The European Defence Community in the U.S. Foreign Policy Context

Abstract

The European Defence Community E.D.C. was an ambitious initiative in the first years of the 1950s. Leading European countries had different foreign policy agendas towards it. The E.D.C. could have been a crucial milestone on the long path towards European integration. However, the failure to ratify its agreement by the French Parliament in 1954 left this project of defence integration stillborn - but paved the way for another solution for the rearmament of Germany: the Western European Union WEU , as a sub-group of NATO. Nevertheless, the dormant ideal, to contribute to a “European Army” later became one of the ultimate goals of the European Union. The main argument of this paper is as follows: The E.D.C. cannot be regarded as an initiative originating only from the European countries. It can best be evaluated within the framework of general U.S. policies towards Europe and the U.S. global agenda in the first years of the Cold War era. One can trace the U.S. influence from the very first stages of the E.D.C. negotiations. Even in the agreement of the E.D.C., the footprints of U.S. policies can be observed, bringing the NATO Alliance to the forefront. The E.D.C. is also interrelated with the Marshall Plan, which leads us to think that the E.D.C. was not solely a European dream as has been widely argued, but rather an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, which could be resorted to as and when needed. Preponderance of the evidence relating to the E.D.C. suggests that European unity and integration was, in the final analysis, an end product of U.S. policies implemented in the aftermath of the Second World War