Quisling invented the EU

John Laughland

02 May 2007

However, in the course of writing A History of Political Trials from Charles I to Saddam Hussein, I have discovered that another European statesman had conceived ideas of European unity even before they became popular in Berlin in 1941. On 11 October 1939, Germany’s Polish campaign having come to an end, a Norwegian politician sent a telegram to the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, in which he made a last-minute plea for peace between Britain and Germany. The only way to achieve this, he said, was ‘to fuse British, French and German interests into a European Confederation on the initiative of Great Britain, in order to create a community of interests and co-operation, beneficent to all parties. Under these circumstances ... I deferentially appeal to your immense authority and responsibility to suggest that the British government — in accordance with the method of federalisation in America, South Africa and Australia — invite every European State to choose ten representatives to a congress charged with the task of preparing a constitution for an empire of European nations, to be submitted to a plebiscite in each country for acceptance or rejection.’

The author of this imaginative idea was a then relatively obscure former Norwegian minister of defence, Major Vidkun Quisling, CBE. Quisling had been decorated for his services as British chargé d’affaires in Moscow from 1927 to 1929, at a time when the United Kingdom had broken off relations with the USSR and when Quisling resided temporarily in the British embassy on the banks of the Moscow river. As a friend of Britain and Germany alike, Quisling paid fulsome tribute to Chamberlain’s ‘peace for our time’ speech of 30 September 1938, the one he delivered on his return from Munich, and promptly sat down to write a detailed draft for an armistice between the two countries.

Quisling was catapulted into notoriety six months later when he installed himself as leader of Norway following the German invasion of that country on 9 April 1940. As a result of certain unfortunate misunderstandings, the German Chancellor had been obliged to send troops into Norway pre-emptively to prevent the British from violating her neutrality by mining her ports. Quisling was the first collaborationist leader in Western Europe, and his surname passed into the language as a byword for all that is most contemptible about treachery. The Times coined the term within days of Quisling’s assumption of power: ‘To writers, the word quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters.’