Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

Dieses Dokument wurde erstellt mit FrameMaker 4.0.4.Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen 121Book reviews – Comptes rendus – BuchbesprechungenClifford P. HACKETT (ed.). – Monnet and the Americans. The father of a unitedEurope and his US supporters. Washington D.C., Jean Monnet Council, 1995, 268 p. –ISBN 09642541-0-7. – 1464,00 FBThe purpose of this collection of essays, according to its editor and well-known scholar ofJean Monnet, Clifford Hackett, is a modest one; Monnet and the Americans concentrates onsome of Jean Monnet's links with American individuals throughout his long and remarkablecareer and the significance of these relationships for US and European affairs, the keymoments of which included the Schuman Plan, the European Defence Community episodeand the Euratom project. As Hackett acknowledges in the introduction, this aspect formsonly part of a larger story but “one that needed to be told by itself”. Unsurprisingly, therefore,the eight contributions cover little new ground beyond that which has been extensivelytilled by the two recent Monnet biographies, François Duchêne's Jean Monnet, the firstStatesman of Interdependence (London, 1994) and Eric Roussel's Jean Monnet, 1888-1979(Paris, 1996) and appear to be directed primarily toward a US readership. The merit of thecollection is that it draws together in one volume accounts of the principal relationshipsbetween Monnet and key American individuals which have been sketched either in memoirs(as in the case of David DiLeo's subject George Ball) or in comprehensive biographicalstudies (such as Thomas Schwartz’s America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the FederalRepublic of Germany (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991) and Douglas Brinkley's, After theCreation: Dean Acheson and American Foreign Policy, 1953-71 (New Haven, CT, 1991).Inevitably, this results in a degree of repetition and overlap from chapter to chapter but thereader can build a comprehensive picture of the nature of Monnet's network of US relationshipsand the degree to which he employed these individuals in pursuit of his objectives.Richard Mayne provides an introductory biographical essay which leads on to moredetailed studies of particular relationships. Don Cook's contribution “Monnet and the AmericanPress” is essentially a testimony of the contacts Monnet assiduously cultivated with theprincipal US correspondents in Europe, among them Walter Lippmann, James Reston andTheodore H. White. A rough chronological order is maintained tracing Monnet's mostimportant relationships through successive US administrations. This approach illustrates thetenacity with which Monnet pursued contacts that would permit access to the highestsources of decision-making in government. Hackett's own essay points to the relationshipsMonnet developed in his pre-war visits to Washington with Felix Frankfurter, Hans Morgenthauand Harry Hopkins while trying to convince the Roosevelt administration to sellAmerican aircraft to France. This account records the suspicion with which many in the USgovernment (not least in the Treasury and State Departments) initially viewed l’Inspirateur:it was only in 1949, with the appointment of Dean Acheson as Secretary of State, that Monnet'sinfluence in US State Department policy-making really began to take root. It was toreach its apogee in the next administration, where he could number President Eisenhoweramong his contacts and had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as one of his oldest andclosest confidants and lasted into the Kennedy administration. The gradual widening anddeepening of Monnet's US network (to use a suitably European phrase) goes some way toexplaining the extraordinary resilience of his influence among “pragmatic” (a descriptionfavoured by all the authors) US policy-makers.The authors are reluctant to cast a critical eye on either Monnet or his US contacts – Brinkleymerely acknowledges that Monnet's dogged pursuit of Euratom and his scepticismabout the EEC in 1956-57 led him down the path of the “secondary cause”. Similarly, PascaleWinand exonerates Monnet from responsibility for encouraging increased US pressure