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

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John Gillingham
world steel industry in late-1957 ended shortages of the material and the coal-steel
pool soon merged into the European Economic Community.
Conclusion
American integration policy during the fifties, which in the Eisenhower-Dulles
years was intimately associated with Monnetist supranationalism, accomplished
little after the launching of the CSC, an institution of little more than symbolic
importance. The proposals for the EDC and EURATOM, though in some respects
reckless, were too unrealistic to have done much damage. American Euro-diplomacy
of the era was, in fact, largely irrelevant; other forces drove the historical process.
American productivist ideology, as spawned in Europe by the Marshall Plan,
was one of them. Though obviously no blueprint, it provided hope in a civilization
where such a commodity was in short supply. A determination to modernize was a
common denominator of the emergent, though amorphous new European collectivity.
American aid, another agent of change, gave Europe the wherewithal for industrial
re-equipment. The impact of this assistance is only beginning to be examined
in detail and must be better known if one is to determine whether integration could
have been speeded up or better promoted by different methods. 64 The study of integration
must go beyond American policy and its consequences; it requires searching
investigations of the changes in European society that made it possible. 65
John Gillingham
64. See L. SEBESTA, L'Europa Indefesa. Sistema di sicurezza atlantico e case italiano 1948-1955,
Florence 1991.
65. Beginnings in A.S. MILWARD et al., The Frontier of National Sovereignty.