European Integration. Mark Gilbert
of the defense community’s most passionate defenders, although, in fairness, the Pleven Plan had been redesigned by then. Indeed, before long, “American officials considered the EDC the United States’ most important international project during the early 1950s.”49
The process of redesign began in Paris between January and July 1951 when delegations from all the ECSC countries except the Netherlands (which, along with Britain, Canada, Denmark, and Portugal, sent observers) agreed to create a European authority for defense questions. Adenauer, however, insisted that West Germany should participate on the same basis as everybody else and that the Occupation Statute, which gave the High Commission its supervisory authority, should be scrapped. The Americans, in the meantime, had been convinced by Monnet’s personal diplomacy to back the scheme.50 They insisted that the new community should be subject to NATO at the operational level. Britain, which was governed by the Conservatives from the autumn of 1951, ruled out joining, despite Prime Minister Churchill’s previous advocacy of a European army in the debates of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe.51
Between the autumn of 1951 and the spring of 1952, two separate negotiations to abolish the Occupation Statute and to create the defense community were conducted. At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at Lisbon in January 1952, France finally dropped its opposition to the formation of a German army. It was agreed that the Community would place forty-three divisions of approximately thirteen thousand men each at NATO’s disposal, of which Bonn would contribute twelve. Despite a determined effort to block the creation of a European army by the USSR, which proposed the neutralization of Germany in a diplomatic note on March 10, 1952, the treaty establishing the European Defense Community was signed by the six ECSC nations (the Netherlands had by then chosen to participate) in Paris on May 25, 1952; the Occupation Statute was ended, subject to the ratification of the EDC treaty, in Bonn the following day.
The EDC treaty represented the largest single cession of sovereignty made by the countries of Western Europe until the Treaty on European Union in 1992 (see chapter 8). Sovereignty over defense policy was surrendered both to the EDC, which was described as “supranational in character, comprising common institutions, common armed forces [article 15 specified that they would wear a common uniform] and a common budget,” and to the United States, which under the treaty would have taken over the day-to-day control of all armed forces within the European theater of war. Article 18 of the treaty stated that “the competent supreme commander responsible to NATO [who was perforce an American] shall . . . be empowered to satisfy that the European Defense Forces are organized, equipped, trained and prepared for their duties in a satisfactory manner.” Member states could “recruit and maintain” independent of the EDC only armed forces that were destined for “a serious emergency affecting a non-European territory for which a member state assumes responsibilities of defense” or else were intended for the maintenance of “internal order” (i.e., French gendarmes or Italian carabinieri). Deployment outside Europe, the treaty stressed, must not affect any nation’s contribution to the common-defense effort.
The Defense Community was given the same institutional structure as the ECSC. A nine-member “Commissariat” was to act as the executive and was to report to the Assembly and Council of Ministers. There was, however, no figure corresponding to the president of the ECSC High Authority, since such an office would have been tantamount to creating a minister for European defense. The Council, too, was stronger than its ECSC equivalent (the Commissariat could not make decisions or make recommendations without its consent) and would inevitably have become the Community’s dominant decision-making force.
This institutional structure was, however, specifically stated to be “provisional” in character. Article 38 of the treaty, inserted at Italian insistence, stated that the EDC was only a prelude to the establishment of “a subsequent federal or confederate structure.”52 In August 1952, the Assembly of the ECSC began drawing up a blueprint for a European political community (EPC) that would have coordinated the foreign policies of the member states and would have gradually absorbed the functions of the ECSC and the EDC.
By March 1953, the Assembly had completed this job. The EPC was to have consisted of a bicameral parliament, an executive council, a council of ministers, and an empowered court of justice. The parliament was to have been composed of a chamber of peoples (a directly elected assembly) and a senate, which would have been drawn from the national parliaments. The senate would have had the key power of nominating, in a secret ballot, the president of the executive council. The president would then have had a free hand to choose a cabinet of ministers, which, however, could not contain more than two individuals from a single nation. The executive council would then have become the federal government of the community. All its major decisions, however, to be promulgated as law, would have had to be submitted and approved by a simple majority of the chamber of peoples and the senate, which could also have voted the executive council out in a vote of confidence. The court of justice would have provided the nation-states with judicial review of the constitutionality of the EPC’s laws.53
The boldness of this vision testifies to the mindset of the European federalists at this time. In their view, the challenge of organizing a common defense for Europe and planning Europe’s economy necessitated “a great ‘contractualist’ effort to overcome the gradual and sectoral character of European integration in order to arrive at the political union of Western Europe.”54 Even though the member states, in a series of meetings between their foreign ministers, immediately rewrote the Assembly’s proposals in order to strengthen the role of the member states, it remains true that the EPC was a bold expression of the federalist ideal.
Washington was delighted with these developments. Both Eisenhower, who became president in January 1953, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were committed supporters of European unification.55 Dulles, moreover, was more willing than Acheson to prod the Europeans. Between 1949 and 1952, the United States had committed $12 billion in military and civil aid to Europe and had placed procurement contracts worth hundreds of millions more.56 Dulles thought that it was time that the United States was paid back by concrete steps toward political unity.
Despite France being the originator of the EDC project, official and military opinion in France was much more skeptical than the American leadership about the value of the EDC Treaty.57 General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French during World War II, and a future president of the French republic, condemned the treaty in June 1952. France, the general stated disdainfully, would have to assign “pell-mell” its “men, arms, and money” into “un mélange apatride.”58 Unsurprisingly, Gaullists were at the fore in the strenuous parliamentary opposition to ratification of the treaty in the National Assembly. Urged on by Moscow, the French Communist Party (PCF) conducted an intransigent campaign against the EDC that evoked fears of renewed invasion by the Germans.59 But dislike of the EDC was cross party and included many Socialists and Christian Democrats, too.
Between May 1952 and May 1954, when the army protecting France’s colonial holdings in Indochina was humbled by the Vietnamese at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, France had three premiers (Antoine Pinay, René Mayer, and Joseph Laniel) who preferred to postpone ratification of the EDC treaty. French procrastination eventually caused the Eisenhower administration to lose patience. In December 1953, Dulles warned that the United States would undertake an “agonizing reappraisal” of its defense commitments if France did not pass the EDC treaty.60
French defeat in Vietnam, which drove the pro-European Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) from power in Paris and led to the austere figure of Pierre Mendès-France becoming prime minister, added a new dimension to the EDC querelle. Aside from de Gaulle, Mendès-France was “the strongest political personality to have emerged in France since the war.”61 He was suspected, moreover, of being a Cold War neutral.
Dulles nevertheless pushed Mendès-France for immediate ratification of the EDC treaty. On July 13, 1954, he visited Paris, where he bluntly told the French premier that the United States could opt to defend the European periphery (Britain, Spain, Greece, Turkey) and leave France to face the USSR on its