Читать книгу European Integration - Mark Gilbert - Страница 31

The successful creation of the ECSC, despite its starting difficulties, fueled the belief among policy makers that the “Europeanization” of major problems was the best way of solving them—especially when the betterment of Franco-German relations was concerned. The European Defense Community (EDC) began life as a French improvisation to the rehabilitation of West Germany. It finished as a traumatic episode in which an attempt to pool national sovereignty in collective community institutions dealing with defense exposed the deep divisions of the political class of France. La Querelle de la CED (The EDC Controversy), to cite the title of a famous book on the subject edited by the French sociologist and political journalist, Raymond Aron, split French politics asunder.⁴⁶

The root cause of this trauma was German rearmament. As we have seen, the Bundesrepublik was founded in May 1949, but it remained under the tutelage of the so-called High Commission for Germany. This body’s task was to keep vigil over the new German government. West Germany was denied the right to maintain armed forces, could not join NATO or the Brussels Pact, and was excluded from the United Nations. France was willing to remove Germany’s pariah status in economic matters, but defense issues were altogether more sensitive for the French government, which had to be mindful of the French Communist Party’s capacity to stir up mischief among public opinion on such a delicate subject. Nevertheless, if one assumed that the Soviet Union’s intentions were aggressive, then West Germany’s strategic importance was undeniable. In 1950, the Soviet Union had vastly superior forces on the ground in East Germany and the neighboring communist states and was in a position to strike across the north German plain at a moment’s notice: the West’s front line effectively was the Rhine. US policy makers concluded that the only logical course of action was to rearm Germany as fast as possible.⁴⁷

The United States was unwilling to press the French too hard to accept German rearmament until June 1950, when North Korea invaded its southern neighbor. The similarity of Korea to Germany—a country divided between communist and pro-American halves—could not but arouse alarm in the countries that had signed the North Atlantic Treaty. The invasion seemed like a prelude to an attack in Europe. In September 1950, at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty’s foreign ministers, the United States committed itself to sending six fully equipped divisions to Europe, but asked its European allies, as a quid pro quo, to drop opposition to the militarization of West Germany. The French government, stuck, turned to Monnet for help. Monnet, who feared that West Germany might backtrack on its commitment to the ECSC if it was offered an alternative route back to national sovereignty, reverted to a tried (though not yet tested) formula: a European Community for defense matters similar to the one then under negotiation for coal and steel. Instead of Schuman, the spokesman for Monnet’s ideas was, this time, the prime minister, René Pleven.

The Pleven Plan was announced on October 24, 1950. The plan envisaged the creation of a European Ministry of Defense responsible to an assembly and to a council of national defense ministers. The ministry was to organize defense administration (procurement, planning, links with the war industries), not strategic questions; all national governments except West Germany were to retain independent military forces. Germans would, however, have participated in so-called integrated units, though not at more than battalion strength.

American policy makers reacted with “consternation and despair” to the Pleven Plan. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said that it contained “every kind of obstacle, difficulty and fantastic notion that misguided humans could put into one package.”⁴⁸ Naturally, as president, he later became one 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 own. Mendès-France responded that the National Assembly would never pass the treaty and that rejection would be a propaganda disaster. It was better to amend the treaty in order to win over undecided members of the National Assembly.⁶²

Mendès-France put forward a list of amendments to a meeting of the EDC powers in Brussels on August 19, 1954. Among other things, he proposed introducing an eight-year national veto over the Board of Commissioners’ actions; asked that article 38 (authorizing the EPC) be deleted; and requested the right to withdraw from the treaty if Germany were reunited. These amendments infuriated France’s partners, especially West Germany, where the government was under pressure to get results from its controversial policy of Westpolitik (as Adenauer’s opening to the French since 1950 was known). Walter Hallstein, a German official who would become the first president of the European Commission, vented his feelings at the French move by saying, “Mendès has just presented us with the corpse of Europe.”⁶³

Mendès-France allowed the undiluted EDC treaty to be debated in the National Assembly at the end of August 1954. It was rejected by 319 votes to 264 after a debate whose chauvinism shocked France’s neighbors. Opponents of the treaty used four main arguments. First, they feared that France would be swallowed up in a European superstate if they voted for the treaty. Edouard Herriot, who had been the patron of the French Council for a United Europe and had attended the Congress of Europe in 1948, proclaimed that “for us the European Community is the end of France . . . it is a question of the life and death of France.” The treaty was held to be the work of a handful of technocrats (de Gaulle had darkly called Monnet “the inspirer” in a November 1953 press conference and had condemned the EDC treaty for good measure as “an artificial monster” and a “Frankenstein”) who were working behind the scenes to reduce France’s independence.⁶⁴ Second, French legislators worried that the proposed European army would rapidly be Germanized. Distrust of German motives was voiced openly. Third, many deputies thought that the treaty would cut France off from the French Union, as its empire in Africa was now renamed. Fourth, national pride was a major factor. Britain had not signed the EDC treaty, and the United States did not seem to expect it to. France should not lower itself to the level of what one deputy called “two defeated and three tiny countries” if Britain and America did not do the same.⁶⁵

When the result was announced, the anti-cédistes burst into a spirited rendition of “La Marseilleise.” In response, Dulles sourly commented, “It is a tragedy that in one country nationalism, abetted by communism, has asserted itself so as to endanger the whole of Europe.”⁶⁶

The EDC controversy had been a “harrowing split” (déchirement) for France.⁶⁷ But France, in a sense, was the least of the problems. Germany was left, four years on from the Pleven Plan, without statehood, the Americans were bereft of ideas, and European federalists had been reminded that rumors of the death of national sovereignty were greatly exaggerated.

Britain, in the person of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, stepped into the breach with a burst of intelligent diplomacy. The British solution was to extend the Brussels Pact to Germany and Italy.⁶⁸ On October 23, 1954, the Brussels powers agreed to terminate the occupation of Germany, to establish a new body called the Western European Union (WEU) with Italy and West Germany as members, to permit West Germany to join NATO, and to draw up a “European Statute” for the Saarland. Britain pledged it would maintain military forces in West Germany, while Germany pledged it would abstain from possessing certain categories of weapons (nuclear bombs, guided missiles, capital ships). An agency to monitor and audit national stocks of armaments was set up.

The treaty setting up the WEU retained the Brussels Pact’s preamble, stating that one of its goals was “to encourage the progressive integration of Europe,” but nobody was fooled. Monnet later described the new body as a “weak coordination structure” destined to “vegetate,” but it would be more accurate to describe it as “talking shop.”⁶⁹ The WEU did draw up a plan to “Europeanize” the Saarland, but it was rejected by popular referendum on October 23, 1955, and the region eventually became part of West Germany.

The EDC debacle persuaded Monnet that he should devote himself to proselytizing for European unity among the political class of the Six. He left his post as president of the High Authority to do so. Other pro-integration statesmen concluded that the best way of relaunching the European project was to work for trade liberalization. The European Economic Community rose phoenix-like from the EDC’s humiliating failure. In the historiography of European integration, this capacity to recover from defeat has typically been interpreted as a sign of the resilience of the desire for greater European unity. It is also true that the EDC querelle revealed that major powers—France and Britain, in particular—would not relinquish key sovereign powers easily, whatever the rhetoric surrounding the European movement. In this respect, the EDC debacle was a harbinger of the difficulties the European project would have whenever it touched prerogatives big countries regard as sacred.