In 1949 there was rethinking, not least in the head of Jean Monnet, architect of the Plan, and a considerable opportunist. He, like so many of the initial Europeans, was an interesting and even a rather fascinating man. He had not bothered to finish school, made money by selling brandy to Eskimos, got a Soviet divorce, and admired American business (he spent both world wars in the USA, acting for the British or French governments). He would as easily have been director of a French five-year plan as founding father of a sort of New Deal Europe, and his influence was formidable. There were by now many Frenchmen arguing that some closer association with booming Germany was essential. The foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was one (he came from Lorraine and had even served in the German army in the First World War) and he talked comfortably not just to Adenauer but to the Italian, Alcide De Gasperi, who had been a deputy in the Austrian parliament before 1914, when Trieste had been an Austrian port.
In 1949 Monnet and Schuman sensed that France must change course, and make an effort to capture the new Germany before she went off in a completely Atlantic direction. Monnet was already irritated at the French metallurgical industries’ inability or unwillingness to compete. Trade with Germany would put an end to that, and Franco-German reconciliation became the order of the day. Even in the twenties, there had been efforts at co-operation, for French steel, and during the war intelligent technocratic heads — Albert Speer, as German munitions minister, and tubby little Jean Bichelonne, head of industrial production for the Vichy French — had talked ‘Europe’, though the sheer clumsiness of the Nazis had caused French workers to run away and hide. Now there were better-organized Germans, and the Ruhr was working again. Collaboration could go ahead without the old collaborators — in fact, on the French side, the Free French had just stepped into their shoes. The French proposed a European Coal and Steel Community, in May 1950, and told the British only at the last minute, just as the British had informed them of the devaluation of 1949 at the last minute. The Germans had agreed in advance. True, their industrialists did not necessarily want to have their hands tied, but a political argument was all-important: ‘Europe’ would be Germany’s way of becoming respectable again. Konrad Adenauer, anyway a product of the western-leaning and mainly Catholic Rhineland, therefore overrode objections.
The heavy industry of western Europe was to be run through some multinational body. It would take charge of coal and steel, set prices, govern cartels, allocate production quotas and generally preside over trade, which would of course be free of tariffs. At this time, Belgium and Luxemburg were major producers of coal and steel, and their adhesion was important; at the same time Italy, re-emerging, and surprisingly strongly so, as an economic power, also needed access to coal and iron, of which she had little. As with all such international arrangements, the details were difficult and complicated, because in each country there were lobbies and interest groups wanting special treatment. The French metallurgical industrialists had long been used to protection; the Belgians subsidized wages in the older, and sometimes nearly obsolete, mines of the French-speaking Borinage country, around Mons and Namur, so that the miners there could match those of the Kempen district, where the mines were very new, productive and in Flemish-speaking country. Such subsidies could not be squared with the rules of competition of an international community, supposed to create ‘a level playing field’. An equalization fund would have to be set up, so that in effect the Germans compensated the Borinage miners whose coal sold at a loss. Even Luxemburg made for difficulties, as its iron and steel needed protection from the Ruhr. In 1951, after difficult negotiations on such points, a treaty established the European Coal and Steel Community. There was a High Authority, sitting in Luxemburg, in some pomp and grandeur, interpreters chattering away. There was a court of arbitration. There was a ministerial council, taken from member country governments, and an assembly of deputies. There were provisions for the Authority to store, say, scrap metal in case prices fell below a certain level. The organization even had a flag — blue for steel, black for coal, six yellow stars representing the member countries (Italy had joined). With adaptations — the black was dropped, as it stood for political Catholicism — this became the flag of the future Europe.
4. The NATO System
‘The Czech coup’ brought an immediate hardening of Western attitudes, and the ratchet effect of the Cold War moved on: in three years, it led to a full-scale war, though not the one that had been expected. In 1947 there had already been a military side to this. In March of that year, the British and French concluded an alliance, the Treaty of Dunkirk. It was supposedly designed against Germany, but its real point was of course defence against the Soviet Union, and there was a further concealed point of importance: no-one entirely trusted the Americans, who were extracting hard bargains for any economic help that they gave, and who were even, still, imposing 50 per cent tariffs on European imports. The British and French responded with efforts to refloat their overseas empires, and again feared, quite rightly, that the Americans were not in sympathy. Again, there was the nuclear element. The British had taken the decisive steps in the making of the atomic bomb, and had presented the secret to the Americans, a good year before they had come into the war, but they had then cut out the British, who proceeded with a bomb of their own. France, lacking coal, was also extremely interested in nuclear energy (and proceeded very successfully with it). Dunkirk therefore had an anti-American aspect.
More generally, ideas of European unity were in the air: Churchill had made a well-publicized speech at Zurich in September 1946 calling for it and in January 1948 the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, echoed him, after the London conference on Germany had failed. This time round, given Soviet intransigence, the Americans sympathized. In December 1947 the three Western foreign ministers reviewed the whole situation and agreed as to the problems — Greece under great pressure, Germany still in collapse, the Italian Communist Party perhaps on the verge of taking power at the next (April) election. In effect Bevin was proposing an American military alliance, and had secretly made this proposal late in January. The Americans had told him that they would do nothing unless the Europeans themselves united, and it was in that sense that Bevin spoke. He was adamant as to the nature of the Soviet threat, of police state totalitarianism, and proposed a rather vague ‘Western European Union’ which did indeed develop in 1948-9 (and became less vague six years later, when Italy and Germany were included). Now, in March 1948, a Brussels Pact brought in the Low Countries, ‘Benelux’, with a permanent committee of defence ministers, and in September a staff was set up, at Brussels, under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In April there was already an Anglo-Canadian draft plan for extension of the Pact to the USA, though the American role was mainly financial, to help rearmament, and without provision for an American command, let alone bases on European soil. But a US military mission was present and in July it took part in deliberations. There was a formal problem, that the USA could not make peacetime alliances, but that was got round by the ‘Vandenberg Resolution’ (June), which — with some sleight of hand as to the wording — allowed the USA to make them after all, provided they were undertaken in connection with the United Nations.