European Integration. Mark Gilbert
to incorporate its zone into the institutional framework decided in Washington and allowed free elections throughout Germany. Stalin rejected these terms, and Germany was partitioned. The first West German elections took place in August of that year, resulting in a narrow victory for the Christian Democrats (CDU-CSU) who took 139 seats in the Bundestag to the 131 of the Social Democrats (SPD). The CDU formed a coalition government with the Liberals (FDP) and the nationalist “German Party.”
The division of Germany into two states delighted Paris, but French leaders were uncomfortably aware that West Germany alone surpassed France in industrial power. West German steel production, which had been restricted to less than three million metric tons in 1947 (France produced nearly six million), surged to over nine million tons in 1949 (the same as France). In 1950, Germany produced twelve million tons; France, less than nine million.7 The Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that would return Germany to its position as the economic powerhouse of Europe had begun: French diplomacy had to cope with this fact. Improving relations with Germany became an “obsession” for Schuman, who, as a native of Lorraine, an area of France occupied by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, had only become a French citizen in 1919 at the age of thirty-two.8
Washington—aided by London—kept the pressure on Paris to move in this direction. American efforts to assist Europe intensified once the break with Moscow over Germany had been consummated and after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Marshall Plan aid for April 1949 to June 1950 would be over $5 billion; in September 1949, Congress doled out a further $1 billion in military aid to Europe. The quid pro quo for this largesse was the reintegration of Germany into Western Europe. In the fall of 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson urged France to normalize relations with West Germany by the spring of 1950.9 It became increasingly clear that the United States intended in the long run to allow Germany to rearm and possess military forces and to join the North Atlantic Treaty. This idea was anathema for France.
The Americans’ ardent backing put Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the leader of the CDU, in a strong negotiating position. Adenauer was hostile to attempts by the IAR to cap or rationalize German heavy industry. At the same time, as a veteran politician from the Rhineland (he was almost seventy-four when he took office), he knew that a Franco-German rapprochement was a precondition for peace. In November 1949, Adenauer agreed to join the IAR and to cap steel production at 11.2 million tons. In return, Bonn would be allowed to join the Council of Europe as an associate member and to establish embassies and consulates abroad: in short to be recognized as an equal and to reenter the “international sphere.”10 This deal—the so-called Petersberg accord—was controversial in Germany, but it signaled Adenauer’s willingness to anchor the new Germany into the West, even at the cost of conceding some measure of sovereign control. In two interviews with an American journalist in March 1950, during a fierce row between France and Germany over France’s policy of absorbing the Saarland into the French economy, Adenauer openly proposed a Franco-German economic union, with a legislature drawn from the two countries’ parliaments and an executive “organ” responsible to the legislature. Europe, Adenauer argued, should remember how the 1834 Zollverein customs union had been the prelude to German unification.11
THE SCHUMAN DECLARATION
By the spring of 1950, the time was ripe for a transformation of the relations between France and Germany. The question was how, not whether, such a transformation would take place. The plan announced on May 9, 1950, for the creation of a coal and steel community was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, and it bore his trademark preference for the technocratic and supranational resolution of complex political issues. Monnet approached Schuman on May 1, 1950, proposing that the French and German coal and steel industries be subjected to a supranational “High Authority” with sovereign powers to plan and develop economic activity. Schuman agreed, and over the next week, working in conditions of great secrecy, Monnet and his advisers drew up the text of the declaration announcing the plan.12
The plan reflected Monnet’s characteristic tendency to put the big picture first. In a five-page “note de réflexion” to Premier Georges Bidault on May 3, 1950, explaining the rationale for the plan, Monnet gave an almost philosophical justification for putting it forward at that historical juncture. In Monnet’s view, European politics was stuck in an impasse. It was necessary to take a “concrete and bold decision” on a “restricted but decisive issue” in order to unblock the situation and create the conditions to turn the situation around creatively: policy makers, he asserted, had developed “one track-minds.” All they could think about was the Cold War. It was therefore necessary to do something “profound, real, immediate and dramatic” that would change their “mood.” Absent such an action, Monnet worried that the German question would become a “cancer” that would threaten Europe with renewed war, for a strong, expanding Germany would be bound to evoke “Malthusian reflections” in France. For this reason, France was “marked out by destiny.” It was the duty of France’s policy makers to direct the German people toward hope and set in motion a dynamic that could lead to peace.13
Monnet’s American lawyer and friend, George W. Ball, regarded this document as typical of Monnet’s original, problem-solving approach. According to Ball, with the Schuman declaration, Monnet “adapted to politics a tank warfare tactic General de Gaulle had futilely advocated in the late 1930s: concentrate all available power on a limited point, then spread out behind the lines.”14
Monnet’s intellectual panzers conducted a surprise attack. Adenauer and the German government were told only on the eve of the plan’s announcement through a personal letter from Schuman to the German chancellor, hand-delivered by a French foreign ministry official, which made explicit reference to Adenauer’s March interviews.15 The British were informed by the French ambassador on the morning of May 9, even though Schuman was scheduled to join Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Secretary of State Dean Acheson in London for tripartite talks on Germany later in the week. The Americans themselves were informed only on May 7, 1950, when Acheson visited Paris. Acheson recorded his reactions in one of his memoirs:
After a few words of greeting . . . Schuman began to expound what later became known as the “Schuman plan,” so breath-taking a step towards the unification of Europe that at first I did not grasp it. . . . Schuman implored us to treat what he was about to tell us in the greatest of confidence, not to speak to any of our colleagues about it, not to send cables, or to have memoranda transcribed. For he had discussed the proposal only with the Premier (Bidault) and one or two members of the Cabinet. The next step would be to consult the whole Cabinet, and, if it approved, then to make some public statement . . . after that, France’s neighbors would be approached.16
Secrecy was necessary. French politics was unsettled, and untimely disclosure might have set off a damaging political crisis. Even more important, Schuman and Monnet were determined that the British would not sabotage the supranational dimension of the scheme. Only countries that acknowledged the principle of supranational government would be allowed to participate in the detailed negotiations. Their insistence on this point soothed the Americans’ disappointment at being excluded from the plan’s formulation.
On May 9, 1950, Schuman made his famous declaration. In addition to its historic proposal to “place the whole of Franco-German coal and steel production . . . under a common ‘High Authority’ within the framework of an organization open to participation by the other countries of Europe,” Schuman’s speech implied a breach with the federalist approach. In his view, Europe should advance step-by-step through economic integration: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single, general plan. It will be built through concrete achievements, which first create a de facto solidarity.” A “wider and deeper community” would emerge once economies were more fully integrated: action on the “limited but decisive point” of coal and steel production was the best starting point since “the pooling of coal and steel production” would ensure that “any war between France and Germany” would be “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.”17
Beneath the high moral tone of the declaration, French national