Europe’s road to integration was paved by centuries of recurring, often catastrophic warfare. After the devastation of WWII, things needed to change. World War II left Europe more physically, economically, and demographically devastated than any conflict in its history. It was a continent of rubble, displaced people, and collapsed institutions. An estimated 40 million Europeans died, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, a reversal from WWI, where soldiers made up most casualties. This shift reflected the war’s characteristic brutality of bombing campaigns, sieges, genocide, and mass reprisals against civilian populations. The Holocaust murdered roughly 6 million Jews and millions of other targeted victims like Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, Soviet POWs, all through a systematic industrial killing apparatus unprecedented in scale. The Soviet Union alone lost an estimated 24–27 million people, military and civilian combined, roughly 14% of its prewar population. Poland lost close to 20% of its entire population, the highest proportional loss of any country. Cities across the continent were reduced to rubble. Berlin, Warsaw, Dresden, Cologne, Rotterdam, Stalingrad, and dozens of others were bombed or besieged into ruins. Warsaw was over 80% destroyed after the 1944 uprising, largely by deliberate German demolition. Germany’s major cities lost roughly a third to half of their housing stock; some, like Cologne, saw over 90% of their historic centers destroyed. Transport infrastructure like railways, bridges, ports, and roads were systematically targeted throughout the war and largely nonfunctional by 1945, crippling the movement of food, fuel, and people. Industrial capacity collapsed since factories were bombed, machinery was requisitioned or destroyed, and agricultural production plunged due to lost manpower, livestock, and disrupted planting cycles. An estimated 40–60 million people were displaced across Europe by war’s end with refugees, expellees, forced laborers, concentration camp survivors, and POWs, all trying to find their way home or to safety. Roughly 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, elsewhere) in the war’s aftermath, one of the largest forced population movements in modern history. “Displaced Persons” camps housed millions for years, as international agencies struggled to repatriate or resettle people whose homes no longer existed or whose borders had changed entirely. Currencies in Germany and elsewhere were effectively worthless; barter economies emerged in their place (cigarettes famously functioned as informal currency in occupied Germany). Famine and near-famine conditions hit much of the continent in 1945–47, worsened by the destroyed infrastructure and a brutally cold winter in 1946–47. National governments in occupied and defeated countries had to be rebuilt from scratch, often under Allied occupation authorities (the Allied Control Council in Germany, for instance). Coal and steel production, the literal industrial base of European economies, was in ruins, which is precisely why pooling and rebuilding it became the starting point for European integration a few years later.
The US Marshall Plan (1948–1951) injected roughly $13 billion (over $150 billion in today’s dollars) into Western European reconstruction, credited with jump-starting recovery, though rebuilding took most of a decade even with that aid. It was against this backdrop of ruin, hunger, and the raw memory of what nationalism and unchecked industrial capacity had produced twice in one generation that the Schuman Declaration and the Coal and Steel Community emerged in 1950–51. The devastation itself was the argument for integration. In 1952 the “Common Assembly” of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the six-nation body (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) was Europe’s first postwar integration project. When the European Economic Community (EEC) and Euratom were created by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the assembly was expanded to serve all three communities. It renamed itself the “European Parliament” in 1962, though the name wasn’t formalized in treaties until later.
Strasbourg’s story is really the story of a border city that’s changed hands between France and Germany repeatedly, shaping it into something culturally distinct from both… and it fits neatly into what it is today, the seat of the European Parliament. Strasbourg has ancient and medieval roots. It was founded by the Romans around 12 BC as a military camp called Argentoratum, at a strategic Rhine crossing point. It grew into a trading and ecclesiastical center through the early Middle Ages and became a Free Imperial City within the Holy Roman Empire in 1262, giving it a long stretch of self-governance and prosperity. Its cathedral, Strasbourg Minster, was largely built between the 12th and 15th centuries and for centuries it was the tallest building in the world (until 1874), and its pink Vosges sandstone gives the whole old town a distinctive rosy glow. Johannes Gutenberg (the first printer of the Bible) lived and worked in Strasbourg in the 1430s, developing early printing techniques there before perfecting the press in Mainz. Strasbourg was a Protestant stronghold during the Reformation, then was annexed by France under Louis XIV in 1681, ending its status as a free city. It stayed French (and became thoroughly Francophone in administration, though the local Alsatian dialect remained Germanic) until 1871, when Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. It reverted to France after WWI (1918), was annexed by Nazi Germany again in WWII, and returned to France for good after 1944/45. This back-and-forth is why Strasbourg’s architecture, cuisine, and dialect blend French and German influences so distinctly with half-timbered Germanic houses alongside French administrative grandeur. Precisely because of that contested history, Strasbourg was chosen after WWII as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation and European unity. It now hosts the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and is one of the official seats of the European Parliament, a deliberate statement that a city fought over for centuries now anchors European cooperation instead.
This context is part of why Strasbourg later became such a deliberate symbolic choice for European institutions. It was a city fought over repeatedly, now hosting the body built specifically to end that pattern. The European Parliament’s story is one of gradual transformation, from an unelected advisory body into the only directly elected institution of the EU, gaining real power step by step. Parliament has three official homes, a quirk that traces to national compromises during its founding: Strasbourg (official seat, where monthly plenary sessions are held), Brussels (where committee work and additional plenaries happen, and where most political activity actually centers), and Luxembourg (administrative/secretariat functions). This “traveling circus,” as critics call it, has long been controversial for its cost and inefficiency, but treaty rules requiring unanimity have kept it in place.
We spent the day on a walking tour of the city center (an island) hearing about this history and seeing the medieval architecture. We followed it with a Bateaux tour around the island to show us all the expanded parts of Strasbourg where all this EC activity occurs. Like almost all European cities, one of the things you notice are the “Stolpersteine” (literally “stumbling stones”), which are small brass memorial plaques set into the pavement across European cities to mark the last freely chosen home of individual victims of Nazi persecution, making them the largest decentralized memorial in the world. The inscriptions typically follow a set format: “Here lived [name], born [year], deported [date/destination], murdered [date/place]”, or, for survivors, details of escape, emigration, or survival. Most commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but stones also honor Roma and Sinti victims (Porajmos), disabled people murdered under Nazi “euthanasia” programs, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and resistance members. Stones are placed at street level, not in cemeteries or set-apart memorial sites, deliberately embedding memory into everyday urban life, so residents encounter victims’ names on their own street, often outside their own front door. While some consider the stumble stones controversial, I highlight them as a symbol of what Strasbourg itself has come to mean to the world. In eighty years, this continent has transformed itself in mostly good ways into something that we as Americans helped achieve, but which we as Americans should take note of and try harder to emulate.