Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

There was another blind alley. What was to be done with Germany on the international level? France was divided; both Right and Left opposed any forward move. Nevertheless, a centrist government, at American prompting, went ahead. Monnet’s deputy, René Pleven, by now prime minister (though not for long) proposed another supra-national arrangement, a European Defence Force (it went back to 1950, and Monnet urged this in part because he wanted another iron in the fire during the lengthy and arduous negotiations over the ECSC). At first the idea was to delay German rearmament, but then came another ambition, to put German troops under French officers in a European Defence Community (EDC), in its way not dissimilar to the ECSC. On its own the EDC arrangement was hardly necessary. It was to be small, and would not operate independently of NATO; in any case in 1953, even before the treaty was to be ratified, the Americans had adopted a new strategic doctrine, that of enormous nuclear response to a Soviet attack, such that any European Defence Force (EDF) would only be of trivial importance. On the other hand, the EDF would be supported by a proto-government with four ministries and a great deal of money to spend on armaments — a European ‘military-industrial complex’ as President Eisenhower later called the American version. The foreign ministers of the six ECSC nations initialled this treaty in May 1952. The French socialists insisted on the EDC’s having a political supervisory body, and negotiations started for a European Political Community out of that, with the same paraphernalia as the ECSC. Defence budgets doubled in the first year of the Korean War (to $9bn) and in a ‘Mutual Security Program’ the US supplied defence aid as well, in fact not much less than the Marshall Plan itself. It was really the Americans who pushed for the EDC, and no-one was enthusiastic. In July 1954, after two years’ acrimonious exchanges, and two months after France’s catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, the French parliament failed to ratify it. ‘Europe’ had been foiled again, it seemed, but in fact the EDC was superfluous. German rearmament went ahead anyway, Germany joining NATO in 1955, and NATO itself did what the EDC had been supposed to do. On Christmas Eve in 1954 the French assembly rejected German membership of NATO but then, on 30 December, bizarrely allowed Germany into what was now to be called the ‘Western European Union’ under the Brussels Pact. A threat that there would be a separate treaty with Germany then allowed her into NATO as well. There had been a crisis in the alliance, but not one, in the end, of any significance. Dulles greatly exaggerated when he remarked that a ‘disaster’ had been avoided, of an ‘isolated’ France and a ‘neutralized’ Germany, Europe dominated by the Russians. The crisis such as it was was easily enough settled. But again Monnet and his friends had been disappointed, and they needed something else.

There was another strand to ‘Europe’, and it also closely involved France. Monnet could see that nuclear energy was becoming important, and France, lacking coal, had been forward with it. Now he proposed a European Atomic Community, ‘Euratom’ (the Brussels Exhibition in 1958 with the huge ‘Atomium’ as its centrepiece). This was a step too far. The American atomic agency preferred to deal separately with the European countries and they anyway lacked the uranium and the specialized knowledge, which the Americans, outside diplomatic circles, were not inclined to share. Euratom never achieved anything. But the idea of a customs union now came up again — yet another idea that was originally American and even went back to 1947. The Benelux countries were at the mercy of their larger neighbours, Germany especially. They were enthusiastic about anything that made for a supra-national authority that would bind France and especially Germany, and they were also anxious that the British should be involved as a counterweight. Now, the Dutch foreign minister proposed a customs union.

The suggestion was taken up by an Italian foreign minister with a desire to lay down supra-national rules that would prevent Italian politicians from indulging in sharp practices. With a constituency in Sicily to impress, he invited major representatives to discuss the Dutch idea. They met in an old Dominican monastery near Messina, at Taormina, in May 1955. The French wanted German machinery; the Germans wanted respectability; and Euratom was at least worth discussing. As ever, the British hung back. They sent an intelligent, well-informed and linguistically talented official, Russell Bretherton, who sucked an avuncular pipe in some scepticism as the others talked in their high-flown way; then he wished them well and took his leave. Later on, there was much criticism at this missed opportunity. Of the failure to link up with the ECSC, Alan Milward remarks that the then Labour government was ‘too complacent and too much a product of British history to understand what was happening in France’; besides it suspected ‘neo-liberalism’, i.e. Erhardian anti-socialism, in the various ‘European’ ideas. As to Bretherton’s departure from Messina, other commentators also shake their heads, and suggest that Great Britain missed a chance to create a ‘Europe’ that would have suited its purposes better than the Europe that did emerge. There is truth in these criticisms, but in the end they are anachronistic. In the mid-fifties the British were doing quite well, were even selling fashionable motor cars, were reconstituting their foreign investments, even beyond the pre-war level. The trading agreements with the Commonwealth worked quite well, and food was quite cheap, while markets were available for exports.

At any rate the other Europeans came quite quickly to an agreement, and set up a conference at Venice for the following May and June to work out details. Experts settled these and on 25 March 1957 the Treaty of Rome (strictly speaking, ‘treaties’) established the European Economic Community, or EEC (and the ineffectual Euratom). It entered into force on 1 January 1958. The preamble, a sort of Catholic aftershave, stated grandly that the aim was integration and even unification within a set period. Institutions were taken from the ECSC — a council of ministers, an arbitration court and a High Authority, though it was called a ‘Commission’ because by now most people had had enough of Monnet’s ambitiousness. The first president — such was his title — was German. Adenauer would have preferred Wilhelm Röpke, a good liberal who had had much to do with the remaking of Germany but instead had to make do with Walter Hallstein, who taught commercial law. He was a chilly figure who, asked what he should be called, said he would prefer it if he were called ‘Professor’.

He was too frosty to deal with the French combination of acuteness and arrogance that he now encountered. The new Community, as with its predecessor, followed French lines. The Germans were simply anxious to be accepted. Provided that the customs area, free trade and competition meant what they said, they would accept French proposals as regards institutions. These reflected French ways, which meant ‘top-down’ behaviour, complete with ‘directives’ that were composed by functionaries on high and then communicated for obedience by the member states’ governments. French civil servants referred to the people as les administrés and in French circumstances, given the periodic ungovernability of the country, this was not inappropriate. But these institutions were conceded because the other member states recognized that France faced particular difficulties with a customs union. She still had a large African empire, and had made some effort to integrate it with the French metropolis. Much of her agriculture was very poor and backward, and would not face competition. Some of her industry — Lorraine steel, for instance — had flourished but there were still large parts of it that would collapse if exposed to German and even Italian trade on level terms. There was a further French fear that, given the capital mobility that a customs union must mean, there would be yet another ‘flight from the franc’. At varying intervals, the bourgeoisie famously put its money into suitcases and headed for the Swiss border: this had happened when a left-liberal and anti-clerical government (led by Émile Combes) took over in 1905, and had been repeated with the Popular Front government of 1936. With the troubles of 1947, it had happened again, and French governments knew very well that their best-laid plans could go awry because the money fled. This was one reason for their readiness to devalue, a course of action that at least made the suitcases (some of them no doubt filled with black-market profits from the war) lighter. One way and the other, the French were not wholehearted about the Community, and they had to be placated. There were also fears for the ‘social benefits’ which had been awarded to French workers after the war. These were expensive for the patrons and they thought that cheaper-wage countries would have an unfair advantage. The ‘benefits’, such as wage equality of the sexes, would have to be ‘harmonized’. Few people in France were therefore particularly enthusiastic about a customs union, and on the whole the idea went ahead mainly because, otherwise, it was clear enough that France was going nowhere; it was Germany that led the pack. In 1954 France had been humiliated in Vietnam, and now she was being further strained as a vicious terrorist war went on in Algeria. France needed friends. It helped that in 1955 a lively anti-European figure, Pierre Mendès France, lost office at this time, punished for being right. It also helped that the head of the French delegation, Robert Marjolin, was a remarkable man with long experience as head of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), and he managed the negotiations very well — tacitly telling the other Europeans what they should say, so that he could manage the French behind him.