European Integration. Mark Gilbert
“shopping lists,” the CEEC’s initial report in August 1947 requested $29 billion in American aid by 1952. Michael Hogan, in his magisterial history of the Marshall Plan, states that this figure “stunned the Europeans as much as the Americans.”33 Secretary of State Marshall had previously been reluctant to impose conditions upon the would-be recipients of aid. However, the giant CEEC request precipitated matters. American policy makers urged the governments of Western Europe to devote more resources to reviving production, even if this meant cutting back on cherished social programs; to liberalize trade by slashing tariffs and ending exchange controls; to move to a customs union as quickly as possible; and to establish a “continuing European organization” with sovereign powers over the direction of the European reconstruction effort.34
The European reaction to these prescriptions was unenthusiastic. British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin lamented the “unfortunate impression of high-handedness” left by the Americans’ approach.35 The Europeans refused to abandon social programs or jeopardize employment levels. Led by Britain and France, they also refused to accept that the proposed supranational economic organization should have sovereign powers. On the other hand, they were obliged to accept a reduced aid package of just over $19 billion. Hogan comments: “Europeans . . . sought a recovery program that would limit the scope of collective action, meet their separate requirements and preserve the greatest degree of national self-sufficiency and autonomy. Americans, on the other hand, wanted to refashion Western Europe in the image of the United States.”36 As an exasperated Senator J. William Fulbright bluntly argued in the spring of 1948, there was no easy way out of the “anarchic confusion” of nationalism in Europe. For European nations to give up “their ancient and cherished prejudices” would be hard. But the alternative—“subjugation by the Communist agents of Moscow”—was worse.37
This binary choice was too simplistic. European nations had good reasons for wanting to preserve their national sovereignty, and they were, moreover, in a good position to resist pressure for greater unity. The fragility of Europe’s economies, paradoxically, was a political strength. Just as negotiations in the CEEC reached their climax in September 1947, Britain defaulted on the terms of the loan extended to it in 1946 by suspending convertibility of the pound sterling into dollars. France and Italy also wobbled on the verge of bankruptcy in the autumn of 1947. Had US policy makers refused aid, economic ruin would have been certain. The United States could not turn its back on the Europeans, no matter how stubborn they were over the question of sovereignty.
In April 1948, by large majorities in both chambers, and with Fulbright as a key broker, Congress authorized the first $5 billion of recovery spending for Europe. It also established the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), with branches in every Western European country, to oversee the distribution of Marshall Plan aid. The first director of the ECA was a prominent businessman strongly sympathetic to the idea of European political unity, Paul Hoffman. Day-to-day relations with the Europeans were entrusted to a presidential special representative based in Paris, W. Averell Harriman.
In parallel to the ECA, the European countries set up the OEEC, the “continuing organization” that would plan the division of Marshall Plan aid among its member states as well as act as the forum for intra-European negotiations to liberalize trade. Essentially a ministerial council of sovereign states, the OEEC was served by a secretariat of officials, planners, and economists and by an executive committee of civil servants from the nation-states that formulated the Council’s final decisions. The work of the secretariat was placed in the hands of Robert Marjolin; the executive committee was chaired by a British official, Sir Edmund Hall-Patch. As Marjolin has written, “France and Britain called the tune in the OEEC.”38 Nevertheless, every country (even small nations such as Iceland and Luxembourg) had a right of veto in the Council, and no country was obliged to implement Council decisions against its will.
Despite the intergovernmental character of the OEEC, and thus the difficulty of securing unified action, Hoffman’s opening address to the Council on July 25, 1948, called upon the nation-states of Europe to devise a “master plan of action” for the rebirth of European economic and political life. He called for the OEEC nations to “face up to readjustments to satisfy the requirements of a new world.” In particular, nations should avoid thinking along “the old separatist lines.” Hoffman urged his listeners to think in terms of “the economic capacity and the economic strength of Europe as a whole.”39 What the Americans had in mind for Europe has since been dubbed “the politics of productivity”—the creation of a free trade area administered (at least in the first instance) by supranational planning bodies that would make boosting production their fundamental goal and lead to political unity in friendship with the United States.40
THE QUEST FOR UNITY
The OEEC was not regarded as a pan-European political institution by true believers in the cause of European unity. They were mindful of Seeley’s admonition against mere intergovernmentalism. Robert Marjolin’s mentor was Jean Monnet, a French international civil servant who was the architect of the postwar French economic plan and an advocate of greater European unity since the time of Briand. Monnet regarded the OEEC as a “watered down British approach to Europe—talk, consultation, action only by unanimity.”41 It was no way to make Europe, Monnet believed. Marjolin sharply disagreed, believing that the concept of nationality would not be displaced merely by creating new institutions.
In the long run, Marjolin would be proved right. Far from abolishing national sovereignty, the process of European integration has actually demonstrated its remarkable tenacity. At the time, however, he was in a minority among intellectuals, most of whom were gung ho for greater political unity as soon as possible. By 1946, every country in Western Europe could boast a federalist movement of greater or lesser size: some countries, notably France, had more than one. In April 1947, these bodies federated themselves into the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes (UEF). The new association, which had a collective membership of some 150,000 people, declared its purpose was “to work for the creation of a European federation which shall be a constitutive element of a world federation.”42 As this declaration suggests, the UEF was not without its utopian aspects. Its main goal, however, was one that inspired intellectuals all over the continent in the early months of the Cold War—the creation of a European “Third Force” that could act as a bridge between Soviet communism and the Western European tradition of democratic socialism.43 Intellectuals in all of the major Western European nations contended that a European federation offered the opportunity of building a progressive socialism that would assuage Soviet fears of capitalist aggression and would, over time, lead to totalitarian and federalist forms of socialism, converging into a single democratic model.
Some left-wing intellectuals—the British novelist and political writer George Orwell and Altiero Spinelli being the most famous examples—were less optimistic about relations between a United States of Europe, even one that followed socialist precepts, and Soviet totalitarianism. Spinelli, breaking decisively with the two mass parties of the Italian left (the Communists and the Socialists), was arguing by 1947 that the Soviet Union regarded Western Europe as a “vital space” that it was hoping to “exploit” economically to relieve the Soviet people’s misery. The United States, by contrast, while it possessed “imperialist temptations and ambitions,” also possessed a “sincere desire” to see Europe emerge as an independent liberal state. Spinelli contended on many occasions that the shortsighted nationalism of Europe’s leaders, who refused to admit that the day of independent nation-states was over, was the main cause of their increasing subordination to Washington.44
Federalist ideas might nevertheless have remained isolated in an intellectual ghetto had it not been for the intervention of Winston Churchill, the internationally renowned British war leader whose Conservative Party had been defeated in the general elections of July 1945. At the University of Zurich on September 19, 1946, Churchill argued that the countries of Western Europe should “re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can . . . we must build a kind of United States of Europe.” According to Churchill, the rock upon which this new federation should be founded was not Britain—“We British have our