Keith Middlemas - Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

Despite all the possibilities for leverage that this dependence implied, the Americans still failed to secure the acceptance of a policy with which it had become increasingly identified. 23

Part of the problem with the EDC was the question of control: to whom would a European minister of defence be responsible, who would decide how and when the European army would be used and who would decide the foreign policy that the existence of the army was supposed to support? The treaty had indeed envisaged an assembly and its first task would be to design a new, democratic model for political control. The existence of these clauses had been introduced on the insistence of Alcide de Gasperi and were a triumph for Altiero Spinelli’s federalist movement. In September 1952, the foreign ministers decided not to wait for the ratification of the EDC treaty but to move ahead immediately with the preparations for a ‘European Political Community’ (EPC). Six months later, right on schedule, the ad hoc assembly produced a draft treaty for the EPC. Meanwhile the increase in Gaullist representation in the French parliament had led to the coalition government dispensing with the services of Schuman as its foreign minister. This, more than anything, symbolized the abandonment of supranationality as the leitmotif of French foreign policy. Within the new environment, however, the EPC merely complicated an already difficult situation. For French socialists, the EDC was acceptable only if the elements of democratic control were strengthened. But any concessions in this direction would antagonize the Gaullists and others for whom the treaty was acceptable (if still unpalatable) only if the elements of national control were reinforced. Thus the French made desperate efforts to add protocols to the EDC treaty in the vain hope of finding the magic combination that would allow their parliament to ratify it. 24

Within the Netherlands, the EDC had created problems of a different nature. The European army had been accepted only reluctantly and the government was not interested in increasing its entanglement with premature experiments in political federation. Thus, when the EPC was launched, the Dutch made their acceptance conditional on its being given specific economic tasks. Their foreign minister, Jan Willem Beyen, attempted to get the EPC treaty to include provisions for the automatic creation of a customs union. In the subsequent inter-governmental talks on the EPC, which lasted from the autumn of 1953 until the summer of 1954, the Beyen Plan received only qualified endorsement. In theory, it was acceptable to Belgium and Germany only if it were widened to embrace a complete common market and only if provisions were added for economic policy coordination. The Italians, however, were willing to accept the idea that the creation of a common market was one of the tasks of the EPC (which left open the option that the EPC might do nothing) but were not willing to countenance it as a separate protocol. But the French were unwilling to accept it at all. With an economy lurching into deficit because of colonial wars, while government abandoned many of the ‘liberalization’ measures that had previously been adopted, the time was evidently not ripe for discussing the automatic removal of protectionism. 25

The EDC was never a very stable construction. It was also utterly inadequate to carry either the ambitions of the European federalists or Dutch designs for a permanent and fair removal of trade barriers. When the EDC collapsed in August 1954 on the French refusal to move to ratification, it seemed at the same time to dash all hopes that the Six might move towards further integration.

In the wake of the EDC’s collapse, there was an intense surge of diplomatic activity to resolve outstanding sources of Franco-German conflict. One success of this was the decision, based on a British initiative, to create a German army under the umbrella of NATO and under the auspices of the Western European Union (WEU) which was now to embrace all six ECSC countries, as well as the UK itself (ironically, this was a solution that could have been reached almost four years earlier). Another potentially thorny issue in relations between the two countries had been the disputed status of the Saar, pre-War German territory under French administration, later incorporated into a customs union with France. The French government had wanted to give this area ‘European’ status but, under a new agreement, France accepted that it would be bound by a plebiscite to be held in October 1955. In the event, the populace rejected the European option and the territory was transferred back to Germany in January 1957.

Another source of inconvenience, if not tension, had been the French desire to secure markets for its agricultural produce in Germany. This question had become trapped into the so-called ‘green pool’ negotiations for the creation of some form of European agricultural organization but, after their failure and the transfer of the agricultural brief to the OEEC in January 1955, the first bilateral agreement to emerge was the Franco-German wheat agreement. Among the other agreements dating from this period, possibly the next in importance was that to canalize the Moselle river, thereby improving trade between the two countries. France’s partners reacted to this flurry of activity with some ambivalence. Whilst they could see the potential gains in easing relations between the two countries, they could also see the danger that if France no longer needed ‘integration’ to control Germany, their own interests could easily be ignored in the ensuing rounds of bilateral dealing. Under these circumstances, the Benelux governments began to consider ways of relaunching the ‘European agenda’.

At the headquarters of the ECSC in Luxembourg, Jean Monnet was also concerned at the drift in events. Unaware that the French government was indifferent to his fate, he decided to make his continuance as chairman of the High Authority contingent upon progress on the European front. Rather than start afresh, or pick over the wreckage of the EDC disaster to see what could be salvaged, he considered that the best approach would be to build outwards from the existing community. This could be extended into inland transport in general, into other classical energy forms (particularly electricity generation) or, and this was to be the key to its success, into atomic power. Nuclear energy was seen as an exciting new prospect where there had been little time for entrenched interests to emerge; yet the costs of developing it were too heavy for a single country to bear. This last consideration, however, had not prevented most industrial nations from embarking on experimental programmes of their own. The French government, especially, was extremely keen on developing nuclear cooperation and particularly wanted jointly to construct an isotope separation plant, a necessary but expensive component in developing enriched uranium for future reactors and nuclear bombs. Unknown at the time, it was in December 1954 that the French nuclear energy agency began to implement a five-year programme to manufacture a French nuclear bomb. 26

The question of a nuclear community, EURATOM, was one of the items on the agenda when the foreign ministers of the Six met in Messina in June 1955 and it was adopted for further study alongside a patchwork of other initiatives (the main one of which was a common market, which we will return to below). The first results of this study envisaged that EURATOM would acquire a monopoly of all nuclear material and its transformation into products for fission. EURATOM would also build and control its own nuclear installations, including an isotope separation plant, financed from a common budget. Finally, it would administer a common market in all these materials and equipment. The one point it did not touch on was the relation of this structure to national military programmes, such as the one already underway in France. At this juncture the French suggested a moratorium on the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons for five years, which did not affect the French programme because it would not be ready for such tests until after this period. The military problem was part of a wider one that, mid–way through the negotiations, was beginning to sap EURATOM’s rationale. It was never envisaged that EURATOM would be the sole European nuclear programme, merely that it would assist and facilitate (and to some extent control) parallel national programmes. 27