Читать книгу European Integration - Mark Gilbert - Страница 27

◆ ◆ ◆

Contemporaneously with the creation of the Council of Europe and the fervent debates in its Consultative Assembly, Western Europe took crucial steps toward greater economic integration in the coal and steel sector. On May 9, 1950, Foreign Minister Robert Schuman of France proposed that France and Germany, along with any other willing nation, should transfer the regulation and development of their coal and steel industries to a supranational “High Authority.” Since coal and steel represented a substantial proportion of both countries’ economies, and since neither country could make war without control of this sector of the economy, Schuman’s dramatic move potentially amounted to a much profounder cession of sovereignty than any of the schemes being proposed by the Council of Europe. It signaled a way of advancing to greater European unity via so-called functional integration, rather than by a leap to political union. As Dirk Stikker, a Dutch foreign minister, argued in a contemporary article, such an approach was a pragmatic “middle road” between intergovernmental cooperation of the kind that prevailed in the OEEC and the futile (because excessively ambitious) schemes of the federalists.¹

Schuman’s bold initiative also opened up the prospect of resolving the Franco-German rivalry that had been the curse of European security since 1870. In fact, Schuman acted because he and his closest advisors, notably Jean Monnet, feared that France would be eclipsed by West Germany as an industrial power and sidelined as the predominant political force in Western Europe. The United States and Great Britain pressed hard for quick and full rehabilitation of the new Federal Republic of Germany from the fall of 1949 onward and as a consequence, France faced a tricky foreign policy dilemma: Should it insist on confining the new Germany within a watchful diplomatic environment (and run the risk of incurring German enmity and annoying the Americans?), or should it engage with Bonn, acknowledge West Germany as a peer, and set the conditions by which Bonn was brought back into polite society? The French government chose the second option—though the choice was unpopular with large sections of French public opinion—and its gamble paid off handsomely. The Schuman Plan achieved a “political and economic balance of power” with Germany that was tilted, politically at least, to France’s advantage.² It was a diplomatic masterstroke. Even France’s subsequent collective nervous breakdown over German rearmament and its failure, in August 1954, to ratify the treaty establishing the European Defense Community (EDC), did not diminish France’s place as primus inter pares in the new configuration of power in 1950s Western Europe.