UEF Memorandum on the provisional report presented in July 1951 by the conference for the organisation of the European Defence Community
Text in French archived in the European Archives of the EU
The Birth of the EDC: The Pleven Plan and the Functionalist Approach
The issue of European defense became crucial between 1949 and 1950. The end of the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and the outbreak of the Korean War raised fears of a potential open conflict between the USSR and the USA. In this context, the United States viewed Europe as the "soft underbelly" of the Western front. Consequently, the Truman administration considered the rearmament of Europe an essential aspect of its foreign policy. According to Truman, West Germany could not be excluded from this rearmament process.
However, the prospect of German rearmament was strongly opposed by the French government under Pleven, which sought to assert its position with the U.S. and the UK. By the end of 1950, however, pressure from the Truman administration on the French government had intensified. The U.S. had already developed a plan, the One Package, which envisaged the creation of an integrated army with the participation of German divisions. To avoid being excluded from discussions about German rearmament, France was compelled to propose its own plan.
It was in this context that Jean Monnet conceived the idea of linking the rearmament of West Germany to the precedent set by the creation of the ECSC. Monnet devised a plan for the establishment of a military force composed of troops from various European states, to be placed under the control of a supranational authority. Pleven presented this plan to the Allies in October, and a diplomatic conference was convened in Paris in February 1951 to discuss the matter. The conference was attended by France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg, while the Netherlands initially participated as observers before joining as a full member.
The Pleven Plan mirrored the ECSC model and did not go beyond functionalism. The participating states did not relinquish any portion of their sovereignty; instead, they agreed to closer military cooperation. The supranational authority would not be free and independent from the participating states but would remain under the control of national governments, as it lacked its own budget and true autonomy.
The Paris Conference and the Challenges Faced
The opening of the Paris Conference was disappointing; the French proposal did not seem to garner sufficient support among the European partners, partly due to skepticism from the U.S. and the UK. Only Italy showed cautious optimism towards the plan. During the initial months, conflicts between the states' specific interests prevented significant progress. In July, the Conference presented a provisional report to the governments, leaving many issues unresolved.
The institutions proposed by the Conference were four: the Commissariat, the Council of Ministers, the Assembly, and the Court of Justice. Among these, only the Council of Ministers held decisive power in the decision-making process. It was responsible for appointing the Commissariat, setting the budget based on national contributions determined case by case, and held exclusive authority over the deployment of the integrated army in the event of conflict.
The Commissariat was given a purely organizational and coordinating role, while the Assembly had only a consultative function.
The Italian Contribution and the Overcoming of Functionalism
Federalist movements closely followed the EDC negotiations and pressured national governments to overcome their differences and seize the opportunity to build a federal Europe.
After the drafting of the provisional report, Altiero Spinelli wrote a memorandum, which he sent to the heads of delegations and the Italian government. In his comments, Spinelli highlighted how the intergovernmental and functionalist approach adopted so far had led to unsatisfactory results. In particular, he strongly criticized the institutions outlined in the report, where the Council held excessive power, and the diplomatic conference method, which merely pitted the states' specific interests against each other without any possibility of reaching satisfactory decisions.
[By Giovanni Salpietro The Actuality of the ECD, The Federalists]
Why is so important this Memorandum?
The decisive intervention of the UEF in relation to article 38 of the European Defence Community was the ‘‘Memorandum on the provisional report presented in July 1951 by the conference for the organisation of the EDC’’, which Spinelli sent to the Italian government in September 1951 and immediately afterwards to the other five governments of the initial six.
In this document — which must be considered as one of the monuments to the struggle for European federation — the innate contradictions of the concept of a European army without a European state were explained with cast iron logic. In particular, two main points were underlined.
First of all, ahead of the various and serious difficulties that the negotiations founded on this proposal had met, there was a tendency in certain delegations to renounce the objective of a European army and to be content with a form of integration of command. In this way, however, a mere coalition of national armies would be created, with the consequent effect of reconstituting the German army, which was the very thing that the EDC project was supposed to avoid, and maintaining the military inefficiency of western Europe, caused by the presence of individual national armies. Secondly, the European military coalition, subtracted from national control and put at the disposal of an Atlantic command centre, would have eventually belonged to the said command centre as troops of tributary states and therefore of states no longer truly sovereign. They would have been substantially similar to the auxiliary troops that the Indian rajah supplied to the British Army or the reguli (the kings of the little kingdoms satellites of ancient Rome) to the Romans. As Spinelli said, ‘‘by not wanting to create a sovereign European body, the Conference tacitly (proposed) that the European sovereign (be) the American general’’.
Starting from these observations, the memorandum subjected the institutions and military organisation proposed by the provisional report to detailed criticism, traced all its contradictions to one fundamental initial contradiction — an army without a state — and proposed in precise terms a constituent procedure. It was stated in particular that the conference on the EDC:
1) would have to recognise the necessity, in order to achieve true unification, of agreement on a text that would define with clarity the European institutional bodies, the powers assigned to them and the relationships between the nation states and the new European state;
2) would also have to recognise its own inability to formulate a text that would be an international treaty up to the moment of national ratification, but which would become the constitution of the new state after ratification and the creation of the appropriate bodies;
3) would therefore have to propose a European constituent assembly elected by national parliaments (‘‘the guardians of the people’s sovereignity’’) for reasons of speed, and charged with drafting such a text within six months to be submitted for approval by the nation states.
After this memorandum had been presented the Italian negotiators committed to reach the purview of article 38, which connected the construction of a European army to that of a political community.
The culmination of the negotiations was reached on December 11th 1951 in Strasbourg at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the six countries of the ECSC, in which De Gasperi presented arguments which were entirely compatible with those of the UEF memorandum.
The Italian Delegation believes that, instead of a partial or annually renewed renunciation of national sovereignty and parliamentary powers, it would be preferable to ask national Parliaments, once and for all, for a commitment of a definitive and constitutional nature. This system would have the advantage of eliminating, once the Treaty is ratified, all parliamentary responsibility concerning both the management of funds allocated to the European budget and their amount. In this way, Parliaments would relinquish any involvement with a previously fixed "portion" of national resources, and this "portion" would be managed in its entirety at the European level by the Community's specialized bodies.
He underlined in particular the extreme difficulties the national parliaments had in accepting the creation of a European army without giving life to an authentic European country which also implied economic solidarity between the various European peoples, and the right to the supranational democratic participation that genuine European citizenship would bring.