AUGUST, 2021
Economic matters became very soon intertwined with military matters. If a likely German economic renaissance caused apprehension in France, the possibility that Germany could regain full sovereignty and have armed forces at its disposal was a reason for alarm among the French ruling class and the population at large. For the French it was difficult to forget the three military invasions they experienced between 1870 and 1940. One of the worries was also that once Germany regained military sovereignty and were allowed to become a full member of NATO, it would lose any interest for the ECSC.1 Even though on the German side the question of rearmament was treated extremely cautiously, since 1948 politicians from all sides consulted occasionally with military advisors.2 The contrasting positions between the Western allies made it difficult to have a clear line and since the founding of the Federal Republic there was little progress on the issue. Only with the international crisis triggered by the Korean conflict the need for German rearmament resurfaced with urgency. The West, and especially the Americans, were convinced that the world was nearing a new world conflict. And the analogies between the Korean and the German situation prefigured that the next frontline would be in Germany. For the US, the rearmament of Western Germany could not be delayed anymore. To overcome French resistance, the Americans even considered a separate peace treaty with the Federal Republic that would then be joining NATO.3 On 11 August 1950 in front of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, Winston Churchill gave a speech that underlined the necessity to produce a common effort by all countries in the free and democratic Europe against the communist and Soviet threat, warning that too much time had already been lost in the face of the immediate danger. He therefore presented a motion that demanded the creation of European armed forces that would answer directly to a unified command.4 On 29 August Adenauer submitted to the Allied High Commission a memorandum that outlined an alarming superiority of men and equipment of the armed forces and police in the Eastern zone under communist influence and in which it was stressed the unpreparedness and lack of police and defence forces in the Federal Republic in the event of an attack similar to the one that happened in Korea. After stating that he already demanded that the allied forces reinforce the contingent that was there in defence of Western German territories, he declared himself ready to contribute with German troops to an international Western European army, emphasising at the same time the refusal of a newly militarised Germany through a national military force.5 As Churchill already pointed out, the superiority of conventional forces stationed in communist Europe had been counterbalanced by the nuclear deterrent that was exclusive of the United States. But this balance had been altered in August 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon. In the meeting of the foreign ministers of the three Western powers in New York on 12-14 September 1950, it was agreed that the contribution of the Federal Republic was essential to protect Europe from communism. Shortly afterwards Adenauer tasked a commission of military experts that met at the Himmerod monastery between 5 and 8 October to prepare a plan for the possible set-up of German armed forces.6 The generals Speidel, Heusinger and Foertsch prepared a document in which it was envisaged not only a deterrence force but a contingent with 250000 units with armoured vehicles, air force and navy that in the framework of the Western alliance could be able to carry out a defence war even outside the territory of the Federal Republic and which assumed that the country would be granted full sovereignty and equal rights. Following plans and negotiating positions were all developed starting from the concepts discussed in this occasion. The worst-case scenario that the French feared seemed to be confirmed. Generals like Speidel and Heusinger, who did serve under Hitler, were about to start a new Wehrmacht.7 Once again it was Monnet, worried that the issue could jeopardise the negotiations that just started for the creation of the Coal and Steel Community, to show French government officials a possible escape from the deadlock, suggesting that the principle of “community” containment of Germany, already applied in the industrial field, be applied to the military one as well.8
On 24 October 1950 the French Prime Minister René Pleven introduced to the French National Assembly a plan for the establishment of an integrated European army as part of a European Defence Community. The institutional structure followed on the lines of the ECSC, and it was composed of a High Authority, a Council of Ministers, a Common Assembly and a Court of Justice. The army would be made of units from all member countries and would include German troops, under the command of a European Defence Minister (presumably French) that would respond to the Assembly and to a Council of the Defence Ministers of the nation States. Beside the units that would be part of the common army, the other countries would continue to have their own national armies, while the military forces of the FRG would only operate under the European framework. It was also specified that the size of the German units could not be bigger than the battalion. In this way France would succeed in preventing the Germans joining NATO, especially in a moment when the military effort in Indochina was straining the French armed forces and the economy. For the United States it was concerning that in front of a clear request to integrate German troops directly into an Atlantic army under American leadership, France would respond with a gradual assimilation through a complex institutional mechanism that it intended to keep under its strict control.9 According to Hans-Peter Schwarz it was a «baroque concept» that badly concealed the intention to stall the effort and play for time.10 The French proposal was not particularly appealing for the Germans, but the deeper motives that informed Adenauer’s European policies and pro-Western stance convinced him to accept disadvantageous conditions that the population and the parliamentary opposition resisted. Under the pressure of the SPD he demanded that the FRG should not be subjected to any discrimination as a precondition to provide own troops to a European army and that the Occupation Statute should be abolished through a new security treaty.11 Presenting his requests, he used language reminiscent of the second half of the 1920s, in which the recognition of equal rights was indispensable to make possible the fulfilment of the particular obligations requested by the Western powers.12 The German position was accepted by the allies that in a meeting of the foreign ministers on 14 September 1951 declared to be ready to satisfy the demands of the German government. Two separate set of talks then started. In Paris, officials were working laboriously to draft the treaty for the EDC, while in Bonn Adenauer negotiated the terms to regain full sovereignty. Meanwhile in Washington it was acknowledged that the desired goal to create a European army with German forces as part of NATO and under the command of the US was not feasible and therefore the plan for the EDC was finally accepted. In the final stages of the talks the Stalin Notes on 10 March 1952 caused turmoil in Germany with part of the public opinion strongly doubting the integration with the West. Thanks to the support of the Americans, on 16 March Adenauer was able to state publicly his opposition to the Soviet proposals, declaring that these were nothing new and that their only purpose was to make the Defence Community fail.13 Nevertheless on 23 May the French cabinet put forward further reservations about the status of Germany as a divided country and asked for guarantees in case Germany denounced the treaty and abandoned the EDC. Such reservations could only be overcome with the Anglo-American reassurance on the integrity of the EDC and their commitment to keep troops in Europe. On 26 May 1952, the Generalvertrag was signed in Bonn. On 27 May the Treaty establishing the European Defence Community was signed in Paris.14 During the parliamentary debate on 19 March 1953 for the ratification of the treaties at the Bundestag, the SPD renewed its disapproval against any action that could undermine the possibility of reunification, and it considered the treaty for the EDC as such. The Generalvertrag was considered nothing more than a mere legislative variation of the Occupation Statute. The legislation was approved with 224 votes in favour, 165 against and 2 abstentions. On 15 May 153 it was approved at the Bundesrat.15
In France, the ratification of the treaty was considerably troubled. Passing the legislation through the National Assembly, with a strong Gaullist and communist opposition and a general anti-German sentiment, was a task that required a strong leadership. But in France during the fourth Republic it was difficult to find a strong government. Between May 1952 and May 1954, at a time when the forces that were defending the French colonial territories in Indochina were humiliated by the Vietnamese in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, France had three Presidents of the Council (Antoine Pinay, René Meyer and Joseph Laniel) that postponed the ratification of the EDC treaty.16 To make things more complicated was a topic that seemed to be at first a useful initiative to complete the integration of Western Europe and a necessary political counterbalance to the creation of a common army. Influenced by the federalist theories of Altiero Spinelli, that was also influential for Monnet, Schuman and the Belgian socialist leader Paul-Henry Spaak, the Italian head of government Alcide De Gasperi won approval for a provision included in article 38 of the treaty that gave the EDC Assembly the mandate to formulate proposals for the establishment of an elective assembly and for the development of the Community into a federal or confederal institutional structure. Two months after the signing of the EDC treaty, on 25 July 1952 the ECSC treaty came into effect, and the first meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the new institution was planned for the following September. The six Ministers of the Community decided in the first meeting of the Council on 10 September to charge the newly formed Assembly with the implementation of article 38. The intention was to speed up the project for a European Political Community that should have coordinated the foreign policies of the member States and gradually take over the responsibilities of the ECSC and EDC. This was modified to reflect the composition of the future EDC Assembly and was chaired by Spaak, taking the name of Ad Hoc Assembly. On 10 March 1953 it approved a project for a markedly federal European Political Community. The faith of the project was strongly linked with the parliamentary ratifications of the member States signatories of the EDC Treaty, that was the juridical premise for all acts of the Ad Hoc Assembly. During the heated debate that erupted for months in France, a majority against the plan took form among diverse groups with different motivations. Nationalists and Gaullists considered the federal and supranational project the end of France and its independence. They worried that with the involvement in a European army, France could not tackle the ever more demanding efforts in the colonies, thus sanctioning the end of the French Union. The communists on the other hand were against any rearmament of Germany, while the democratic left did not want to damage the prospects of distension with the communist bloc, that seemed more likely after Stalin’s death and the armistice in Korea. On 19 June 1954 Pierre Mendès France became President of the Council of Ministers. After two months, in a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Six in Brussels, the French government proposed several amendments that not only would have altered the nature of the treaty but would have also made necessary a new ratification of the parliaments of the other countries involved. The request was clearly not acceptable and when the treaty was finally put down for a vote on 30 August, this was rejected by the French National Assembly with 319 votes against 264, a bigger margin than expected. Bino Olivi comments on this regard that the crisis of the Nation States was not as deep as one might have thought and that the sovereignty principle was not as damaged as many believed at the beginning of the 1950s.17 It is certainly worth noticing the paradox for which the complex institutional mechanism that was put in place by the French government to avoid the creation of German national armed forces and prevent them joining NATO appeared subsequently to the French establishment itself worse than the problem it was supposed to solve.18
The priority for Adenauer now was to preserve the Generalvertrag and make sure that the FRG join NATO. Once more French opposition had to be overcome. A first step to come out of a situation created by what for many was a traumatic event was advanced by the United Kingdom. The proposal was to extend the Treaty of Brussels to the FRG and Italy, establishing the Western European Union. The organisation never acquired an operative role, but in the moment, it helped to reassure the French about the German rearmament, giving them a sense that the Britons were again on their side in dealing with continental issues. Adenauer accepted again to make significant concessions, still with the aim of pursuing his long-term policies that were now at risk of being disrupted. He also expressed concerns about the direction that the country could have taken if it was not found a rapid solution to the failure of the EDC, fearing a substantial resurgence of German nationalism and neutralist currents.19 The most important concession was that the Federal Republic would voluntarily give up producing weapons of mass destruction (the so-called ABC weapons; atomic, biological, chemical), a decision that according to generals like Speidel was excessive and without anything adequate in return. Adenauer for his part underlined how that was the only way for France to accept the new role of the Federal Republic and he always insisted that this renunciation was not absolute and forever.20 On the difficult question regarding the Saar, that kept being an obstacle in the French-German reconciliation and in the EDC debate, it was confirmed what was called Europeanisation, that was a rather explicit scheme on the French part to maintain the economic control of the region. The agreement on the Saar, that had been accepted by Adenauer causing discontent and damaging considerably the popularity of European integration in Western Germany, still had to be the subject of a confirmatory referendum that was considered by many a pure formality. What is particularly surprising about the solutions found to respond to the failure of the EDC is how quickly they were implemented. Even more so considering that the treaty rejected on 30 August by the French parliament had been on the European political scene for about four years. With the Conferences of London, from 28 September to 3 October 1954, and of Paris, from 19 October to 23 October, it was reached a political balance in Western Europe that Schwarz compares for stability and duration to the one achieved by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.21 Following the accords of Paris, on 5 May 1955 the Federal Republic of Germany regained its full sovereignty and four days after it joined NATO.
1. Herbert Müller-Roschach, Die deutsche Europapolitik 1949-1977. Eine politische Chronik (Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 1980), 20.
2. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Band 2, Die Ära Adenauer, Gründerjahre der Republik 1949-1957 (Stuttgart/Wiesbaden: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt/F.A. Brockhaus Verlag, 1981), 136.
3. Donatella Viti, “L'integrazione europea e la Francia”, in Storia dell'integrazione europea vol. I, ed. Romain H. Rainero (Roma: Marzorati, 1997), 387.
4. “The Assembly, in order to express its devotion to the maintenance of peace and its resolve to sustain the action of the Security Council of the United Nations in defence of peaceful peoples against aggression, calls for the immediate creation of a unified European Army subject to proper European democratic control and acting in full co-operation with the United States and Canada”. “Address given by Winston Churchill to the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 11 August 1950)”, Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe (CVCE), University of Luxembourg, last modified 14 May 2013, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/address_given_by_winston_churchill_to_the_council_of_europe_strasbourg_11_august_1950-en-ed9e513b-af3b-47a0-b03c-8335a7aa237d.html.
5. “Memorandum from Konrad Adenauer on security in the FRG (29 August 1950)”, last modified 14 May 2013, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/memorandum_from_konrad_adenauer_on_security_in_the_frg_29_august_1950-en-77999062-f79e-41d9-9906-66cb5afb99e3.html.
6. Müller-Roschach, Deutsche Europapolitik, 19-20.
7. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 136 ff.
8. Leonardo Rapone, Storia dell'integrazione europea (Roma: Carocci, 2002), 18-19.
9. Sergio Chillé, “Gli Stati Uniti e l'integrazione europea, 1946-1957”, in Storia dell'integrazione europea vol. I, ed. Romain H. Rainero (Roma: Marzorati, 1997), 489.
10. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 135.
11. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 139.
12. Raffaele D’Agata, “L’integrazione europea e la Germania”, in Storia dell'integrazione europea vol. I, ed. Romain H. Rainero (Roma: Marzorati, 1997), 587.
13. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 155.
14. Müller-Roschach, Deutsche Europapolitik, 31-32.
15. Müller-Roschach, Deutsche Europapolitik, 35.
16. Mark Gilbert, Storia politica dell'integrazione europea (Roma/Bari: Laterza, 2005), 43.
17. Bino Olivi, L'Europa difficile. Storia politica dell'integrazione europea 1948-2000 (Bologna: il Mulino, 2000), 44.
18. Rapone, Integrazione europea, 21.
19. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 247.
20. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 250-251.
21. Schwarz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, 247.