The philosophy of Raymond Aron (1905-1983) included a European dimension from his youth in the 1920s to his death in the 1980s. A fervent believer in a unified Europe from a young age, Aron’s views hardened in response first to Nazism and then to the trials and tribulations of exile. Although he was convinced that the idea of a united Europe was less powerful than a political myth, he still used it to offer West Germans hope in the context of the early years of the Cold War. Yet he never concealed his skepticism towards Jean Monnet’s project, and criticized it for confusing the economic and political dimensions. Aron was nevertheless a leading player in intellectual Europe, through his academic work, his activity as an editorialist and his involvement with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He believed that the failure of the European Defence Community (EDC) had sounded the death knoll on Jean Monnet’s project, but until his death, he continued to comment on the European project’s successive twists and turns, focusing on the strategic issues. 

Portrait of Raymond Aron. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mrs. Dominique Schnapper.
Portrait of Raymond Aron. Reproduced with the kind permission of Mrs. Dominique Schnapper.
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From start to finish, the idea of a united Europe was at the heart of Raymond Aron’s philosophy and his entire body of work. His first published article appeared in the Revue de Genève in 1926: its title was “What Europe’s Young University Students Think.” His last article appeared in L’Express in 1983: it was about Euro-missiles and Europeans’ freedom. As a subject, “Raymond Aron and Europe” covers more than just his lived experience, i.e. his path through 20th-century Europe. It encompasses the articulation between his philosophy and the activism, networks and media through which this major and multi-facetted intellectual – philosopher, sociologist, editorialist and strategist – commented on the dramas of the Old Continent and the twists and turns of the project for a united Europe. It also includes a retrospective gaze through which Aron made a date with history in the final, autobiographical part of his body of work. Raymond Aron’s public writing and statements project one essential fact: his vision of Europe should not be mistaken for Europe as it was actually built.

A European Education

Deeply affected by the massacres of the Great War, Aron, like many young people of his generation, was a pacifist. His first experience of Europe as a political entity came from a spell at the League of Nations in 1925. His pacifism was fueled by the philosopher Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier). In 1930, Aron was hired as a lecturer at the University of Cologne. Wanting to contribute to Franco-German reconciliation, he wrote “Letters to Germany,” which was published in Alain’s journal, Libres propos, and participated in several editions of the Décade de Pontigny, (or “10 Days in Potigny,” an annual forum for intellectual debate) which was frequently devoted to Franco-German relations and the idea of a united Europe. But his time in Germany – which lasted until April, 1933 – was also when he discovered National-Socialism. 

In 1932, Aron attended one of Hitler’s speeches in Berlin and then, along with his friend Golo Mann, an autodafé supervised by Goebbels. As early as 1931, he had lost whatever illusions he had had about the possibility of a united Europe. The European ideal, he wrote, “has not come alive in the souls of the crowds.” He described it as an “idea for intellectuals.” At that point, Aron devoted himself first to writing his thesis, and then to the fight against Nazism: in 1940, he went to London, where he became the editor-in-chief of the journal La France libre (“Free France”). That commitment turned him into a player in the “propaganda battle:” to counter Goebbels’ recuperation of the European myth, he asserted that Europe was composed of free nations that refused the yoke of empires.

Aron was still calling himself a Socialist when he defended his dissertation on March 26, 1938. Foreign-policy considerations soon led him to liberalism, however: in the summer of 1938, he participated in the Walter Lippmann Colloquium and patronized the Reform Club in London. During World War II, he came to see the Anglo-American alliance as the safeguard for Europeans’ freedom: first against the Nazi occupier, and later, after the war had ended, against Soviet influence.

A Time for Europe

After 1945, Aron began to work for a united Europe in earnest; he participated in the Allies’ efforts to convince the Germans that their future was with Europe and the West, and urged future French administrative elites towards reconciliation. To that end, in 1946, he taught a class called “Perspectives on the Future of Europe” to the first graduating class of the ENA (France’s prestigious School of National Administration, which trains future high-level civil servants). He joined the French Committee for a United Europe, an offshoot of Churchill’s United Europe Movement. 

Aron’s European activism culminated in his “Discourse to German University Students,” published in Preuves, in 1952. His harangue in that piece was exceptionally lyrical for him: “the European community [is] … the final element of the effort that gives meaning to a life or establishes an objective for a generation.” People concluded that, in terms of his commitment to Europe, “the die was cast.” Yet that was not the case. In fact, at that point, Aron believed that only the European myth (in Sorel’s sense of the word myth) would be capable of standing up to Soviet expansionism. But his resistance to building what would become the European Union is attested by the skepticism of his own philosophy, which critiqued philosophies of history. 

As an attendee of the 1948 Congress of Europe in the Hague, he would later describe the congress in his memoires as a gathering of has-beens who represented no one but themselves. A member of the Gaullist RPF (Rally of the French People) Party from its start, in 1947, he had tremendous reservations about the Schuman Plan, and later became an outspoken critic of the EDC. Wanting to create a European army before Europe’s political unity had been established seemed absurd to him, particularly considering the region’s divergent foreign policies: while the BRD (West Germany) was focused on reunification with East Germany, France’s empire still stretched south across the Mediterranean. In Aron’s words, the French parliament’s 1954 rejection of the EDC constituted, the “death knoll” of Jean Monnet’s project. 

Aron’s main European tribune was a journal called Preuves, the Parisian organ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had complete faith in the Atlantic Alliance, the only serious safeguard, in his view, for political freedom in western Europe. In 1949, it was probably Aron who convinced de Gaulle to approve the Atlantic Treaty. In his 1951 (English edition, 1954) book, The Century of Total War, he wrote that ““Europe” is the grandiose name provisionally given to a Continental sector of the Atlantic community.” He was actually repeating in barely changed words something he had written as far back as 1931: “… the idea of Europe is an empty shell, it has neither the transcendence of Messianic ideologies, nor the immanence of carnal homelands; it’s an idea for intellectuals, which can be seen both in its opportunity in terms of reason and in its feeble resonance in people’s hearts.” 

Europe Stepping out of History?

In 1955, Aron went back to academia as a sociologist. His point of view about building Europe hadn’t changed very much. In Peace and War (French edition, 1962; English edition, 1966), he expressed his skepticism towards Jean Monnet’s project once more: it was an illusion to believe that political unity could be born of a common market, since the two entities were not of the same nature. The same idea runs through his 1975 conferences in Brussels and Paris, in which Aron observed that, as a myth, the European idea had died. That idea can also be found in the pages of his In Defense of Decadent Europe, (1977, French and English editions), in which he distinguishes between citizens and consumers: the architects of European construction were wrong to confuse political subjects with economic ones. 

Yet Aron did acknowledge that the European Economic Community (EEC) deserved credit for having ruled out the possibility of new European wars. In 1966, he worried that de Gaulle’s grand scheme could resuscitate 1914 Europe, which led Monnet to suggest that they do something together. The project never really got off the ground. But most importantly, Europe is at the heart of Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (French edition, 1976; English edition, 1983), in which Aron urges Europeans not to succumb to the temptations of a “farewell to arms” or “stepping out of history.” That concern inspired two of his main actions in the final years of his life: the 1978 co-founding of Commentaire, which promoted western – both trans-Atlantic and European – moral rearmament; and his support for NATO’s deployment of Euromissiles in response to the Soviets’ of SS-20s. Above and beyond the Cold War, Raymond Aron’s work continued to explore 21st-century Europe, which is still seeking political unity through economic integration, and whose repeated efforts to build a common defense have yet to achieve conclusive results.

To quote from this article

Joël Mouric , « Raymond Aron and Europe », Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe [online], ISSN 2677-6588, published on 16/12/24 , consulted on 19/02/2025. Permalink : https://ehne.fr/en/node/21475

Bibliography

Baverez, Nicolas, Raymond Aron, un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

Bonfreschi, Lucia, Raymond Aron e il gollismo 1940-1969 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2014).

Mouric, Joël, Raymond Aron et l’Europe (Rennes: PUR, 2013).

Oppermann, Matthias, Raymond Aron und Deutschland. Das Problem des Totalitarismus und die Verteidigung der Freiheit (Thorbecke: Ostfildern, 2008).

“Chapter 2: Reimagining the state in a global space”, in Rosenboim, Or, The Emergence of Globalism. Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States 1939-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017): 24-55.

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