Edwards, The United Socialist States of Europe, 33, 40.

21. 21.  Ridley and Edwards, The United Socialist States of Europe, 8, 9, 53.

22. 22.  Ridley and Edwards, The United Socialist States of Europe, 68–75. Ridley would subsequently credit Trotsky’s 1926 article Europe and America as their main source of inspiration. See for example F. A. Ridley, Unite or Perish! U.S.S.E., United Socialist States of Europe (London: ILP, 1947).

23. 23.  Ridley and Edwards, The United Socialist States of Europe, 101.

24. 24.  See for example Fenner Brockway, The Way Out (London: ILP, 1942); Walter Padley, The Economic Problem of the Peace (London: Gollancz, 1944), especially 89–113. An echo of these arguments can be found in George Orwell’s 1947 plea for the Socialist United States of Europe; see George Orwell, ‘Toward European Unity’, Partisan Review 14, no. 4 (1947), 346–51. See also R. N. Berki, ‘Marxism and European Unity’, in European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period, ed. Peter M. R. Stirk (London: Pinter, 1989), 26–41.

25. 25.  Michael Newman, ‘British Socialists and the Question of European Unity, 1939–45’, European Studies Review 10 (1980), 80.

26. 26.  ‘Minutes of the first meeting of the International Socialist States of Europe’, London School of Economics, Independent Labour Party Archive, London/LSE/ILP/3/76.

27. 27.  ‘Minutes of ILP NAC meeting 4–5 August 1946’, London/LSE/ILP/3/34. On Pivert’s early commitment to socialist Europeanism, see Talbot Imlay, ‘Marceau Pivert and the Travails of an International Socialist’, in The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

28. 28.  See Report of an International Conference held in London, February 22–23, 1947 in Support of a Campaign for the United Socialist States of Europe (London: ILP, 1947), 14.

29. 29.  On the process leading to the creation of the Socialist International, see at least Ettore Costa, The Labour Party, Denis Healey and the International Socialist Movement: Rebuilding the Socialist International during the Cold War, 1945–1951 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

30. 30.  On Labour’s refusal to attend the February 1947 meeting, see the letter from Windle to McNair, 19 February 1947, Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester, Labour Party Archive, ID/Healey/10/1. On Labour’s pressures on the SFIO, see Healey to Mollet, 30 January 1947, ID/Healey/7 and the Pivert-McNair correspondence, January–February 1947, Archives Nationales, Paris, Papers of Marceau Pivert, 559AP/29.

31. 31.  See E. H. Carr, ‘The Two Scourges’, Times, 5 December 1940. Carr’s wartime fascination with supranational planning is laid bare in his book Conditions of Peace (London: Macmillan, 1942). On supranational planning in the British debate, see Peter Wilson, ‘The New Europe Debate in Wartime Britain’, in Visions of European Unity, ed. Philomena Murray and Paul Rich (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Mark Gilbert, ‘The Sovereign Remedy of European Unity: The Progressive Left and Supranational Government 1935–1945’, International Politics 46 (2009); Tommaso Milani, ‘From Laissez-Faire to Supranational Planning: The Economic Debate within Federal Union (1938–1945)’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 23, no. 4 (2016).

32. 32.  Within the British context, this equally applies to left-wing members of the Labour Party who disparaged piecemeal reformism and felt uncomfortable with the Atlanticist orientation of Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy. Their views were condensed in the pamphlet Keep Left (1947): see Jonathan Schneer, ‘Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (1984); R. M. Douglas, The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). It is indeed revealing that a few members of Keep Left—R. H. S. Crossman, Michael Foot, Geoffrey Bing and Leslie Hale—agreed to attend the conference held by the MUSSE in Montrouge in June 1947, despite the presence of a strong ILP contingent. See Rapport de la deuxième conférence internationale pour les États Unis Socialistes d’Europe. Paris, 21 et 22 Juin, 1947 (London: The International Committee of Study and Action for the United Socialist States of Europe, 1947), 8.

33. 33.  ‘Annual Report of the National Administrative Council of the Independent Labour Party to be submitted at the 55th Annual Conference, The Town Hall, Ayr, April 5th to April 7th, 1947’, ILP/5/1947/3.

34. 34.  See the already cited Unite or Perish! by Ridley where the Truman Doctrine is discussed in some detail.

35. 35.  ‘National Administrative Council of the ILP—Income and Expenditures Account for the Year ended 29th February 1948’, ILP/3/36.

36. 36.  See John McNair, James Maxton: The Beloved Rebel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), 315–31; William Knox, James Maxton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 144–5.

37. 37.  For an overview, see Hugh McDonnell, Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947–1962 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 104–36.

38. 38.  See Richard T. Griffiths, ed., Socialist Parties and the Question of Europe in the 1950’s (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Othmar Nikola Haberl and Lutz Niethammer, Der Marshall-Plan und die europäische Linke (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1986); Jan de Graaf, Socialism Across the Iron Curtain: Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), especially 243–81.

39. 39.  On the ‘New Deal synthesis’ underlying the Plan, see Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 22–3. For a more critical view, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 299–304.

40. 40.  See for example Gérard Bossuat, La France, l’aide américaine et la construction européenne, vol. I (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1997), 141–75; Gerard Bailey, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 115–44.

41. 41.  See Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World: Vol. I—The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1900–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 168–72.

42. 42.  Printed in Rapport de la deuxième conférence internationale pour les États-Unis Socialistes d’Europe. Paris, 21 et 22 juin, 1947, 135.

43. 43.  Rapport de la deuxième conférence internationale, especially 29, 43, 67. For the conference papers, see also International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe Collection.

44. 44.  ‘Between Ourselves, July 1947’, ILP/5/1947/4.

45. 45.  ‘Between Ourselves, July 1947’, ILP/5/1947/4.

46. 46.  See for example ‘Compte Rendu de la Réunion du Comité d’Études et d’Action pour les États-Unis Socialistes d’Europe’, 25–26 October 1947, Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU, Fiesole), Mouvement européen (ME) Fiesole/EUI/ME-368 and the strong stance taken by the Belgian Raymond Rifflet, ‘Vers l’Union occidentale?’, Les Cahiers socialistes: revue indépendante de critique sociale 20, no. 5 (1948). On the UEF’s more flexible line, see Bertrand Vayssière, Vers une Europe fédérale? Les espoirs et les actions fédéralistes au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007), 155–74. On Frenay’s attitude towards the MUSSE, see Robert Belot, Henri Frenay, de la Résistance à l’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 2003), especially 525–6.

47. 47.  See Bertrand Vayssière, ‘Le Congrès de La Haye et les fédéralistes ou la quête d’improbables États Généraux de l’Europe’, in Le Congrès de l’Europe à La Haye (1948–2008), ed. Jean-Michel Guieu and Christophe Le Dréau (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), 79–91. The MUSSE did not take an active role in the Hague Congress and sent only a few observers.

48. 48.  Anne-Isabelle Richard, ‘The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anti-colonialism and Socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 21, no. 4 (2014), 527.

49. 49.  See the debate taking place at the Puteaux Congress: ‘Assemblée Générale du Comité d’étude et d’action pour les États-Unis Socialistes d’Europe—Puteaux, 22 Juin 1948’, Fiesole/EUI/ME-87.

50. 50.  According to Loth, this was largely a consequence of the SFIO’s ascendancy over the MUSSE: see Wilfried Loth, Sozialismus und Internationalismus: d. franz. Sozialisten u.d. Nachkriegsordnung Europas 1940–1950 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977), 99–101, 211–14.

51. 51.  ‘Programme d’action socialiste européenne’, Les Cahiers socialistes: revue indépendante de critique sociale 22, no. 5 (1948), 18.

52. 52.  ‘Programme d’action socialiste européenne’, 18–19.

53. 53.  ‘Programme d’action socialiste européenne’, 19–20.

54. 54.  See the much more diverse list of participants to the Paris Congress of November 1949, Fiesole/EUI/CIF-33. On the change of name, see also Olivier Philip, Le problème de l’union européenne (Paris: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1950), 191–3; Henri Brugmans, L’idée européenne 1920–1970 (Bruges: De Tempel, 1970), 127–8.

55. 55.  Letter from Gironella to Rebattet, 2 December 1948, Fiesole/EUI/ME-494.

56. 56.  See the dense correspondence, and especially the letter written by Edwards and McNair dated 12 October 1950, between the British section and Gironella in HAEU, Papers of Fernand Dehousse, Fiesole/EUI/FD-80. See also the undated letter from Brockway to Gironella in HAEU, Movimiento federalista europeo (MFE), Fiesole/EUI/MFE-48.

57. 57.  Third European Congress of the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe (London: The British Centre of the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe, 1950), 2. For a critique of the Strasbourg Consultative Assembly from a socialist-federalist perspective, see Enric Gironella, Le “Serment” de Strasbourg (les raisons d’un échec) (Paris: MSEUE, 1950).

58. 58.  Philip took over from the Luxembourger Michel Rasquin, who had resigned in August out of discomfort with American financial support for the EM and the position of strength British Tories were enjoying within it. See the ‘Communiqué de presse’ in Bulletin du Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe 6 (1949), 12–13; ‘Lettre du Comité Exécutif International du M.S.E.U.E. à Michel Rasquin’, 2 September 1949, and other related documents in Fiesole/EUI/ME-369.

59. 59.  On Philip, see Loïc Philip, André Philip (Paris: Beauchesne, 1988), especially 9–138; Christian Chevandier and Gilles Morin, eds., André Philip, socialiste, patriote, chrétien: colloque ‘Redécouvrir André Philip’ organisé à l’Assemblée nationale les 13 et 14 mars 2003 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2005); Mathieu Fulla, Les socialistes français et l’économie (1944–1981) (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016), especially 70–77.

60. 60.  See for example André Philip, ‘L’unification économique de l’Europe’, Cahiers du monde nouveau 5, no. 3 (1949), 32–38; André Philip, L’unité européenne: l’heure de la décision (Paris: Editions du M.S.E.U.E., 1950), especially 16–18.

61. 61.  See the documentation for the Third and Fourth Congresses – held in Paris in November 1949 and in Strasbourg in November 1950 respectively – in Fiesole/EUI/ME-366 and Fiesole/EUI/ME-365.

62. 62.  A full-blown attack came from Philip himself: see André Philip, Le Socialisme et l’unité européenne: réponse à l’exécutif du Labour Party (Paris: Editions du M.S.E.U.E, 1950).

63. 63.  On the post-war culture of social democracy, see Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 117–85; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 360–89.

64. 64.  See for example André Philip, L’Europe unie et sa place dans l’économie internationale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953), especially 125–66.

65. 65.  See for example the opening editorial, ‘Notre but … la Gauche Européenne’, Gauche Européenne 1 (March 1953), 1–2.

66. 66.  See for example Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe (Brussels: MSEUE, 1950); Raymond Rifflet, Europe et socialisme: un bilan politique (Brussels: MSEUE, 1951); La Communauté Européenne de Défense (C.E.D) vue par les jeunes du Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe (Bagnolet: MSEUE, 1953); Le projet de Constitution Européenne: le socialisme et l’Europe (Brussels: MSEUE, 1953); La construction de l’Europe vue par les Jeunes du Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe (Brussels: MSEUE, 1953); Raymond Rifflet, Du fédéralisme utopique au fédéralisme scientifique (Brussels: MSEUE, 1956).

67. 67.  See Dietrich Orlow, Common Destiny: A Comparative History of the Dutch, French, and German Social Democratic Parties, 1945–1969 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 65–101; Martin Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 191–6.

68. 68.  It is worth stressing that the MSEUE central archives in Paris were largely destroyed in the 1960s.

69. 69.  See André Philip, ‘Pour l’étude des principes d’un socialisme européen’, Fiesole/EUI/ME-364. Other reports were penned by Herman Louis Brill, Otto Bach, Sébastien Constant, Gérard Jacquet, Hendrik Brugmans and the already cited Gironella and Edwards. Some—including Philip’s—were published in Bulletin du Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe 2 (1951).

70. 70.  Philip, ‘Pour l’étude des principes d’un socialisme européen’.

71. 71.  Philip, ‘Pour l’étude des principes d’un socialisme européen’.

72. 72.  See for example André Philip, ‘Pour l’étude des principes d’un socialisme européen’, Christianisme social 3–4 (1952), 154–60; André Philip, ‘La crise doctrinale du socialisme en Europe’, La revue socialiste 56 (1952), 346–59. See the official MSEUE ‘Résolution sur les principes d’un socialisme européen’ in Fiesole/EUI/ME-364.

73. 73.  See the letter dated 26 February1952, in Archives Nationales (Paris), Papers of André Philip, 625AP/4.

74. 74.  Letter dated 26 February1952, in Archives Nationales (Paris), Papers of André Philip, 625AP/4. Moulin’s argument drew heavily on his book, Socialism of the West: An Attempt to Lay the Foundations of a New Socialist Humanism (London: Gollancz, 1948).

75. 75.  Evidence from de Man’s private papers shows that he continued to correspond with Philip and—more frequently and on more substantive issues—with Moulin after 1945. See AMSAB-Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Ghent), De Man-Lecocq Archive/611–615 and 526–530. On de Man’s socialism, see Peter Dodge, ‘Voluntaristic Socialism: An Examination of the Implications of Hendrik de Man’s Ideology’, International Review of Social History 3, no. 3 (1958), 385–417. For Philip’s and Moulin’s appraisals of de Man, see for example André Philip, Les Socialistes (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 68–72; Léo Moulin, ‘Henri de Man en 1985’, Bulletin de l’Association pour l’étude de l’œuvre d’Henri de Man 14 (1987), 81–4.

76. 76.  See Michel Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 1930–1950 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 95–7; Léo Moulin, Libre parcours: itinéraire spirituel d’un agnostique (Brussels: Racines, 1995), 78–81.

77. 77.  See Tommaso Milani, Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy: The Idea of Planning in Western Europe, 1914–1940 (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 90–94, 163, 128.

78. 78.  See Stéphane Clouet, De la rénovation à l’utopie socialistes: Révolution constructive, un groupe d’intellectuels socialistes des années 1930 (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1991) with Moulin’s preface (11–14); Henri Brugmans, À travers le siècle (Brussels: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, 1994); Caroline Vermeulen, Le Collège d’Europe à l’ère des pionniers (1950–1960) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), 131–2.

79. 79.  See the letter in AMSA-IGS, De Man Archive/539. On Moulin’s relationship with Spaak, see his 1988 interview with Alain Dantoing whose transcript can be accessed at the state archives in Brussels (CegeSoma) (AA2268/505) and his letters to Spaak at HAEU (Papers of Paul-Henri Spaak, PHS-502). For Spaak’s attitude towards MSEUE in spring 1952, see Paul-Henri Spaak and Jeanne Hersch, ‘Les socialistes européens à Francfort’, Monde Nouveau-Paru 57 (1952), 11–16. Moulin also praised the Belgian monthly Cahiers socialistes edited by Rifflet, which frequently published MSEUE contributions while trying to revive a socialist humanism informed by de Man’s thought. See Eva Schandevyl, ‘Intellectuels belges en quête d’un nouveau socialisme: l’aventure des Cahiers socialistes (1944–1953)’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 13, no. 1 (2006); Bertrand Vayssière, Européiste et eurocrate: la vie fédéraliste de Raymond Rifflet (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2018), especially 71–84, 106–8.

80. 80.  Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 13.

81. 81.  See for example the speech by Mollet at the Fourth MSEUE Congress, celebrating this flexibility [Fiesole/EUI/MFE-32].

82. 82.  See Aurélie Dianara Andry, Social Europe, the Road not Taken: The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

83. 83.  See Patrick Pasture, ‘The Interwar Origins of International Labour’s European Commitment (1919–1934)’, Contemporary European History 10, no. 2 (2001); Christian Bailey, ‘Socialist Visions of European Unity in Germany: Ostpolitik since the 1920s?’, Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017); Brian Shaev, ‘Liberalising Regional Trade: Socialists and European Economic Integration’, Contemporary European History 27, no. 2 (2018).

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