100th birthday of Jean Monnet - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1988 - 80 Pfennig

Jean Monnet was born in Cognac on November 9, 1888. His father is a successful merchant who often travels across Europe, to Singapore, New York or Russia, full of ideas and restless activity. The mother, firmly attached to the realities, keeps the family organization in balance. Jean Monnet can not be enthusiastic about the school; After the one-year-old he asks his father to join the family business. At the age of 16, he describes himself as a traveler, goes to England for two years, then to the United States and convinces his business partners of the quality of the cognac that bears his surname. With the commercial experience, his knowledge of human nature and the ability to be patient grows to weigh the right moment for a contract. In Monnet, accustomed to think in terms of economic organization and international co-operation, the conviction that the forces should not be bundled by the addition of forces in an alliance, but by common organs, is consolidated. At the age of thirty, Jean Monnet became the first deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, formed in 1919. In 1934 Jean Monnet marries the Italian Silvia de Bondini in Moscow. After the Second World War, Monnet develops a plan to modernize the French economy and becomes head of the Modernization Commission. The experience gained by Jean Monnet during and after the two world wars brings us to the idea of ​​unifying Europe, for which he devises a plan, initially limited to the coal and steel sectors. Coal and steel are for him "the key to economic power and the arsenal in which weapons for the war are forged." Therefore, Monnet not only considers it an economic necessity, but a moral responsibility to place relations between France and Germany on an entirely new footing. As before, Monnet designs a plan for a supranational organization - without having been commissioned to do so - and presents it to French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, who makes it his own and on 9 May 1950 in the name of the French Government of the World Press. Today, for example, Monnet's idea of ​​a European Coal and Steel Community is called a Schuman Plan. Jean Monnet becomes the first President of the High Authority of the ECSC / Coal and Steel Community, established by the Treaty of Paris on 18 April 1951 by Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The Coal and Steel Community becomes the foundation of subsequent European efforts to unify. In order to devote himself to complete preparations for the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC), Monnet resigns as President of the High Authority in the summer of 1955. His desire is to win the parties and trade unions to European unification, and in 1955 he founds the United States of America Action Committee. This "Monnet Committee" elaborates strategies for political union, a European Monetary Union, advocates the accession of Great Britain to the EC and makes proposals for the further relations of the European Community with the United States of America. "I have never missed opportunities to act. The key is to be prepared for it. I need a conviction that has been consolidated through long thinking. If the moment comes, everything is very simple, because necessity does not allow for any further hesitation ", as it is stated in his memoirs written by Jean Monnet in 1975 and from a conversation with then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in June 1950:" The concrete problems I know that from experience, they are never unsolvable when viewed from the point of view of a great idea. " On 2 April 1976 Jean Monnet is appointed by the Heads of State or Government of the Member States of the European Community as an honorary citizen of Europe. He died on March 16, 1979. His remains are transferred in 1988 in a solemn state ceremony in the Pantheon. The Monnet country house in Houjarray - southwest of Paris - is the site of the Jean Monnet Memorial, declared by the European Parliament in 1988 to be the »Année Européenne Jean Monnet«. (Text: Horst Zeller, working group European Integration, Bonn)