desperately to believe that some good might come out of the Nazi occupation. The fact that the Nazis themselves had apparently unified much of Europe in a technical sense—removing frontiers, expropriating property, integrating transportation networks and so forth—made the idea even more plausible. And the attraction of a Europe liberated from its past and its mutual antagonisms was not lost abroad, either. Four years after Nazism’s defeat, in October 1949, George Kennan would confess to Dean Acheson that while he could understand apprehension at Germany’s growing importance in Western European affairs, ‘it often seemed to me, during the war living over there, that what was wrong with Hitler’s new order was that it was Hitler’s.’
Kennan’s remark was made in private. In public, after 1945, few were willing to say a good word about the wartime New Order—whose inefficiency and bad faith Kennan rather underestimated. The case for intra-European economic cooperation was of course undiminished—Jean Monnet, for example, continued to believe after the war as he had in 1943 that to enjoy ‘prosperity and social progress… the states of Europe must form… a ‘European entity’, which will make them a single unit’. And there were enthusiasts for the ‘Movement for European Unity’ formed in January 1947 at Churchill’s instigation.
Winston Churchill had been an early and influential advocate of a European assembly of some kind. On October 21st 1942 he wrote to Anthony Eden: ‘I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe, in the revival of the glory of Europe… it would be a measureless disaster if Russian bolshevism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe. Hard as it is to say now, I trust that the European family may act unitedly as one, under a Council of Europe.’ But the post-war political circumstances seemed unpropitious for such ideals. The best that might be expected was the creation of a sort of forum for European conversation, which is what a May 1948 Congress of the European Unity Movement in The Hague proposed. The ‘Council of Europe’ which grew out of this suggestion was inaugurated in Strasbourg in May 1949 and held its first meeting there in August of that year; delegates from Britain, Ireland, France, the Benelux countries, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Norway took part.
The Council had no power and no authority; no legal, legislative or executive status. Its ‘delegates’ represented no-one. Its most important asset was the mere fact of its existence, though in November 1950 it issued a ‘European Convention on Human Rights’ that would assume greater significance in decades to come. As Churchill himself had recognized, in a speech given in Zurich on September 19th 1946, ‘The first step in the re- creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany.’ But in those first post-war years the French, as we have seen, were in no mood to envisage such a partnership.
Their small neighbours to the north were moving rather faster, however. Even before the war ended the exiled governments of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed the ‘Benelux Agreement’, eliminating tariff barriers and looking forward to the eventual free movement of labour, capital and services between their countries. The Benelux Customs Union came into effect on January 1st 1948, and there followed desultory conversations between the Benelux countries, France and Italy over projects to extend such cooperation across a larger space. But these half-formed projects for a ‘Little Europe’ all came to grief on the shoals of the German problem.
Everyone agreed, as the Marshall Plan negotiators in Paris in July 1947 concluded, that the ‘German economy should be integrated into the economy of Europe in such a way as to contribute to a raising of the general standard of life.’ The question was how? Western Germany, even after it became a state in 1949, had no organic links to the rest of the continent except via the mechanisms of the Marshall Plan and the Allied occupation—both of them temporary. Most Western Europeans still thought of Germany as a threat, not a partner. The Dutch had always been economically dependent on Germany—48 percent of Dutch ‘invisible’ earnings before 1939 came from German trade passing through the harbours and waterways of the Netherlands—and Germany’s economic revival was vital for them. But in 1947 only 29 percent of the Dutch population had a ‘friendly’ view of Germans and for the Netherlands it was important that an economically revived Germany be politically and militarily weak. This view was heartily endorsed in Belgium. Neither country could envisage an accommodation with Germany unless it was balanced by the reassuring involvement of Great Britain.
The deadlock was broken by the international events of 1948-49. With the Prague coup, the agreement on a West German state, the Berlin blockade and the plans for NATO it became clear to French statesmen like Georges Bidault and Robert Schuman that France must re-think its approach to Germany. There was now to be a West German political entity including the Ruhr and the Rhineland—only the tiny Saarland had been temporarily separated from the main body of Germany, and the coal of the Saar region was not suitable for coking. How were the resources of this new Federal Republic to be both contained and yet mobilized to French advantage?
On October 30th 1949, Dean Acheson appealed to Schuman for France to take the initiative in incorporating the new West German state into European affairs. The French were well aware of the need to do
It was in these circumstances that Jean Monnet proposed to France’s Foreign Minister what became known to history as the ‘Schuman Plan’. This constituted a genuine diplomatic revolution, albeit one that had been five years in the making. In essence it was very simple. In Schuman’s words, ‘The French government proposes that the entire French-German coal and steel production be placed under a joint High Authority within the framework of an organization which would also be open to the participation of the other countries of Europe.’ More than a coal and steel cartel, but far, far less than a blueprint for European integration, Schuman’s proposal represented a practical solution to the problem that had vexed France since 1945. In Schuman’s scheme the High Authority would have the power to encourage competition, set pricing policy, direct investment and buy and sell on behalf of participating countries. But above all it would take control of the Ruhr and other vital German resources out of purely German hands. It represented a European solution to a—
Robert Schuman announced his Plan on May 9th 1950, informing Dean Acheson the day before. The British received no advance notice. The Quai d’Orsay took a certain sweet pleasure in this: the first of many small retaliations for Anglo-American decisions taken without consulting Paris. The most recent of these had been Britain’s unilateral devaluation of the pound sterling by 30 percent just eight months before, when only the Americans had been pre-advised and the rest of Europe had been obliged to follow suit.[42] Ironically, it was this reminder of the risks of renewed economic self-interest and non- communication among European states that had prompted Monnet and others to think their way forward to the solution they were now proposing
The German government immediately welcomed Schuman’s proposal, as well they might: in Konrad Adenauer’s delighted reply to Schuman he declared that ‘this plan of the French government has given the relations between our two countries, which threatened to be paralysed by mistrust and reserve, a fresh impetus towards constructive cooperation.’ Or, as he put it more bluntly to his aides: ‘
The Germans were the first to ratify the Schuman Plan. Italy and the Benelux countries followed suit, though the Dutch were at first reluctant to commit themselves without the British. But the British declined Schuman’s invitation and without Britain there was no question of the Scandinavians signing on. So it was just six West European states that signed the April 1951 Paris Treaty founding the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).
It is perhaps worth pausing to remark on a feature of the Community which did not escape notice at the time. All six foreign ministers who signed the Treaty in 1951 were members of their respective Christian Democratic parties. The three dominant statesmen in the main member states—Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman—were all from the margins of their countries: De Gasperi from the Trentino, in north-east Italy; Adenauer from the Rhineland; Schuman from Lorraine. When De Gasperi was born—and well into his adult life—the Trentino was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he studied in Vienna. Schuman grew up in a Lorraine that had been incorporated into the German Empire. As a young man, like Adenauer, he joined Catholic associations—indeed the same ones that the Rhinelander had belonged to ten years earlier. When they
