journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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Ronald W. Pruessen
and NATO, for example, had demonstrated transatlantic inclinations in this direction.
And in the period during which EDC itself was being designed and debated,
other evidence of the overall thrust was visible as well – the Schuman Plan most
notably.
As early as 1947, John Foster Dulles had been thinking of European integration
as a mechanism for specifically preventing the renewal of a German menace. What
was needed, he argued, were “economic forces operating upon Germans” which
were “centrifugal and not centripetal,” “natural forces which will turn the inhabitants
of Germany’s states toward their outer neighbors” in a positive and cooperative
rather than an aggressive fashion. This would make it possible “to develop the
industrial potential of western Germany in the interest of the economic life of western
Europe, including Germany, and do so without making Germans the masters of
Europe.” The great beauty of pursuing programs like the internationalization of the
Ruhr, in this regard, was that the allies could go beyond hoping that they were creating
“a Germany which (...) would never again want to make war;” they would
have created a European structure within which Germany “could not again make
war even if it wanted to.” 30
Other US policy makers regularly voiced similar views in the period leading up
to EDC negotiations. John McCloy saw a “united Europe” as the kind of “imaginative
and creative policy” that would “link Western Germany more firmly into the
West and make the Germans believe their destiny lies this way.” It made sense to
“enmesh” the Germans in structures that would both tap their resources and control
their behavior. 31 George Kennan made a similar case, both regularly and forcefully.
A 1949 Policy Planning Staff paper on the “Question of European Union” argued
that:
“We see no answer to German problem within sovereign national framework. Continuation
of historical process within this framework will almost inevitably lead to
repetition of post-Versailles sequence of developments (...) Only answer is some
form of European union which would give young Germans wider horizon and
remove introverted, explosive, neurotic quality of German political thought (...).”
In an early 1950 debate with Charles Bohlen, Kennan continued to insist that
“without federation there is no adequate framework within which adequately to
handle the German problem.” 32
It was this kind of overall thinking which was applied to the specific problem of
German rearmament – and which eventually generated EDC. John McCloy put it in
very broad terms when he said that a “fundamental principle” of the US approach
to 1950-51 negotiations was that “whatever German contribution to defense is
made may only take the form of a force which is an integral part of a larger interna-
30. For a fuller discussion of Dulles’s early thoughts on “dual containment,” see R.W. PRUESSEN,
John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power, New York 1982, Chapter 12.
31. SCHWARTZ, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany, 95;
FRUS, 1950, III, 817.
32. The Policy Planning Staff paper is quoted in SCHWABE, “The United States and European Integration:
1947-1957,” 133; the remarks to Bohlen are in FRUS, 1950, III, 620.