number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

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John Gillingham
postwar Europe can be better appreciated and the sources of European integration
more thoroughly understood than at present. 2
The European Coal and Steel Community was historically significant less for
what it did than because of its mere existence. The diplomacy that led to its founding
gave West Germany an escape from the European doghouse. It also sealed a
tacit and enduring understanding by which the potentially stronger power, Germany,
would subsidize the weaker one, France, into equal partnership. The CSC
enshrined this commitment. Undergirding it was an acknowledgement by both parties
that the United States would make and enforce the rules. Although Jean Monnet,
who inspired the Schuman Plan proposal, drafted these rules, they were
modelled on the American antitrust tradition. As the first President of the High
Authority, in office from August 1952 when the CSC commenced operations, to
June 1955 when he finally stepped down, Monnet's main challenge was to break up
the trusts and cartels that regulated coal and steel outputs in Western Europe. 3
The incompatibility between the reformist ideology of Washington and traditional
continental "organized capitalism" nevertheless paralyzed the Coal and Steel
Community. The High Authority did not in any sense "govern" the heavy industries
of Germany, France, the Benelux nations, and Italy, which continued to do business
as usual. 4 Nor did it have any of the "spillover effects" attributed to it by optimistic
social scientists 5 ; the CSC neither spontaneously generated complementary institutions
nor otherwise gave rise to new ways of doing business and changed relationships
between government and industry. Indeed the whole episode of inspiring,
negotiating, and operating the coal and steel community if anything simplified and
accelerated the restoration process. It strengthened an only slightly reformed old
order and helped foreclose the chance of generating a new one. In practice supranationalism
was a farce and treated as such by the governments of the The Six which,
after resuming the negotiations in May 1955 that led ultimately to the Treaty of
Rome, abandoned it as a model. Its most important legacy was to have set in
motion a diplomatic process which, taken in hand by the Europeans themselves,
developed new approaches, better suited to local conditions, that in the end fulfilled
the hopes of American policy-makers 6 .
The myth of supranationalism nevertheless had in its most extreme form what
amounted to a stranglehold on American integration policy during the 1950's. Its
real heyday was in the years of Eisenhower and Dulles, and the same somewhat
cloudy concept even continued to command loyalty during the presidency of John
F. Kennedy. 7 Its hold can be explained partly by parallels in the American experi-
2. See A. S. MILWARD, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992,
pp. 11-13.
3. See J. GILLINGHAM, Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe: The Germans and French from Ruhr
Conflict to Economic Community, Cambridge, 1991.
4. Ibid, pp. 319-332.
5. Ibid, ix-x.
6. Ibid, pp. 361-363.
7. P. WINAND, "The European Challenge: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe,"
doctoral dissertation, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1991, passim.