Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ important to remember that security and defence policies had initially focused on the need to inhibit future German aggression. The Treaty of Dunkirk, signed in March 1947, was a long-term Franco-British alliance directed against Germany. When the Brussels Pact was signed a year later and the Benelux countries joined the alliance, they modified its exclusive orientation against Germany by a commitment to ward off aggression from whatever source.²⁰ In the intervening twelve months, the announcement of the Truman Doctrine had highlighted a more immediate and dangerous threat to peace and security from the Soviet Union in the east. Yet the fact remained that had the Soviets invaded, the new alliances were ill-placed to stand in their way. Some have even argued that their very frailty was intended to demonstrate the necessity for American troops and equipment, backed by nuclear weapons if necessary, to be committed to Europe’s defence. Indeed, the secret so-called ‘Pentagon Talks’, which embraced the USA and Canada, started soon afterwards. These discussions came into the open in the summer of 1948 and were widened in their scope, culminating in April 1949 with the signature of the Atlantic Pact, forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).²¹

      American strategic planning in this period recognized that it would be impossible, even with US troops already on the ground, to defend Europe from Soviet aggression. In the event of an attack, the best scenario was a withdrawal behind the Pyrenees to Spain and across the Channel to the United Kingdom, from which points the reconquest of Europe could begin. A defence line at the Rhine or the Alps was not considered to be plausible before 1957 at the earliest. The only way to bring that date forward was to increase the European defence effort, and to employ the latent military strength of West Germany. Two events accelerated thinking in this direction: the victory of the Communists in China and, more importantly, the loss of the nuclear monopoly signified by the detection of the first Soviet atomic test in autumn 1949. These plans were made public in the crisis atmosphere surrounding the Communist invasion of South Korea which triggered the start of the Korean War. In September 1950, Acheson demanded the rearming of West Germany within NATO whilst pledging both an increase in the number of US troops stationed in Europe, and assistance for an arms buildup elsewhere.

      The European reaction to events in eastern Asia was rather more sanguine than that in the USA, and few really saw any link between the Korean war and an increased threat to security in Europe. Given the fact that the rise in raw material prices which had accompanied the outbreak of war had undermined ECSC members’ balance-of-payments positions and weakened their recoveries, they were reluctant to undermine progress further by increasing defence budgets. Still less did they see any immediate necessity for German rearmament. In France especially, this reaction was acute. If the idea of facing a resurgent German industry had filled French policy-makers with dismay, their alarm at the prospect of a reconstituted German army was even greater. Since much of the French army was involved in Indo-China, Germany would soon have the largest army in western Europe.

      Within the French planning ministry, an alternative strategy was hurriedly put together. If supranationality had provided a vehicle for controlling German industry, could it not serve to control its rearmament as well? In October 1950, the prime minister René Pleven announced that France would accept German rearmament only in the context of a European army, under the control of a single minister of defence. Initially, the Americans were horrified at the delay to the formation of German divisions that acceptance of the French proposals would imply. Although talks on the Pleven Plan started in February 1951, parallel efforts continued to find a formula for the integration of the German army into NATO. When these failed, in summer 1951, the US not only tolerated the French scheme but became an enthusiastic advocate. A European Defence Community (EDC) would become the agent for carrying forward the process of integration in Europe.²²

      At this point, only five of the six ECSC countries were involved as full participants in the negotiations. After the switch in the American position, the Netherlands finally joined too, its change of heart prompted by a fear of losing American cash and goodwill and the hope of securing a defensive line (the Rhine-Ijssel line) that would not abandon most of the country to advancing Soviet forces. In May 1952, the treaty establishing the EDC was signed in Paris. It was not particularly elegant in design, nor particularly egalitarian in intent. To neutralize the danger of independent German military adventure, the army was to be made up of national units of battalion size only. Having thus fragmented German military capacity, the French then went on to remove their own colonial armed forces from Community control. By defining Germany as a potential war zone, the treaty also proscribed the manufacture of certain war equipment on German soil. Despite the modifications made during the negotiations, the EDC did not make much military sense. Nor did it much appeal to the other members of the Six. But the treaty’s greatest failure lay in its primary task of making German remilitarization acceptable to French public opinion. Successive French governments shrank from presenting the treaty to parliament for ratification and when they eventually did so, in August 1954, it was rejected.

      The EDC is an interesting example of the limits of American hegemonic leadership. American pressure was instrumental in securing a higher priority for European defence spending and for obtaining recognition that German troops were necessary. Yet, ultimately, the American administration had to defer to the French political agenda. Moreover, having done so, they failed to secure French acceptance of its own government’s creation, despite the fact that Europe’s defence was impossible without the USA. Certainly, this point was repeatedly made and never more clearly than when secretary of state John Foster Dulles threatened an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of the American defence commitments to Europe if the issue were not resolved quickly. Moreover, French security objectives in their colonies were utterly dependent on US assistance. From 1950 to the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the United States covered 70% of the costs of France’s colonial war in Indo-China.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ