a federal reorganization of Europe . The harsh experience of recent decades has opened the eyes of even those who refused to see , and has brought about many changes favourable to our ideal ’ 7 .
In 1943 , Jean Monnet , at a meeting of the Comité français de libération nationale , states :
‘ There will be no peace in Europe if the States are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty ... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples ... prosperity and the social developments that must go with it [ which ] will only be possible if they form a federation ...’.
This was the ultimate goal of the Schuman Declaration drafted by Monnet and his collaborators and made public by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 .
The fledgling federalism project met with a setback at the hands of the French National Assembly – and in particular of the French Communist Party ( PCF ) and the Rassemblement du peuple français ( RPF ) established by General de Gaulle – in the form of the rejection of the European common defence project that Jean Monnet had launched and which was supposed to have filled with political content the – initially economic – Coal and Steel Community . Following that rejection ( 1954 ), Jean Monnet resigned from the post of President of the High Authority of the ECSC .
Old-established political power and its traditional interests were therefore resisting a project that threatened to weaken it through the sharing of sovereign prerogatives . But the political trauma of the wars of the 20th century had instilled the idea of change into
7 . Ibid
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