January 31, 2025

Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)

48 minutes

Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s.

It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries – and their close ties to "founding father" Jean Monnet have long been known. But, in Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (Routledge, 2025), Enrico Ciappi takes things back a step - to the intellectual groundwork done by a network of American, French, and British politicians, diplomats, economists, and strategic thinkers.

"The Schuman Plan arrived at the end of a long intellectual journey," he writes, with the two critical players in that journey being Monnet himself and the renowned New York-based think tank: the Council on Foreign Relations.

Enrico Ciappi is a postdoctoral research fellow in history at the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. This is his first book.

*His book recommendations were The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 by Or Rosenboim (Princeton University Press, 2017) and The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray, 1990 — reprint in 2006).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

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