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The Western European Union Armaments Pool 37
The Western European Union Armaments Pool: France’s Quest
for Security and European Cooperation in Transition
1951-1955
Elena Calandri
Looking back to the European Defence Community – The Crisis in Context
In May 1950, partly as a response to American pressures to end obstruction of West
Germany's full industrial recovery and political rehabilitation, the French foreign
minister Robert Schuman launched a plan to pool production and development of
the essential strategic materials and set the goal of European political union, to be
built up gradually "par des réalisations concrètes créant une solidarité de fait". In
September 1950, despite rapid progress, the Schuman Plan negotiators had only
started to sketch a framework for Franco-German reconciliation so America's
uncompromising pressure to have West Germany contributing to Western defence
disrupted the tempo of the process. Isolated among his colleagues, who were afraid
of fomenting American disengagement from Europe at the New York NATO Council
meeting, the French government's representative rejected German membership
of the North Atlantic Pact, arguing that this did not offer any means of limiting and
controlling rearmament. The French Premier, René Pleven, put forward therefore a
supranational solution worked out by Jean Monnet. In January, 1951, representatives
of the Six opened negotiations in Paris to create a "European army". 1
As negotiations went ahead, the plan started a chain reaction which transformed
the distant, almost visionary, European union into an entangling, imminent reality.
In the autumn of 1951 the Benelux and Italy called for a political roof over an economic
framework to complement the common army. After the Six had signed the
European Defence Community (EDC) Treaty on 27 May 1952 the ad hoc assembly,
formed under the terms of Article 38, elaborated upon the rules for the European
Political Community. Plans for "pools" in such varied fields as transport and
milk products proliferated. By the end of 1953, rumours were spreading about the
establishment of a common market within six years. 2
In France, initial mixed feelings towards the Pleven Plan turned into hostility
concerning the Defence Community. Not only did it become clear that France
could only exact controls over Germany at the price of undercutting her own autonomy
but in March, 1953, Stalin's death defused the fear and urgency that had been
so effective in pushing together "the West" in the aftermath of the Korean war.
1. E. FURSDON, The European Defence Community. A History, London 1980; for considerations on
the origins of the plan and on acceleration as the main cause of the failure, J. MONNET, Mémoires,
Paris 1976.
2. Among them, Pierre Pflimlim's "Green" pool, the so called White Pool, Malagodi's transport Pool;
on the EPC and its economic spill-over, Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris
(AMAE), DECE 1944-60, vols 582 and 584.