Jean Monnet Quotes

People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis.

Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.

Jean Monnet: “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.

Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone.

In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their

Social entrepreneurs are among the most dynamic engines of the cooperative movement. Where corporate moguls work for personal enrichment, these civic-minded business leaders work for the cooperative equivalent, which is a desire to generate community self-reliance, abolish poverty, and enhance community economic well-being by improving housing, food, transportation, energy, health, finance, and a host of other products and services. Their motivations are not selfishly financial; they are far deeper, rooted in both the human spirit and the pervasive sense of community that human beings have striven to express throughout history. As the economist Jean Monnet once said, “Without community, there is crisis.

... les hommes n'acceptent le changement que dans la nécessité et ils ne voient la nécessité que dans la crise. (Mémoires, Paris, éditions Fayard, 1976, p. 129)

...les hommes n'acceptent le changement que dans la nécessité et ils ne voient la nécessité que dans la crise. (Mémoires,éditions Fayard, 1976, p. 129)

Jean Monnet expressed this philosophy with admirable clarity: ‘since the people aren’t ready to agree to integration, you have to get on without telling them too much about what is happening’ (Ross 1995: 194).

L’Europe intégrée, ça ne pouvait pas convenir à la France, ni aux Français…. Sauf à quelques malades comme Jean Monnet, qui sont avant tout soucieux de servir les États-Unis. (Tome 2, Fayard, édition 1997) - p214

Il faut se résoudre à conclure que l'entente est impossible avec De Gaulle, qu'il est un ennemi du peuple français et de ses libertés, qu'il est un ennemi de la construction européenne (et) qu'en conséquence, il doit être détruit dans l'intérêt des Français. (Note déclassifiée, adressée au secrétaire d'État américain Harry Hopkins, (cité par Éric Branca, "De Gaulle - Monnet ou le duel du siècle", Revue Espoir, n°117, novembre 1998, p 9).)

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration.3 As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries. If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.4 They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition. As a conviction, high modernism was not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.

Gli uomini accettano il cambiamento solo nella necessità e vedono la necessità soltanto nella crisi.

If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius N~erer