Effective solidarity
With his Declaration, Robert Schuman introduced the possibility of supranational cooperation on common interests between multiple democratic States. Reconciliation, effective solidarity and subsidiarity are to be practiced among states for the common good.
Schuman's Point of View
MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
Schuman considered the European spiritual and cultural heritage the raison d’être of the European integration project. This outlook implied working towards mutual understanding, and acting consistent with the common regional, national, continental, universal common good.
ONE STEP AT A TIME
Solidarity in line with subsidiarity and in small steps, taking into account basic human psychology. The process of integration would therefore take several generations. "Europe would not happen all at once".
SOLIDARITY OVER ECONOMIC ADVANTAGE
Economic cooperation should be a means and not the main purpose of European integration.
“This ‘whole’ cannot and must not remain an economic and technical enterprise: it needs a soul, the conscience of its historical affinities and of its responsibilities, in the present and in the future, and a political will at the service of the same human ideal.”
- Robert Schuman -
Uniting Europe
Robert Schuman laid down some of his thoughts and beliefs for a United Europe in principles he valued most. He envisioned the future of Europe to be of a reconciling nature: restoring the relations between France and Germany to make peace possible on the European continent.
Schuman wanted to put an end to the repeating events of war and unify Europe once and for all. In a letter Schuman wrote to his friend George Ditch in 1942, he showed his desire to come to a united Europe, unaware that eight years later the Schuman Declaration would give notice to precisely that. France and Germany, archenemies for more than a thousand years, would reconcile and start as equal partners a peace-project on a supranational level, changing the instruments of war, coal and steel, into instruments of peace.
"We and our allies should look for the cause of the wars and come to structures that make the return of such cataclysms impossible. The solutions can only be found within a unified European framework."