The signature of a Convention of Human Rights
in 1950 was nevertheless a notable and lasting
achievement. The European movement had come
to a dead end by then, as far as the political inte-
gration of Western Europe was concerned.
Neither France nor Britain, nor any of the other
members, was ready for a real United States of
Europe. But the public support generated for the
idea of Europe played a part in preparing the way
for the more hard-headed approach of piecemeal
economic integration followed in the 1950s.
For France the fundamental problem of the
overwhelming strength of Germany, even a
divided Germany, remained to be faced. The out-
break of the Korean War and the likely continua-
tion of the Cold War made it obvious that the
Americans and the British would insist on West
German recovery. Wartime policies pursuing the
demilitarisation and industrial dismantling of West
Germany were ended, and the French came under
great pressure from Washington to permit West
German rearmament and a German contribution
to defence. France had to make the best of it: it
could not be defended without the alliance of
Britain and the US. The French prime minister,
René Pleven, therefore took the initiative in
October 1950 to call for a European army subject
to a European Defence Community (EDC), which
would avoid the danger of creating a separate West
German army. Under the Pleven Plan, German
combat units would be kept small and thus inca-
pable of independent action. In May 1952 the
Occupation Statute was repealed and the Federal
Republic of Germany took a further step towards
the restoration of full sovereignty; simultaneously
the European Defence Community Treaty was
concluded between France, the Federal Republic
of Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries
(Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg).
Britain was not a member. The Anglo-Saxon
separation from continental Europe had, from the
first, worried the French as they faced a resurgent
Germany, for memories of Britain’s lack of support
in the inter-war years were still fresh. To reassure
the French, the British Conservative government
concluded a mutual defence treaty with the EDC.
The French had, however, to concede that the
national army units would be 12,000–13,000 men
strong, rather than the 1,000–2,000 they had
envisaged, and that West Germany would con-
tribute half a million men.
The signature of the treaty was not enough to
secure its adoption. It had to be ratified by the
signatories’ national parliaments as well, includ-
ing the French National Assembly. No issue since
the Dreyfus case divided France more deeply than
the EDC and its consequential endorsement of
German rearmament. Successive French govern-
ments, uncertain of ratification, procrastinated
until in August 1954 the National Assembly,
when the treaty was finally submitted, rejected it.
The opponents of EDC initially refused to see
that France could not veto the creation of a new
German army in the long run since the other
West European nations and the US were insisting
that the Federal Republic be accepted as a full
ally. By December of the same year, enough
members of the National Assembly had shifted
their views for the restoration of sovereignty to
the Federal Republic and its membership of
NATO to be accepted. Policy had thus run full
circle, from Pleven’s attempt to create a European
army that would have avoided a new German
national force, to an acceptance of German rear-
mament and the creation of the Bundeswehr.
Pleven’s plan to counterbalance German strength
by playing the card of ‘European integration’ had
been aborted at the military level.
German industrial power had been closely
linked with German aggression – for example, the
alliance of the Krupps with the Hohenzollerns
before 1914 and with Hitler after 1933. European
integration could break these links. Accordingly
the French developed dynamic European policies
that were to change the economic and political
face of Western Europe. But what form should
European integration take? By 1950 it was clear
that the hopes for a ‘federalist’ solution to create a
United States of Europe, by which a member
state’s interests would be subordinated to a federal
European government, were not going to be
realised. The Council of Europe could not be
developed further along integrationist lines, but
there was another way. Prussia’s Zollvereinin the
nineteenth century had shown how common
economic interests could bind states together; the
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