A Capsule History of European Integration (and US Support Thereof)

In a recent social media post, President Trump made the claim that the European Union was “formed for the primary purpose of ‘screwing’ the United States of America.” This is, like nearly every other historical claim Mr. Trump has made for more than a decade, a totally false statement. It is not a mis-statement, but rather an obvious lie intended to mislead, misrepresent, and confuse his ill-informed audience. What follows is a capsule history of the European Union, with special emphasis on the proactive and energetic role the United States played in establishing the EU. The internal politics of EU formation is fascinating and highly complex and worthy of study in its own right. The story recounted here is less about those intra-union dynamics than about the EU-US relationship.

Visions of a unified continent are nearly as old as recorded history itself. The Romans imagined an endless empire that would eventually encompass all the territory of the world. Campaigns of political or ideological conquest, from Charlemagne to centuries worth of papal dreams, have envisioned a unified continent. Napoleonic marches of conquest, as well as the military alliances that opposed and then defeated Napoleon, each in their own way also articulated a unified Europe. The later nineteenth century witnessed utopianist movements toward a unified Europe, now in the face of new democratic norms associated with the age of the nation-state.
 
But it’s really the experience of WWII that began to galvanize a political movement toward union. The various governments-in-exile began to gather together under the banner of the United Nations. The Dutch, somewhat ironically, help to pioneer what is conventionally considered the first actual institution of integration, the so-called Benelux customs union uniting the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg ratified in 1944. Benelux was too small and too limited in scope to prompt further integration, and would be swallowed up by other initiatives. It would not become the seedbed for actual European unity, though it does help to galvanize support for the so-called Western Union, the collective western European defense initiative proposed by the British in 1948, and intended as a springboard for American defense involvement in the initiative that would produce NATO in 1949.
 
It was the Americans that first helped to inspire a dedicated momentum toward European integration, with the proposal made in June 1947 soon to become known as the Marshall Plan. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed the “friendly aid” program to the nations of Europe in a commencement speech at Harvard. Marshall had as his aim the addressing of still-ongoing economic misery throughout all of Europe as a result of WWII. That misery had been sharpened and amplified by the terrible winter of 1946–7 which deepened the hardships many Europeans were facing. The Americans were concerned, with good reason, that ongoing economic misery in Europe would promote political radicalism in the form of communism. There were strong internal communist parties, particularly in France and Italy; more months and years of penury would make their messages even more attractive to hard-pressed French and Italian voters.
           
The Marshall Plan had originally been offered to all the states of Europe, including the Soviet Union. The Americans insisted that the program not be an American imposition but instead a response to a clearly defined and well-articulated proposal from the Europeans themselves. Leading statesmen met in Paris in June 1947 to begin formulating the European response to Marshall, at which point Stalin instructed the eastern European nations to absent themselves from the proceedings. The bifurcation of Europe, not unexpected by the Americans, thus became a Cold War reality. But the demand that the Europeans be active agents of aid, and not mere recipients of gifts, remained. This led to the creation in July 1947 of the Committee of European Economic Co-operation (CEEC). (Bevin, Bidault, and Molotov meet in Paris - British Pathé) The CEEC would evolve the following year into the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) and eventually the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The CEEC and its successors were responsible for drawing up aid requests in front of Marshall Plan funds appropriated each year by Congress. The Americans insisted that each year’s aid request not be an aggregated shopping list of each individual country’s desires, but rather a carefully coordinated package that took each country’s actual needs, political realities, and comparative advantages in mind. There was no sense in backing a Dutch automobile industry, for example, on a continent in which the Germans, Italians, British, Swedes, and even the French produced worthy automobiles. The Americans insisted that the Marshall Plan was to be activated by European initiative, with individual countries acting in concert. Hence the annual CEEC request represents the first large-scale movement toward continent-wide economic planning and coordination.
 
The heart of the continent’s economic dilemma was the problem of Germany. Germany was the most populous nation with the most advanced industrial base on the continent. No scheme of continental recovery that did not include German production or consumption was feasible. This was the source of the dispute between the US and the USSR as they occupied the defeated country, but the problem of what to do with Germany was also of paramount importance for the victorious allies surrounding the prostrate nation. German consumption would have to be restored if British, French, Italian, Belgian, Scandinavian, and Dutch goods were to have markets. German production was also necessary for the rebuilding economies of those states. But a restored and dynamic Germany also obviously posed an enormous security risk to the neighbors who had twice in the previous generation felt the wrath of German industrial power. A way to both restore and constrain Germany stood thus at the heart of both Cold War geopolitics and intra-European politics and economic policy.
 
The Marshall Plan established an agency to run the program, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA). The ECA maintained separate missions in each country. It also established one continent wide office in Paris called the Office of the Special Representative (OSR) to liaison directly with the CEEC/OEEC. The country missions helped administer the program in each country, providing expert technical and economic advice as participating countries developed their recovery programs and invested Marshall funds. But the aid requests each year came not from the individual countries but from the CEEC/OEEC, in concert with OSR and ECA, which presented the annual request to Congress for approval. In its operations as well as its ongoing ideological focus, the ECA continued to not only counsel, but to pressure the Europeans toward greater economic cooperation and trade and industrial integration. I’ll have more on how the Marshall Plan functioned in a subsequent blog post.
 
Almost certainly the greatest breakthrough toward integration occurred in 1950. With now more than a year of Marshall Plan operations as assurance, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman shocked the world by proposing that French and German coal and steel industries no longer operate under their national flags, as it were, but be combined and amalgamated into one “supranational” endeavor known as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). What became known as the “High Authority” would administer French and German coal and steel, in an organization that was quickly joined by the Dutch, Belgians, and Italians. In this way, a great source of economic competition would be removed, as well as the geopolitical competition between Germany and France over the rich resources of the Ruhr valley, a contested region that had been the source of Franco-German antagonism since the nineteenth century. Not only would crucial bottlenecks in key industries be removed, promoting continental recovery, the High Authority would demonstrate that French and German cooperation was possible, perhaps the greatest ideological impediment to further European integration. Every scholar who has looked at the matter concurs that the ECSC constitutes the first durable, permanent organization of what would eventually become the European Union. The Americans heralded the breakthrough, of French genius and design.
           
The ECSC was not the last French diplomatic masterstroke in this regard. Later that same year French Prime Minister Rene Pleven proposed that a European military force also be organized along supranational lines just as coal and steel. The European Defence Community (EDC) would align member states’ military forces in a common organization. Unit-level forces would retain their national character, but be commanded by a pan-European officer corps and answerable to a Europe-wide political body. The EDC was envisioned as an independent European pillar in the military edifice of NATO, the American pillar being the other. The EDC was envisioned as a way to bring the vast German military potential to bear (i.e., against the Soviet Union) without an independent Germany being able to vex its neighbors. In the event, the EDC went down to ironic defeat in the French parliament in 1954, but by then a proposal to achieve much the same outcome via NATO alone was approved by all member states, West Germany thereby taking its place in the defense of the West within the Cold War.
 
There were other lesser organizational developments in the period, such as a European Payments Union (EPU) which the Americans backed and helped to finance, to contribute to currency convertibility and thereby facilitate intra-European trade, a sine qua non of all interested parties throughout the period. There were other proposals for other sector integration schemes, including agriculture, along the ECSC pattern. The Dutch, who had from the first been skeptical of integration, had by this time become convinced both by American pressure and American performance that integration was in their best interests. They became leading proponents of economic and political integration, making several of these historic proposals themselves. But they tended to run into difficulties of one sort or another, as well as the recurring reassertion of national prerogatives in individual economic sectors. Little in the way of further economic, to say nothing of political, integration occurred until later in the decade. In 1956 the so-called Suez crisis highlighted the relative powerlessness (so it was seen at the time) of even key players like the British and the French in the face of American hegemony. This helped to produce a further push toward integration which resulted in 1957 in the Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic community, a progressive common market that increasingly tied the economies of Western Europe together. This establishment would then give way in 1992 to the Treaty of Maastricht, establishing the European Union. All of these developments were celebrated in Washington as securing peace among the partners, solidifying a growing market for American goods and capital within Europe, and providing a defensive bulwark with the Americans against outside aggression.
 
Whether the spark toward integration provided by the Marshall Plan would have ignited a broader movement toward integration in the absence of the Cold War is impossible to know. It is easy to surmise a scenario wherein the European states turned inward once recovery had been assured, snuffing out further impulses toward cooperation. But history did not unfold that way. The Marshall Plan ignited the beginning of an organizational apparatus. Following the Marshall Plan (indeed, even before the culmination of the Marshall Plan), military integration carried the torch for European unity. The Americans strongly supported the EDC, especially the Eisenhower administration, which promised an “agonizing reappraisal” toward US-Europe relations should the European commitment to defense solidarity weaken. Via NATO, via significant amounts of military defense aid in various forms, and under ongoing political pressure, the Americans continued to promote, support, and push for European defense unification.
 
It is too much to say that the Marshall Plan caused European integration. The Europeans themselves, along with creative and bold statesmanship from generations of leaders, are primarily responsible. But it is also clear that the Marshall Plan, in its complexity and pressure, the following military build-up, and ongoing political and diplomatic support, all helped Europe on a path toward greater cooperation. All of these policies were pursued, with greater or lesser enthusiasm to be sure, by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
 
It may be a final irony that the sudden, unwarranted, and precipitous American repudiation of European integration represented by President Trump and to which we bear sorrowful witness today provides further stimulus to European cooperation.

Further reading:
Ernst H. van der Beugel, European Integration As a Concern of American Foreign Policy: From Marshall Aid to Atlantic Partnership (Amsterdam: Elsevier Pub. Co., 1966).

Martin J. Dedman, The Origins and Development of the European Union 1945-95: A History of European Integration (London: Routledge, 1996).

David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (London: Longman, 1992).

John R. Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955: The Germans and the French From the Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1992).

Derek W. Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration Since 1945 (London: Longman).