It’s clear that the future belongs to those who know how to unite people; no man, no nation, no community is capable of facing up alone to the major economic, social and environmental challenges facing humanity. Paradoxically, in the face of these common challenges, a reflex of mistrust, identitarian withdrawal and national egoism is gaining ground everywhere.

Yet there is a method of action that has proved its worth in the darkest moments of our history, that has given Europeans hope when they seemed condemned to confront each other to the point of self-destruction. A method that has provided, and continues to provide, practical answers to our problems and crises, without ever having been theorized.

This method, which must be fully rediscovered because it responds to today’s challenges, is the community action method.

At the origins: Rebuilding and reinventing in the midst of collapse

We are in the aftermath of the Second World War. The nations of Europe have destroyed each other. For the second time in thirty years, all that was young, dynamic and new in Europe, and even beyond, has been mobilized to disunite, break and slaughter. Our infinite energies have produced endless catastrophes.

We urgently need to change course. Rebuilding sustainably means building together. But how? At the end of the world wars, the European nation-states were on the verge of collapse, in the grip of an unprecedented stalemate. France was weakened, Germany humiliated; we had to rebuild on new foundations, reinventing the ties that would unite yesterday’s enemies tomorrow, eliminating the temptations of domination and enabling European countries to take their destiny back into their own hands.

Jean Monnet has a conviction

One man has a deep conviction: to guarantee a future of peace and prosperity for the peoples of Europe, we must unite them at all costs. By linking our destinies, we will do more than restore our national identities: together we will gain a capacity for action that none of us could hope to acquire alone.

His convictions were not moral, religious or abstract, but focused entirely on efficiency. Jean Monnet is anything but an intellectual. His quest is not ideological, spiritual or mystical. What he seeks is action. He doesn’t believe that we can change the nature of men, but he is convinced that “by modifying the context in which they act, we can lead them to behave differently towards each other.”

Principles of a method

We need to unite people, but not just any old way.

If this union is to last, it cannot depend solely on the goodwill of the leaders of the moment. If it is to be strong, it must guard against any temptation for one nation to dominate another. If it is to project itself into the future, it must be founded on a principle of equality, because mutual recognition is the condition for the success of any joint effort. If it is to succeed, it must be guided by a pragmatic concern for efficiency, because its main raison d’être is to do better together than alone. Finally, if it is to be effective, it must be voluntary, and therefore absolutely democratic.

Three principles underpin this method of uniting in action, making it original and powerful: a vision of union, efficiency in action, and democratic legitimacy. It was around these simple principles that, in 1950, Jean Monnet proposed a revolutionary way of uniting people and getting nations to act together.

Jean Monnet did not theorize about this method. It is based on a fundamental intuition and nearly forty years’ experience of international action. The fundamental intuition is that, without the union of the peoples of Europe, Europe will only experience adventure and decline. Experience shows that when people work together towards a clearly identified common goal, they rise above their own diversity and interests. Secondly, in order to perpetuate common action, it must be organized through a legitimate and independent political authority capable of keeping the common interest in focus.

The driving force and essence of European construction

These simple yet powerful principles have shaped the history of European integration and defined the key moments in our Community history, from the birth of the ECSC and the High Authority – whose members formally undertook not to represent their national interests but to defend the common interest of the Community – to the Treaties of Rome establishing the European Communities, the Single Act, the Maastricht Treaty and finally the European Union.

Our Community history really began when Jean Monnet proposed this new method of action to Robert Schuman, with the creation of the Coal and Steel Community and its institutions. Through these institutions, the historical means of domination of the participating countries became “collective property”, and the common resources thus pooled were managed efficiently in the interests of all.

It was also, and above all, a vision of union that underpinned this first community project, this first concrete realization of a united Europe. This vision is clearly expressed in Jean Monnet’s note, echoed by Robert Schuman in his famous declaration at the Salon de l’Horloge on May 9, 1950: ” Europe will not be built all at once, nor in a comprehensive construction: it will be built through concrete achievements that first create a de facto solidarity“. Simple and clear.

To this day, the ECSC remains the “purest” implementation of the Community method of action: six States, all very different, but with the political will to look beyond their differences to pool their interests, create the first truly transnational structure in history. They decided to delegate to an independent High Authority a real, even decisive, power of proposal and organization through rules ratified by the political power.

A real revolution

In the political arena, what Monnet is proposing is a Copernican revolution.

Historically, since the Treaties of Westphalia, diplomatic relations have been governed by the inalienable principle of the absolute sovereignty of States. The logical consequence of this, in collective decision-making, is the requirement of unanimity and the blockages that accompany the use of the veto. At the League of Nations, Jean Monnet observed that the system was incapable of resolving problems in an interdependent world: ” the veto is both the root cause and the symbol of the inability to overcome national egoism “. To break the deadlock of national egoism – which the weakened states of Europe can no longer afford – he proposes a new way of “making community”.

Jean Monnet’s insight was decisive: there was a way for states to use their own sovereignty to address common problems. This methodological proposal to pool sovereignty in specific areas of action, accompanied by the political will to exercise this sovereignty jointly in the interests of all, is hardly revolutionary today. At the time, it reversed a well-established logic. By thinking in terms of common rather than individual interests, Jean Monnet “turned the tables”.

He summed up this reversal in one of his most famous formulas: ” We don’t unite states, we unite people.

A method that works

For over seventy years, the community method has changed our lives – from coal stoves to Euros.

In the collapse of the 1940s, the countries of Europe were no longer – de facto – fully sovereign, in the sense that they had lost much of their independence and capacity for action. A few years later, these same countries had regained their power to act, and invented a new form of common sovereignty.

This is no magic trick, and even less rhetoric. In Community action, the Member States retain all their decision-making powers, leaving a common entity with a monopoly on proposals. As Jean Monnet put it, ” The Community method of action is a permanent dialogue between a European body responsible for proposing solutions to common problems and national governments expressing national points of view.”

It is this great sharing, this ongoing dialogue between proposal and decision, that lies at the heart of the European dynamic. It is thanks to this robust balance that this body is capable of producing supranational law in highly targeted areas, with a very clear pact and mandate. To this day, after a number of evolutions and hybridizations, it is still this institutional balance that governs relations between the various bodies of our European Union.

A method for tomorrow

How is it, then, that the Community method and the European project it supports are still being contested? What is the future of the Community method? How can we make it useful today and tomorrow?

Critics of the Community method claim that, in the long run, it has weakened us by robbing us of our sovereign powers. Let’s not mince words. Self-proclaimed “sovereignists” are all too quick to usurp the words “sovereignty”, “general interest” or “popular will”. They claim that the Community method is a “sovereignty trap”. In reality, it is nothing of the sort.

History shows us that union is a gas pedal of power and sovereignty. Its raison d’être is efficiency, enabling Europeans to better protect themselves and project themselves into the future. To control our destiny, we need to be united. This was true yesterday as it is today.

Who can believe that a disunited Europe will be able to carry weight in the titanic confrontation between the United States and China? Who better than a united Europe to promote democratic values and influence the world’s energy and environmental choices?

In our day-to-day lives, how could Europeans have supported the war-torn Ukraine or received vaccinations without the Union’s decisive joint action? How could the countries of the Union – on their own – have mobilized the resources needed for recovery in the conditions in which the Union was able to do so?

It is the Community method of pooling competences and resources in specific areas, and of permanent dialogue between the Union and sovereign States, which has enabled and will enable the nations of Europe and Europeans to control their destiny and influence the course of history. Far from leading to the disappearance of national sovereignty, the Community method is the key to restoring it together.

Where and how to apply it to regain its full strength?

Seventy years after the Coal and Steel Community, the need to harness the potential of sovereign states to build European power is more acute than ever. It is imperative that we return to the practical teachings of Jean Monnet. One of his great strengths was his astonishing intuition in identifying those “small but decisive” areas on which to focus common action.

Today, we need to rediscover this discernment, to repeat this gesture. In what decisive areas can and must the Community method be applied effectively? Between the institutionalization of technical cooperation, the pooling of certain sovereign powers, or cooperation based on the economic performance of nations, how can we identify the most useful and effective fields of action for the Community method?

To return to the imperatives of democratic legitimacy, how can we best regulate this “permanent dialogue” between the Union and national governments, and how can we strengthen the support of Europeans for a project which, in the final analysis, is their only chance for the future?

Today, it’s up to us Europeans to act with resolve. To take up the torch from the founding fathers, we need to develop clear thinking on the need and the means to restore the Union’s capacity for action.

The community action method offers flexible and effective solutions for structuring peace and prosperity through union between peoples, without denying their particularities or the richness of their diversity. We need to go beyond caricatures and demagogic rhetoric to understand the driving forces behind it and discover its strength, with pragmatism and realism.

The alternative is to turn in on ourselves and return to the selfish reflexes of the past. It’s the renunciation by Europeans of their right to influence the course of history and the future of the world. And it means the inevitable decline of European nations, which some believe are threatened by the European project when it is precisely their only salvation.