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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 interest was alive and well. Among other things, the declaration insisted that “the task” of the High Authority would be to secure “the supply of coal and steel on identical terms to the French and German markets, as well as the markets of the other member countries.” Monnet plainly favored making a deal with West Germany while it was still relatively weak and using the proposed High Authority to ensure that there was a balanced industrial relationship between the two countries.¹⁸

According to Adenauer’s most comprehensive biographer, the chancellor was initially suspicious of French motives. Monnet was the personification of international cooperation against Germany in the two wars. Might not the Schuman Plan be a subtle plot to retard German economic growth, rather than a mutually beneficial opportunity?¹⁹ Once the two men had met each other on May 23, suspicion disappeared. In their talks, Adenauer approved Monnet’s insistence that nations should adhere to the plan on the basis of what Schuman had called “a leap in the dark” during questioning on May 9. That is to say, to have a place at the negotiating table, all would-be members of the proposed community would have to accept the role of the High Authority in advance.

In the weeks following Schuman’s announcement, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, along with Italy, joined West Germany in responding cautiously but positively to Schuman’s appeal. On June 20, 1950, an intergovernmental conference of representatives of the six states, chaired by Monnet, began work in Paris on drafting a treaty.²⁰

The great absentee was Britain. The Schuman Plan presented a tricky dilemma for the Labour government, although Prime Minister Clement Attlee assured the House of Commons on May 11, 1950, that the government greeted the French initiative in a “sympathetic spirit.” In 1950, Britain was the largest producer of coal and steel in Western Europe and had easily the highest standard of living. If Britain entered the Community, its coal and steel industries—located in the poorest parts of the nation—would feel the full brunt of low-wage competition from the continent. From the strategic point of view, British policy makers worried that a Franco-German community might weaken the Atlantic community. Britain was sympathetic to France’s desire to ensure its security against Germany, but disagreed over the means: the Foreign Office thought that “the states of Western Europe were too weak to contain Germany.” In the long term, Bevin worried that a European Community would become a “third force in world politics” and would strive to “free itself from dependence on the United States” and find an “accommodation” with Russia. Last but not least, the mere fact of joining would signal to the world that Britain was a diminished force; that it was no longer an imperial power, but merely “a unit in a federated Europe.”²¹

As so often happens, purely contingent factors played a role. Bevin and the treasury minister, Sir Stafford Cripps—the key ministers, and the two most considerable figures in the government—were critically ill (both died within a few months of the Schuman announcement), but Attlee was reluctant to substitute them. Negotiations with Monnet were thus carried on throughout May 1950 by senior civil servants, at least one of whom, Roger Makins, has since been anachronistically described as a “rabid Euroskeptic.”²² Monnet himself found the British officials to be viscerally anti-European. In his memoirs, he noted that the British had no confidence in the ability of the continental countries to resist communism. Certainly, they were not prepared to make the “leap in the dark” required of them.²³

Two leading civil servants, Sir Edward Bridges (permanent secretary to the Treasury) and Sir William Strang (permanent secretary at the Foreign Office) eventually reported to Attlee that agreement was impossible on Monnet’s terms, and on June 3, 1950, the Cabinet, presided over by the deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison, concurred. Morrison’s own contribution to the debate over the Schuman Plan was notoriously to say: “It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners would never wear it.”²⁴

In the subsequent Commons debate on June 26–27, 1950, Attlee stated that the British government could not accept the principle that the most vital economic forces of the country should be transferred to “an irresponsible body that is appointed by no-one and responsible to no-one.”²⁵ Few MPs dissented from the view that staying out was the wisest course of action. A rare exception was a Conservative making his maiden speech: Edward Heath, the man who would eventually take Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.

Attlee’s comment was in fact a reasonable objection to the Schuman Plan as it was originally formulated. If, however, Britain had yielded on the issue of the High Authority, it might have inserted safeguards into the treaty, as well as obtaining a measure of protection for its coal and steel industries. This is exactly what the Dutch and Italian governments did, and Britain, which would have been opening its massive coal and steel industry to competition, would have been in a far stronger position to get its own way than either country.

Edmund Dell, a former Labour minister turned historian, regarded Attlee’s refusal to join the negotiations as “the British abdication of leadership in Europe.” In Dell’s opinion, negotiations with Monnet were handled astonishingly badly: “Unprepared officials led unprepared ministers.”²⁶ In his view—and after reading his closely researched account, it is difficult to disagree—the top civil servants convinced themselves that the plan was unacceptable on grounds of both national principle and feasibility, and they briefed an exhausted government to that effect. Yet it ought to have been obvious that there were powerful forces tending to the scheme’s success. The plan removed the main cause of friction between Germany and France, won the immediate and enthusiastic support of the Americans, enlarged the domestic market for the Benelux countries, and was Germany’s and Italy’s return ticket to the society of civilized nations.

But the problem was not just abstract issues of sovereignty, or the plan’s likelihood of economic success. Britain’s politicians, as Morrison’s remark hints, had to take public opinion into account. The Daily Express, then Britain’s most influential mass circulation newspaper, argued on May 11, 1950, that the Schuman Plan was “a deliberate and concerted attempt to oblige us to accept the United States of Europe”—rhetoric that has a familiar ring to anybody who has lived through the heart searching provoked in Britain by the Treaty on European Union and Brexit.

But even without a hostile press baying against any concession to the Europeans, it seems unlikely that a Labour government would have surrendered even partial control over the recently nationalized coal and steel industries to the High Authority, nominated by largely Christian Democratic governments. Labour believed it was in politics to abolish capitalism, not to make capitalism work better. With what The Economist called the Labour Party’s “almost phenomenal gift for bad timing”—if bad timing it was—the Labour Party published, in mid-June 1950, its official statement of policy on the European question, a pamphlet called European Unity.²⁷ This document unambiguously asserted that Britain would only cooperate in schemes of European unification with countries that had adopted the key socialist policies of public ownership, full employment, and economic planning. Socialism came first in the order of values; Europe, a poor second. Besides, the pamphlet added:

In every respect except distance we in Britain are closer to our kinsmen in Australia and New Zealand on the far side of the world than we are to Europe. We are closer in language and origins, in social habits and institutions, in political outlook and economic interest. The economies of the Commonwealth countries are complementary to that of Britain to a degree which those of Western Europe could never equal.²⁸

Had Britain emerged from the war with a booming economy and its overseas investments intact, Britain would have taken the leadership of Europe by default. The other European countries would have looked to Britain for loans and export markets. But by 1950, Britain was not strong enough to overcome the profound belief of both the European political class and the Washington elite that—in Schuman’s words—le morcellement de l’Europe est devenu un absurde anachronisme.²⁹

This weakness became crucial in May 1950. The Schuman Plan exposed the limitations of British power. Unlike the Council of Europe, it was a concrete initiative that made sound economic sense. The three Low Countries and France and West Germany formed a natural economic region to which each could contribute and from which each could gain. As a contemporary article pithily noted:

France has the ore, Germany the coke, and Holland and Belgium the ports. The Schuman community has therefore a potential strength greater than the aggregate of the individual countries. It is a case of two and two making five.³⁰

Politically, the notion of a coal and steel community offered an opportunity for statesmen to exercise practical idealism. The Labour Party’s determination not to compromise its socialist program, the ingrained mentalities of much upper officialdom, and a misplaced sense of grandeur prevented Britain from seeing this critical fact. As Diane Kunz argues, Britain’s leaders “persisted in seeing Britain lodged within three interlocking circles: with the Continent, with the Empire and Commonwealth, and with the United States. To join a European union would be to favor one relationship to the detriment of others.”³¹

The result of this understanding of Britain’s place in the world was to ensure that British national influence waned. George W. Ball was surely right when he said, “Had Britain embraced the original Schuman proposal, it could have dominated the evolution not merely of the Coal and Steel Community, but also of the European Economic Community.”³² In the following two decades, France and West Germany, putting aside their secular rivalry, emerged as Britain’s equals, or even superiors, in prestige and economic prowess.