Euro & Hitler

Questo sta sempre in mezzo…

He is always in the middle…

Index

1) L’Euro? Lo ha inventato Adolf Hitler (www.ilnavigatorecurioso.it/)

2) What's Hitler got to do with the euro? Everything (Boris Johnson www.telegraph.co.uk)

L’Euro? Lo ha inventato Adolf Hitler (www.ilnavigatorecurioso.it/)

Albert Speer, l'allora ministro nazista degli armamenti, aveva teorizzato singole economie inserite in un sistema tariffario unico per realizzare una produzione industriale su larga scala. Senza dazi, senza tariffe e con una sola valuta. Vi ricorda qualcosa? Tipo l'euro o la Cee?

1942. Terzo Reich. Il ministro dell’economia della Berlino nazista, Walter Funk, organizza una conferenza con economisti, politici e i vertici delle maggiori industrie.

La questione sul tavolo è che uso fare dei territori conquistati e da conquistare. Albert Speer, l’allora ministro degli armamenti, suggerisce la necessità di coinvolgere le altre economie europee.

Nasce un progetto dal nome inequivocabile: Europaische Wirtschaftgesellschaft. Che tradotto in italiano suona più o meno così: «Società economica europea». Un sistema di scambi commerciali, di trattati industriali basati sull’utilizzo di una sola moneta.

Speer, durante gli interrogatori condotti dagli Alleati dopo la guerra, aveva dichiarato che per il nazismo il mero sfruttamento sarebbe stato insufficiente.

«Meglio risollevare», aveva aggiunto, «singole economie e inserirle in un sistema tariffario unico per realizzare una produzione industriale su larga scala». Senza dazi, senza tariffe e con una sola valuta. Vi ricorda qualcosa? Tipo l’euro o la Cee?

La risposta nel corso degli anni è arrivata da molti complottisti, ma anche da lucidi politici. Nel 2002 Boris Johnson, quando era giornalista per lo Spectator e prima di diventare sindaco di Londra, scrisse un lungo editoriale per affiancare l’euro ad Adolf Hitler.

«Oggi, per noi, la prospettiva di revanscismo tedesco sembra ridicola e le difficoltà di integrazione europea sembrano molto preoccupanti. Può essere vero che ciò ci turbi di più», ebbe a scrivere, «proprio per il fatto che non siamo stati conquistati da Hitler. Ma dire che l’euro non ha nulla a che fare con la guerra, o Hitler, è assurdo».

La frase – un po’ fortina – trae la sua origine da alcuni libri pubblicati nel decennio precedente. Uno di quelli che fece più scalpore è da attribuire allo storico John Laughland. The Tainted Source (La sorgente infetta), ovvero le origini antidemocratiche dell’idea europea.

Lo storico arriva a capovolgere la tradizione e cerca di dimostrare che il progetto di un’Europa unificata non è figlio del pensiero liberale, ma delle ideologie totalitarie. E che lungi dal rappresentare una conquista di libertà, il superamento della sovranità nazionale mina alle basi stesse dello Stato di diritto.

Ovviamente, l’idea dell’Europa comune targata Hitler sarebbe stata più che un’utopia irrealizzabile un incubo indescrivibile, il fatto è che, secondo alcuni storici, il progetto nato da quella terribile Conferenza del 1942 avrebbe poi dato ai padri fondatori della Cee una serie di spunti.

La guerra avrebbe insegnato a Jean Monnet e Jacques Delors come addomesticare il potere economico di Berlino.

Non a caso i due padri fondatori si sono dimostrati così determinati nel costruire un progetto ampio, e creare la Comunità europea del carbone e dell’acciaio, alla quale in un certo senso Francia e Germania hanno ceduto la sovranità su due settori vitali per l’economia dell’epoca. Che l’euro possa essere figlio di Hitler non è nulla di così eccezionale, se si pensa che una buona fetta della tecnologia nazista è poi stata riutilizzata dall’Occidente.

 What's Hitler got to do with the euro? Everything (Boris Johnson www.telegraph.co.uk)

Come off it. Donnez-moi un break, as we used to say in Brussels. Here is a harmless, light-hearted commercial attacking the euro, and everyone goes bananas. Lord Brittan of the Berlaymont has issued a press release, calling it "tasteless", "nasty" and "desperate". A public relations official representing Eddie Izzard, the popular transvestite comedian and leading authority on monetary policy, has expressed the strongest possible disapproval. And what has enraged these great men?

Surely they cannot object to the role of Sir Bob Geldof, he who once urged the British people to "give us yer fo----- money", and who now tells Frankfurt to "keep yer fo----- euros". Surely they can't mind the beaming Labour MPs, chefs, rock stars, comedians, anti-Izzard transvestites and everyone else who thinks this country is better off, frankly, safeguarding its macro-economic independence and democratic freedom.

No, what gets the europhile goat is a spoof clip of Rik Mayall playing Hitler, so short I almost missed it. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but apparently it was "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Euro". And it seems to be the view of the europhiles that there is nothing more perverted, disgusting, twisted and unreal than to associate Adolf Hitler with the vision for European Union.

So now is the time for a quick history lesson. Not that I wish to show that all those who support the euro are in any sense Hitlerian, or Nazi, or fascist - far from it - though I know some who are. The plain historical truth, no matter how much Mr Izzard may splutter, is that the European Union did indeed have a weird prototype in Hitler's wartime Reich. In fact, you can only really understand the psychological background of today's experiment in economic and political integration if you understand the horror of what Hitler did in the war.

Let us begin with a conference in Berlin in 1942, attended by economists and politicians, including Walter Funk, the Nazi economics minister. The matter in hand was how to make use of the subject territories; and it was proposed that there should be a Europaische Wirtschaftgesellschaft. Which means, you guessed it, a European Economic Community.

This noble-sounding idea was taken up by Albert Speer, who was then Hitler's minister for armaments. Speer was trying to think of ways to cheer up the French, and to spur them to serve the German war effort. The French were fed up with the depredations of the dreaded Otto Sauckel, whose idea of economic co-operation was to treat France as a reservoir for forced labour. The French workers were fleeing their factories. They were being thoroughly bolshy. So Speer teamed up with the Vichy industry minister, Jean Bichelonne, and proposed a compromise by which German needs could be met and French industry was not ruined.

In 1943, Bichelonne was even invited to Berlin, as a guest of the state, and - as Sir John Keegan has recounted - he and Speer discussed plans for a common market. As he told his interrogators after the war, Speer had concluded that exploitation was inefficient. ''It would have been the supposition," he said, "that the tariff was lifted from this large economic area and through this a mutual production was really achieved. For any deeply thinking individual, it is clear that the tariffs we have in western Europe are unbearable. So the possibility of production on a large scale only exists through this scheme."

There, in a nutshell, you have the dream of European economic union: get rid of the tariffs; create a gigantic single market; realise economies of scale. As Speer told Gitta Sereny towards the end of his life: "When Bichelonne and I played with the idea of a European Economic Union, we thought of it as Utopian. But it wasn't all that Utopian, was it?"

As it happens, the European Union that Hitler created was very far from Utopian. It was a nightmare, not only morally but also economically. All occupied countries had to pay Germany for the costs of their occupation. These costs had to be paid in Marks, but the German clearing bank, the Deutsche Verrechnungskasse, so grossly overvalued the Mark that the subject countries could never bridge the deficit. That meant tax had to go up at home; of France's total wartime public expenditure, 49 per cent was on payments to Germany.

The war taught Jean Monnet, and Jacques Delors, his much younger heir, how dreadfully France could suffer under untrammelled German economic dominance. But the Speer-Bichelonne deal suggested important institutional ways in which Germany could be tamed. That is why, after the war, Monnet and Schuman were so determined to build novel constitutional arrangements, and they created the European Coal and Steel Community, by which France and Germany completely ceded sovereignty over those two vital industries to a common European institution.

It did not matter to those visionary founders that their system was not democratic. Their memories and their imaginations were full of the war and the Hitlerian tyranny. One day Germany might grow great again, and there was only one long-term solution: to create one nation out of many. The only way to end nationalism, they decided, was to end nations and to create the beginnings of a European state.

It was a grand vision. Fifty years on, it is hopelessly out of date. In the 1950s, the democratic objections naturally seemed trifling to Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi, Spaak. Better to have unaccountable European institutions, they reasoned, than another round of vicious national sparring.

Today, to us, the prospect of German revanchism seems ludicrous and the democratic difficulties of EU integration seem very troubling. It may be true that these objections trouble us more, precisely because we were not conquered by Hitler and did not see our democratic institutions discredited or destroyed.

But to say that the euro has nothing to with the war, or Hitler, is absurd. It has everything to do with Hitler, and we should be grateful to the little cinema advert for pointing it out.

Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator