Critical Perspectives on a Founding Myth: Jean Monnet and the European Construction

Abstract

Monnet's role in the post-war organization of (Western) Europe is undeniable: the first European community established a regional organization of several Western European states and also constituted the starting point for a new social reality, with its own dynamics, which gave rise to extensive academic debates. The latter are inevitably also debates about Monnet's personality and form, we consider, by themselves a social universe, a field in the sociological sense. In this field we can glimpse power relations meant to put both Monnet's personality and the European construction in one light or another. In order to identify some fixed elements in this immense process of knowledge, we have cut out from the academic literature accessed a series of explanatory motifs that put Monnet's personality in a variety of perspectives.