US Capitol (House of Representatives and Senate)
MMI's raison d'etre is best described in the words of two of the Founding Fathers of the two great pillars of western civilization:
"France and Germany together have begun to build a great European entity, a sort of second America." - Jean Monnet to Konrad Adenauer in 1961, referring to the first iteration of what we know today as the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Commission, which Monnet and his deputy Emile Noël conceived to make a third war impossible between the two nations.
"Most of our political evils may be traced to our commercial ones." - James Madison, later the fourth president of the United States, in explaining the necessity for an interstate and foreign commerce clause in the US Constitution, which he and his committee composed during the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, District of Columbia. The tenant's initial constitutional lease is for four years only with a renewal lease for a total of not more than eight years. Within its West Wing it encompasses the core of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, which spills over into other buildings nearby.
If the prototype Boston and Dublin colloquia prove successful they may point the way to creation of an ever-expanding cadre of 'alumni" of self-selected, knowledgeable, and bonded transatlanticists to succeed the generations of Europeans and Americans who won World War II and concluded the Cold War peacefully. Generations later autocrats the world over have successfully reminded the West that the need for eternal vigilance over western democratic values, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press and the free movement of people, capital, goods and services, never ceases.
The combined populations of the EU and US is 778 million people, with minor exceptions most of them born literate democrats in a larger world of more than eight billion people; many of the latter are neither.
About Us
The Monnet-Madison Institute, inc. ("MMI"), a not-for profit company registered in Massachusetts, will realize an agreement between the EU and US, The Transatlantic Agenda, to study each other's history and system of governance. Two prototype colloquia of citizens from the European and American Unions, early and mid-career professional men and women, soon will convene first in Boston, Massachusetts, the second one a year later in Dublin, Ireland.
If successful MMI will organize subsequent colloquia to create an ever-expanding "alumni" of Americans and Europeans prepared for participation in bilateral, multi-lateral and international affairs across five sectors of transatlantic civil society: business, government, labor, media and academia. The colloquia will use the World Bank's "conference ownership" format. Participants will teach one another during a collegial three day weekend using a copyrighted multipage Colloquia Schedule and Agenda MMI has composed to fulfill The Transatlantic Agenda's mandate. Significant private funding sources have been tentatively identified. MMI will not seek taxpayer-sourced funds. The issue of observers at subsequent colloquia from aspirant states for EU membership may be considered later.
The Berlaymont houses the headquarters of the European Commission,
the executive branch of the European Union
It was a successor to America's first constitution, 1781's Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which was generally regarded as ineffective for realization of the ambitions of the American nation emergent after Great Britain had signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and withdrawn from its 13 American colonies. Numerous American historians generally have concluded that our well-read Founding Fathers saw the Declaration of Independence as the nation's promise to itself and the Constitution as its execution, its vivification, entrenching in the American experiment a practical democratic expression of Europe's Enlightenment. The EU does not have a comprehensive written constitution but instead a large collection of treaties, one of which was intended to entrench some of the features of a proposed constitution that failed of ratification in two member states.
Inside the EU Parliament