Why Peace Held, This Time
The attentive reader of this series will have noticed a recurring pattern, accelerating since the first installment: sixty-four years between Jena and Sedan, forty-three years between Frankfurt and Sarajevo, twenty-one years between Versailles and Rethondes. Each cycle of revenge took half as long to mature as the one before it — until catastrophe reached, in 1945, its absolute limit.

What is striking about the decade 1945-1955 is that the same accelerating mechanism — modernity, urgency, necessity — continued to operate, but in reverse: barely five years separate the capitulation from the Schuman Declaration; one year separates that declaration from the ECSC. The same need for speed that had served for a century and a half to hasten revenge now served to build peace. Yet the decade was no smooth, untroubled course: the stinging failure of the EDC in 1954 is a reminder that no reconciliation is ever guaranteed in advance, and that European federalism very nearly died a second time, barely four years after its birth.