European Integration. Mark Gilbert
in Brussels on August 19, 1954. Among other things, he proposed introducing an eight-year national veto over the Board of Commissioners’ actions; asked that article 38 (authorizing the EPC) be deleted; and requested the right to withdraw from the treaty if Germany were reunited. These amendments infuriated France’s partners, especially West Germany, where the government was under pressure to get results from its controversial policy of Westpolitik (as Adenauer’s opening to the French since 1950 was known). Walter Hallstein, a German official who would become the first president of the European Commission, vented his feelings at the French move by saying, “Mendès has just presented us with the corpse of Europe.”63
Mendès-France allowed the undiluted EDC treaty to be debated in the National Assembly at the end of August 1954. It was rejected by 319 votes to 264 after a debate whose chauvinism shocked France’s neighbors. Opponents of the treaty used four main arguments. First, they feared that France would be swallowed up in a European superstate if they voted for the treaty. Edouard Herriot, who had been the patron of the French Council for a United Europe and had attended the Congress of Europe in 1948, proclaimed that “for us the European Community is the end of France . . . it is a question of the life and death of France.” The treaty was held to be the work of a handful of technocrats (de Gaulle had darkly called Monnet “the inspirer” in a November 1953 press conference and had condemned the EDC treaty for good measure as “an artificial monster” and a “Frankenstein”) who were working behind the scenes to reduce France’s independence.64 Second, French legislators worried that the proposed European army would rapidly be Germanized. Distrust of German motives was voiced openly. Third, many deputies thought that the treaty would cut France off from the French Union, as its empire in Africa was now renamed. Fourth, national pride was a major factor. Britain had not signed the EDC treaty, and the United States did not seem to expect it to. France should not lower itself to the level of what one deputy called “two defeated and three tiny countries” if Britain and America did not do the same.65
When the result was announced, the anti-cédistes burst into a spirited rendition of “La Marseilleise.” In response, Dulles sourly commented, “It is a tragedy that in one country nationalism, abetted by communism, has asserted itself so as to endanger the whole of Europe.”66
The EDC controversy had been a “harrowing split” (déchirement) for France.67 But France, in a sense, was the least of the problems. Germany was left, four years on from the Pleven Plan, without statehood, the Americans were bereft of ideas, and European federalists had been reminded that rumors of the death of national sovereignty were greatly exaggerated.
Britain, in the person of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, stepped into the breach with a burst of intelligent diplomacy. The British solution was to extend the Brussels Pact to Germany and Italy.68 On October 23, 1954, the Brussels powers agreed to terminate the occupation of Germany, to establish a new body called the Western European Union (WEU) with Italy and West Germany as members, to permit West Germany to join NATO, and to draw up a “European Statute” for the Saarland. Britain pledged it would maintain military forces in West Germany, while Germany pledged it would abstain from possessing certain categories of weapons (nuclear bombs, guided missiles, capital ships). An agency to monitor and audit national stocks of armaments was set up.
The treaty setting up the WEU retained the Brussels Pact’s preamble, stating that one of its goals was “to encourage the progressive integration of Europe,” but nobody was fooled. Monnet later described the new body as a “weak coordination structure” destined to “vegetate,” but it would be more accurate to describe it as “talking shop.”69 The WEU did draw up a plan to “Europeanize” the Saarland, but it was rejected by popular referendum on October 23, 1955, and the region eventually became part of West Germany.
The EDC debacle persuaded Monnet that he should devote himself to proselytizing for European unity among the political class of the Six. He left his post as president of the High Authority to do so. Other pro-integration statesmen concluded that the best way of relaunching the European project was to work for trade liberalization. The European Economic Community rose phoenix-like from the EDC’s humiliating failure. In the historiography of European integration, this capacity to recover from defeat has typically been interpreted as a sign of the resilience of the desire for greater European unity. It is also true that the EDC querelle revealed that major powers—France and Britain, in particular—would not relinquish key sovereign powers easily, whatever the rhetoric surrounding the European movement. In this respect, the EDC debacle was a harbinger of the difficulties the European project would have whenever it touched prerogatives big countries regard as sacred.
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