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

American Monnetism and the European Coal-Steel Community in the Fifties 25
that formulated ambitious policies, published innumerable orders and decrees, and
sought high public visibility. It was the centerpiece of integrationist diplomacy
during most, though not all, of the period between the Schuman Plan announcement
and the founding of the European Economic Community, with both the Coal
and Steel Community and EURATOM subsequently merged.
State Department discussions of integration policy, particularly after 1953, took
place in a cloud-cuckoo land of soaring ambition, wishful thinking, bold posturing,
and fabulism. From the moment of its inception in the Schuman Plan, Monnet presented
the CSC as something unique and unprecedented in history to which the old
rules did not apply. Embodying, as it did, the most profound hopes of war-weary
nations, the initiative was indeed an experiment whose success was devoutly to be
wished and whose failure almost too painful to contemplate. Thus the CSC seldom
faced a reality check. Apart from Luxembourg officialdom and Community coal
and steel producers, few realized that the intellectual turbulence with which Monnet
loved to surround himself was producing little by way of concrete results. Only
belatedly did it dawn upon the makers of American foreign policy that their confidence
in the heavy industry pool had been misplaced.
Without American backing the European Coal and Steel Community would
have come to naught. The United States was more than a silent partner to the Schuman
Plan negotiations, which began in June 1950 and concluded with the initialling
of the Treaty of Paris in April of the following year. Monnet's American
friends intervened massively to save the coal-steel negotiations from being swept
under by the crisis that broke out in September 1950, when, without prior warning,
Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States planned to
begin arming the West Germans. At a single stroke, Acheson had inadvertently turned
the tables on France's Schuman Plan negotiators: a scheme calculated to
redress a strategic imbalance between the two big Rhine-straddling nations now, it
seemed, was to produce the opposite effect. To save the day, Monnet, through
Prime Minister Pleven, proclaimed that France was ready to join, with the Germans
or anyone else, a European army composed of nationally-integrated units. The United
States immediately endorsed the idea. There was, at this point, nothing more to
the proposal than a declaration of intent; no one, Monnet included, had a clue as to
how such an organization would either function or fit into the "big picture." From
this point on, however, and until the demise of the Euro-army project, the histories
of the CSC and the European Defence Community proposal were intertwined. 13
Although the Pleven Plan offered at least a hope of containing West German
rearmament, it did not address French fears that the powerful neighbour to the east
would dominate the Schuman Plan organization. To prevent this from happening
the Allied High Commissioners, effectively under the direction of Monnet's old friend
John J. McCloy, cranked up a long-idled program to decartelize and destrustify
German industry. Indeed, by force majeure they forced Chancellor Adenauer and
the smoke-stack barons of the Ruhr to accept it. The price the Federal Republic
13. J. GILLINGHAM, "Solving the Ruhr Problem: German Heavy Industry and the Schuman Plan," in
K. SCHWABE (ed.), Die Anfänge des Schuman Plans, Bruxelles 1988, pp. 399-436.