The adoption of substitute public goals to replace the discredited ambitions of the past was quite deliberate. As Konrad Adenauer explained to his cabinet on February 4th 1952, when outlining the Schuman Plan’s importance for his countrymen: ‘The people must be given a new ideology. It can only be a European one.’ West Germany was distinctive in that it alone stood to recover its sovereignty by joining international organizations; and the idea of Europe could itself substitute for the void opened up in German public life by the evisceration of German nationalism—as Schuman explicitly hoped
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