Jean Monnet — The First Statesman of Interdependence

Recounts the diplomatic maneuvers of one of the principal architects of France's post-Second World War economic recovery and of the drive for European unity, detailing how Monnet used his diplomatic influence to galvanize the bureaucracies of the Continent.

Duchˆne, Monnet's aide and a correspondent for The Economist, here sets out to chart the remarkable, if somewhat obscure, life of the architect of the European Community and also--a lesser-known fact--of America's wartime munitions effort. Monnet was one of those men who spend their lives forging contacts with the useful, the powerful, and the discreetly influential. Born into a prosperous family in Cognac in 1888, he acquired a merchant's internationalist outlook selling the region's eponymous brandy all over the world. Early in life, he felt at ease with the Anglo-Saxon world and believed that he could mediate between it and a suspicious France. His moment came in WW I, when he coordinated supply trains among the Allies. So began a long career of manipulating economic agreements between democracies, including a highly successful stint as munitions advisor in Washington during WW II. After the war, Adenauer and the German government turned to Monnet to negotiate a steel pact between the French and German cartels that would lay the basis for a lasting economic entente, allaying French fears of steel-based German militarism and market domination while preserving Germany's centuries-old tradition of steel manufacture. The result was the embryo of the European Economic Community, a vision that Monnet had harbored as early as 1943, when he and De Gaulle first discussed the shape of liberated Europe. Men like Monnet, according to Duchˆne, were able to create the EEC because they were not politicians but enlightened technocrats--a breed with a bad name these days. As this book makes clear, however, technocrats can be a saving grace in periods of turmoil. This is not a very personal book; readers would be better advised to turn to Monnet's own memoirs. But it does reveal a complete and satisfying picture of a complex age of transition for Western Europe. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Born in the French town of Cognac, a world center of brandy production, Jean Monnet (1888-1979) went from being a cognac salesman in his father's firm to "Mr. Europe," the driving force behind European unification. Through behind-the-scenes diplomacy in WW II, Monnet helped bring U.S. power and material to bear decisively on the defeat of Hitler; worked with his sometime opponent, Charles de Gaulle, to secure Marshall Plan aid for France; and later cemented the Euratom treaty. The Monnet Plan (which laid the foundation for France's postwar industrial renewal) and the Schuman Plan (devised principally by Monnet but named after French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman) forged a Franco-German coal and steel federation that, in Duchene's view, laid the cornerstone of today's European Union. In this absorbing, dramatic biography, Duchene, an Economist correspondent and former aide to Monnet, closely reassesses the achievements of an "entrepreneur in the public interest." This long overdue biography brings him out of the shadows. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When World War I broke out in 1914, two-thirds of Europe was governed by four families. Eighty years later, after the paroxysms of two world wars, the European Union has emerged as a remarkable new approach to international relations. Much of the credit for this transformation is due to Jean Monnet, a soft-spoken Frenchman who seldom held any official position while exerting a tremendous influence on the course of European interdependence. Duchene has provided us with a well-researched and smoothly written biography that sets Monnet in the context of his times. Duchene's study provides more detail than Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (Macmillan, 1991), a recent work edited by Douglas Brinkley and Clifford Hackett. Taken together, these two works significantly increase our understanding of Monnet and his role in postwar European developments. Recommended for most collections.
Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Monnet was a behind-the-scenes figure his entire life, and his great achievement--what now exists as the European Union--was at first typically known by another man's name. The Schuman Plan of 1950 (named for the French foreign minister) pooled the coal and steel production of those hereditary enemies, the French and the Germans, into a single common market, giving a boost comparable to the Marshall Plan's to Europe's near miraculous recovery from the war. For decades Monnet had cast his lines for means of international cooperation. Biographer Duch{ˆ}ene, associated with The Economist, soldiers on through his subject's life with exhaustive research: no future bio can possibly sift more completely through the archives. Monnet was born to run the family brandy business, a job Duch{ˆ}ene credits with forming his cosmopolitan outlook and, more important, contacts. He knew everybody in Washington, London, and Paris, and a web of friendships and power spun through his career of directing wartime supply operations, and afterward setting up France's economic plan. Less about the man, a self-effacing cipher, than about his lasting work and the concepts behind it, this stolid work won't compete in popularity with profiles of generals or politicians--but it was imperative to write it. Gilbert Taylor