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

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John Gillingham
Yet the Atlanticists remained for the most part outsiders and the Monnetists
dominated the European agenda. The Schuman Plan, along with the Coal and Steel
Community, was their baby: It had to be protected, alternatives to it discouraged,
and its legacy built upon. Monnet's disciples in the foreign policy community like
David Bruce, William Tomlinson, and Robert Bowie were not only vigorous advocates
of the European Defence Community and EURATOM, both brain-children of
the master: they managed to create an air of mystique around his work that elevated
it above critical scrutiny. The message seldom varied: Monnet was indispensable
and he alone had the necessary vision and experience to end the historic antagonism
between France and Germany, integrate Europe, and protect the free world from
communist subversion. The United States, it followed, would be delinquent in
denying him the wherewithal to do the job. Cost was irrelevant, given the stakes,
and support had to be constant and unstinting. Monnet's projects were, however,
unrealistic; the institutions he inspired were all practical failures. They did, however,
result in a fast and furious wheel-spinning.
The State Department Monnetists did not, however, crowd out the pursuit of
better alternatives. The Atlanticist approach, which would have resulted in a thoroughgoing
militarization, was surely worse than theirs and no other more coherent
American design for Europe was in the offing. Nor was one really necessary. American-aided
recovery, along with profound war-induced changes within European
society, was the prime mover of the integration process, which had its own dynamics;
and the American Monnetists could do little to influence either it nor the fundamental
policy decisions of the individual European nations. At worst, Monnet's
American friends can be accused of squandering resources that might have been
used better at home. Rare indeed, however was the critic who made this point. The
Monnetists operated with the blessing of the Administration, especially after 1953,
and their opponents had little fight in them. A mood of national complacency increasingly
clouded over the Eisenhower years. The Pax Americana, at least in Europe,
seemed assured. Philosophers of the Affluent Society maintained that domestic
problems were all but non-existent. The State Department Monnetists were hardly
alone in failing to recognize that with the end of the Dollar Gap and the return to
convertability on the one hand and the creation of the European Community on the
other, the era of America's European hegemony was, by 1958, rapidly drawing to a
close.
The Coal and Steel Community
American policy towards the CSC must be placed against a broader background of
Monnet's ideas and their influence on American policy. Of his three main initiatives,
only the heavy industry pool was of lasting importance. The European
Defence Community, though the most ambitious and potentially significant, never
materialized. EURATOM came into being but was soon eclipsed by the EC and
had little more than a statutory existence. The CSC was an operational institution