European Integration. Mark Gilbert
The Court was originally composed of seven judges appointed by the governments of the member states for a period of six years. The treaty was explicit in stating that the judges should be people “whose independence is beyond doubt.” The Court’s powers were very precisely detailed in article 33 of the treaty:
The Court shall have jurisdiction in actions brought by a Member State or by the Council to have decisions or recommendations of the High Authority declared void on grounds of lack of legal competence, major violations of procedure, violations of this Treaty or of any rule of law relating to its application, or abuse of power.
The Court, in other words, was to be a watchdog over the High Authority. Within the Community, its word was law. But its power was unidirectional: firms, citizens, and the High Authority itself could not have recourse to the Court to have national law or administrative directives declared invalid. Despite this caveat, the Court was soon busy and settled several important complaints against the High Authority within the first few years of the ECSC’s life.40
The novelty of the ECSC treaty was indisputable. Instead of national governments making decisions in the short-term interest of their domestic industries, with little or no thought for the knock-on effects over their borders, the six member states had delegated executive powers to an independent authority. The states were merely reserving to themselves a circumscribed right of veto over the High Authority’s decisions and the right to ask for judicial review of the Authority’s actions. The egoism of nation-states was to be substituted, in the economic sphere at least, with enlightened planning in a specially created institutional forum. It was this commitment to internationalist principle, not the actual experience of the Community in its first few years of existence, that guaranteed the ECSC the laudatory reception it enjoyed in the halls of academe, especially in the United States.41
The truth is more prosaic. If one looks at the activities of the ECSC between February 1953 (when the common market in coal was instituted) and February 1958 (the end of the five-year “transitional period” during which all market-deforming practices were supposed to be eliminated), one sees that the Community played a useful, though limited, role in enabling the six member states to wrestle with the social and economic problems presented by two industries of great importance. The High Authority, which Monnet presided over until 1955 when he resigned and was replaced by the senior French politician René Mayer, propped up high-cost Belgian coal until 1958 by imposing an equalizing levy on the sales of cheaper German and Dutch coal (but still took the blame when the mines eventually had to be rationalized) and made notable attempts to inject a degree of competition into the market for coal purchasing, a politically sensitive issue. It also negotiated a generous loan from the American government and floated other loans on the American capital markets. These loans were then used for investment purposes, although ECSC investment was only a fraction of private investment in the same period. Overall, steel production rose by over 40 percent during the transitional period, and trade in steel products and scrap increased greatly. These last successes, however, owed more to the general rapid expansion of the European economy in these years than to the activities of the ECSC.
On the other hand, the market for coal and steel products was still anything but free in 1958. The High Authority rapidly discovered that it could not establish a common market by decree. Italy’s domestic market in steel was still highly protected (Italy having won a five-year exemption in a protocol to the original treaty), and governments possessed an array of devices—currency devaluation, sales taxes, rebates, and subsidies of all kinds—that enabled them to advantage domestic producers.42 Governments defended national champions tenaciously. The French national coal import agency, for instance, which restricted permits to a handful of dealers purchasing large quantities of coal and coke, was defended tooth and nail by the French government before the Court of Justice and, in 1958, still had its powers intact. Freedom of movement rights were established, after exhausting negotiations, only in December 1954, and the national parliaments took until the summer of 1957 to ratify the accords reached (small-population Luxembourg was the worst foot dragger). An association agreement with Great Britain was signed on December 21, 1954, but it only amounted to a forum for the exchange of information and was not, as Monnet had originally hoped, the outcome of a process bringing the “reduction, and if possible abolition, of reciprocal protection mechanisms.”43 Only in September 1957 were skilled workers freed to move.44 The worsening situation of the coal industry posed severe social problems that the High Authority had neither the financial resources nor the will to handle on its own.45 Overall, as the transitional period wore on, the High Authority became more and more reluctant to take initiatives without the prior approval of the Council of Ministers.
THE DEFENSE COMMUNITY
The successful creation of the ECSC, despite its starting difficulties, fueled the belief among policy makers that the “Europeanization” of major problems was the best way of solving them—especially when the betterment of Franco-German relations was concerned. The European Defense Community (EDC) began life as a French improvisation to the rehabilitation of West Germany. It finished as a traumatic episode in which an attempt to pool national sovereignty in collective community institutions dealing with defense exposed the deep divisions of the political class of France. La Querelle de la CED (The EDC Controversy), to cite the title of a famous book on the subject edited by the French sociologist and political journalist, Raymond Aron, split French politics asunder.46
The root cause of this trauma was German rearmament. As we have seen, the Bundesrepublik was founded in May 1949, but it remained under the tutelage of the so-called High Commission for Germany. This body’s task was to keep vigil over the new German government. West Germany was denied the right to maintain armed forces, could not join NATO or the Brussels Pact, and was excluded from the United Nations. France was willing to remove Germany’s pariah status in economic matters, but defense issues were altogether more sensitive for the French government, which had to be mindful of the French Communist Party’s capacity to stir up mischief among public opinion on such a delicate subject. Nevertheless, if one assumed that the Soviet Union’s intentions were aggressive, then West Germany’s strategic importance was undeniable. In 1950, the Soviet Union had vastly superior forces on the ground in East Germany and the neighboring communist states and was in a position to strike across the north German plain at a moment’s notice: the West’s front line effectively was the Rhine. US policy makers concluded that the only logical course of action was to rearm Germany as fast as possible.47
The United States was unwilling to press the French too hard to accept German rearmament until June 1950, when North Korea invaded its southern neighbor. The similarity of Korea to Germany—a country divided between communist and pro-American halves—could not but arouse alarm in the countries that had signed the North Atlantic Treaty. The invasion seemed like a prelude to an attack in Europe. In September 1950, at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty’s foreign ministers, the United States committed itself to sending six fully equipped divisions to Europe, but asked its European allies, as a quid pro quo, to drop opposition to the militarization of West Germany. The French government, stuck, turned to Monnet for help. Monnet, who feared that West Germany might backtrack on its commitment to the ECSC if it was offered an alternative route back to national sovereignty, reverted to a tried (though not yet tested) formula: a European Community for defense matters similar to the one then under negotiation for coal and steel. Instead of Schuman, the spokesman for Monnet’s ideas was, this time, the prime minister, René Pleven.
The Pleven Plan was announced on October 24, 1950. The plan envisaged the creation of a European Ministry of Defense responsible to an assembly and to a council of national defense ministers. The ministry was to organize defense administration (procurement, planning, links with the war industries), not strategic questions; all national governments except West Germany were to retain independent military forces. Germans would, however, have participated in so-called integrated units, though not at more than battalion strength.
American policy makers reacted with “consternation and despair” to the Pleven Plan. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said that it contained “every kind of obstacle, difficulty and fantastic notion that misguided