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American Monnetism and the European Coal-Steel Community in the Fifties 21
American Monnetism and the
European Coal-Steel Community in the Fifties
John Gillingham
The European Coal and Steel Community (CSC) represents the crowning achievement
of American integration policy in the decade that began with the Marshall
Plan and ended with the Treaty of Rome. This coincides, of course, with the era of
the "Dollar Gap" and of maximum American influence in Europe, the period in
which the vast resources of the United States helped transform a landmass of
hostile states and discredited governments into what would eventually become a
cooperative, prosperous, and stable collective venture that someday may be referred
to officially and without qualification simply as Europe.
The creation of such a federal union was the supreme objective of an American
postwar policy that, as it took form, came to be described as a structure of mutually
interlocking concentric circles. At the periphery were organizations like GATT for
global trade liberalization plus the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
for promoting currency convertability. From there one moved inwards to NATO,
which provided the bonds of a trans-Atlantic security community, and thence to
Marshall Plan-derived, strictly intra-European commercial organizations like
OEEC and its functionally significant financial offshoot, the European Payments
Union. The Coal and Steel Community described the inner ring of "The Six." Europe's
original "supranational" institution, it was important not only because in creating
it the contracting states had for the first time delegated sovereign powers to an
authority vested with a specific mandate to govern over them according to its own
rules; two of the states in question were Germany and France, whose conflicts, centering
on the domination of Western Europe's heavy industry, were at the source of
the two great wars of the century. The CSC solved an historical problem and at the
same time provided a model for the future. A Europe solid at the core would
develop and expand into a bloc equal in strength to the United States and the Soviet
Union but joined by tradition, values, organizations, economic interest, and political
cooperation to the sponsoring superpower. 1
Seen from the vantage point of the present, American integration policy appears
far-sighted and beneficent as well as triumphant. The historian who subjects it to
critical, microscopic examination must therefore be prepared to defend himself
from charges of nit-picking. It is nevertheless important to understand both what
the CSC was and how it functioned as well as its impact on American diplomacy
and foreign relations. If in so doing, one can distinguish more clearly between integration
as represented in the official American scenario and what actually happened,
the real nature of the United States' contribution to the reconstitution of
1. F. ROMERO, "Interdependence and Integration in American Eyes: From the Marshall Plan to Currency
Convertability, in A. S. MILWARD et al The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and
Theory 1945-1992, London and New York 1993, p. 158.