by Tony Judt
But even with a significant and ever-growing American military presence there was only one way in which NATO could meet its targets: by rearming the West Germans. Thanks to Korea the Americans had felt obliged to bring up this sensitive matter (Dean Acheson first raised it formally at a Foreign Ministers’ meeting in September 1950), even though President Truman himself was initially reluctant. On the one hand no-one wanted to put weapons in the hands of Germans just five years after the liberation of Europe; on the other hand, and on the analogy of the economic difficulties of the Bizone just three years previous, there was something perverse about spending billions of dollars to defend the West Germans from Russian attack without asking them to make a contribution of their own. And if Germany was to become, as some anticipated, a sort of buffer zone and future battlefield, then the risk of alienating German sympathies and encouraging neutralist sentiments could not be ignored.
Moscow, of course, would not take kindly to West German rearmament. But after June 1950 Soviet sensibilities were no longer a prime consideration. The British, however reluctantly, saw no option but to find some device for arming Germany while keeping it firmly under Allied control. It was the French who had always been most firmly opposed to putting weapons in German hands, and France had certainly not joined NATO just to see it become an umbrella for German remilitarisation. France managed to block and postpone the rearmament of Germany until 1954. But long before then French policy had been undergoing a signal transformation, allowing Paris to accept with some equanimity a limited restoration of Germany. Unhappy and frustrated at being reduced to the least of the great powers, France had embarked upon a novel vocation as the initiator of a new Europe.
The idea of European union, in one form or another, was not new. The nineteenth century had seen a variety of more or less unsuccessful customs unions in central and western Europe and even before World War One there had been occasional idealistic talk, drawing on the idea that Europe’s future lay in a coming together of its disparate parts. World War One itself, far from dissipating such optimistic visions, seems to have given them greater force: as Aristide Briand—the French statesman and himself an enthusiastic author of European pacts and proposals—insisted, the time had come to overcome past rivalries and think European, speak European, feel European. In 1924 the French economist Charles Gide joined other signatories across Europe in launching an International Committee for a European Customs Union. Three years later a junior minister in the British Foreign Office would profess himself ‘astonished’ at the extent of continental interest in the ‘pan-European’ idea.
More prosaically, the Great War had brought French and Germans, in a curious way, to a better appreciation of their mutual dependence. Once the post-war disruption had subsided and Paris had abandoned its fruitless efforts to extract German reparations by force, an international Steel Pact was signed, in September 1926, by France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the (then autonomous) region of the Saar, to regulate steel production and prevent excess capacity. Although the Pact was joined the following year by Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, it was only ever a cartel of the traditional kind; but the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann certainly saw in it the embryonic shape of future trans-national accords. He was not alone.
Like other ambitious projects of the 1920s, the Steel Pact barely survived the 1929 crisis and ensuing depression. But it recognized what was already clear to French ironmasters in 1919: that France’s steel industry, once it had doubled in size as a result of the return of Alsace-Lorraine, would be utterly dependent on coke and coal from Germany and would therefore need to find a basis for long-term collaboration. The situation was equally obvious to Germans, and when the Nazis occupied France in 1940 and reached agreement with Pétain on a system of payments and deliveries amounting to the forced application of French resources to the German war effort, there were nevertheless many on both sides who saw in this latest Franco-German ‘collaboration’ the germ of a new ‘European’ economic order.
Thus Pierre Pucheu, a senior Vichy administrator later to be executed by the Free French, envisaged a post-war European order where customs barriers would be eliminated and a single European economy would encompass the whole continent, with a single currency. Pucheu’s vision—which was shared by Albert Speer and many others—represented a sort of updating of Napoleon’s Continental System under Hitlerian auspices, and it appealed to a younger generation of continental bureaucrats and technicians who had experienced the frustrations of economic policy making in the 1930s.
What made such projects especially seductive was that they were typically presented in terms of a shared, pan-European interest, rather than as self-interested projections of separate national agendas. They were ‘European’ rather than German or French, and they were much admired during the war by those who wanted 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 conv
ersations 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 something—as Jean Monnet would later remind Georges Bidault, the US would surely encourage a newly-independent West Germany to increase its steel production, at which point it might well flood the market, force France to protect its own steel industry and thus trigger a retreat to trade wars. As we saw in Chapter Three, Monnet’s own plan—and with it the revival of France—depended upon a successful resolution of this dilemma.
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—the—French problem.
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: ‘Das ist unser Durchbruch’—this is our breakthrough. For the first time the Federal Republic of Germany was entering an international organization on equal terms with other independent states—and would now be bound to the Western alliance, as Adenauer wished.
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 met, the three men conversed in German, their common language.
For all three, as for their Christian Democrat colleagues from bi-lingual Luxembourg, bi-lingual and bi-cultural Belgium, and the Netherlands, a project for European cooperation made cultural as well as economic sense: they could reasonably see it as a contribution to overcoming the crisis of civilization that had shattered the cosmopolitan Europe of their youth. Hailing from the fringes of their own countries, where identities had long been multiple and boundaries fungible, Schumanand his colleagues were not especially troubled at the prospect of some merging of national sovereignty. All six member countries of the new ECSC had only recently seen their sovereignty ignored and trampled on, in war and occupation: they had little enough sovereignty left to lose. And their common Christian Democratic concern for social cohesion and collective responsibility disposed all of them to feel comfortable with the notion of a trans-national ‘High Authority’ exercising executive power for the common good.
But further north, the prospect was rather different. In the Protestant lands of Scandinavia and Britain (or to the Protestant perspective of a North German like Schumacher), the European Coal and Steel Community carried a certain whiff of authoritarian incense. Tage Erlander, the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister from 1948-68, actually ascribed his own ambivalence about joining to the overwhelming Catholic majority in the new Community. Kenneth Younger, a senior adviser to Bevin, noted in his diary entry for May 14th 1950—five days after learning of the Schuman Plan—that while he generally favoured European economic integration the new proposals might ‘on the other hand, . . . be just a step in the consolidation of the Catholic ‘black international’ which I have always thought to be a big driving force behind the Council of Europe.’ At the time this was not an extreme point of view, nor was it uncommon.
The ECSC was not a ‘black international’. It was not really even a particularly effective economic lever, since the High Authority never did exercise the kind of power Monnet intended. Instead, like so many of the other international institutional innovations of thes
e years, it provided the psychological space for Europe to move forward with a renewed self-confidence. As Adenauer explained to Macmillan ten years later, the ECSC was not really even an economic organization at all (and Britain, in his view, had thus been right to stand aside from it). It was not a project for European integration, Monnet’s flights of fantasy notwithstanding, but rather the lowest common denominator of West European mutual interest at the time of its signing. It was a political vehicle in economic disguise, a device for overcoming Franco-German hostility.
Meanwhile, the problems that the European Coal and Steel Community was designed to address began to resolve themselves. In the last quarter of 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany regained the industrial output levels of 1936; by the end of 1950 it had surpassed them by one-third. In 1949 West Germany’s trade balance with Europe was based on the export of raw materials (essentially coal). A year later, in 1950, that trade balance was negative, as Germany was consuming its own raw materials to fuel local industry. By 1951 the balance was once again positive and would stay so for many years to come, thanks to the German export of manufactured goods. By the end of 1951 German exports had grown to over six times the level of 1948 and German coal, finished goods and trade were fuelling a European economic renaissance—indeed by the late Fifties western Europe was suffering the effects of a glut of coal. How much of this can be attributed to the ECSC is a matter of some doubt—it was Korea, not Schuman, that sent the West German industrial machine into high gear. But in the end it did not much matter.
If the European Coal and Steel Community was so much less than was claimed for it—if the French commitment to supranational organisms was simply a device to control a Germany that they continued to distrust, and if the European economic boom owed little to the actions of a High Authority whose impact on competition, employment and prices was minimal—why, then, did the British refuse to join it? And why did it seem to matter so much that they stood apart?
