The Development of European Unity ( Pages 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 )

 

Other essays and articles in the History Archives related to this topic include : The Economics of Socialism: An Historical Perspective  •  War and the Downfall of the Monarchies in France and Russia   •  The Battle of Iwo Jima

 

For these reasons, the United States not only supported European unification, but developed an agenda specifically intended to foster unification efforts (Ellwood, 1992). In 1947, the future U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a speech in which he “presented a complete elaboration of the European future” (Ellwood, 1992, p. 57). Dulles identified four principal strategies by which the United States would support unification. First, the United States would provide active and direct assistance to those European countries that would support a unification plan that excluded the Soviet Union and which created barriers for the Soviets’ participation in world politics and economics (Ellwood, 1992). As the so-called “Red Scare” continued to build up, the United States wanted to ensure that the Soviet Union would not exert undue influence over the efforts related to European unification. Second, the United States would coach the Europeans to adopt a federated model similar to that which was implemented to unify the various states of the union that eventually comprised the United States of America (Ellwood, 1992).

 

Third, the United States would encourage the Europeans not to exclude Germany from the unification plan, despite lingering—and justified--political resentments that followed World War II (Ellwood, 1992). As Dulles remarked, it would be important to include Germany in a unified Europe because doing so would “create a market big enough to justify modern methods of cheap production for mass consumption” (Ellwood, 1992, p. 57). Otherwise, Europe would lose a significant source of labor, industrial power, and consumers. Finally, Dulles articulated the United States’ commitment to provide technical assistance and leadership from a distance as needed (Ellwood, 1992). Dulles was confident that the success of the United States in its own unification process, more than a century earlier, could serve as a powerful and pragmatic template for European nations that were truly committed to unification. As was acknowledged earlier, however, despite the general interest in and enthusiasm for unification on the European continent, when actual operationalizing of the plan got underway, countries encountered conflict almost immediately as the result of competing interests, ideas, and priorities (Ellwood, 1992).

 

While many countries were eager to leverage the power of the group to enjoy economic benefits, they found it impossible to agree upon some of the finer points of what unification would actually mean, particularly with respect to military operations (Ellwood, 1992). As Ellwood (1992) observed, countries “were divided on what to do in case of war” (p. 107). Over the next three decades, European governments went back and forth in efforts to achieve a workable compromise for all parties involved, but few countries were willing to concede in those areas that they considered vital to their own national security, much less to the security of the continent and their shared interests.

 

Eventually, however, at this moment in the path toward European unity, the individual nations’ concerns had to give way if the unification project had any hope of succeeding. As one historian has observed, European countries finally decided to form NATO, and, in doing so, “told each other that we were going into the military political alliance of NATO because that was the first and necessary step to eventually arriving at a united Europe” (Ellwood, 1992, p. 125). The NATO member countries decided to sacrifice and “pay the price of the loss of… military sovereignty” in order to “defend… economic sovereignty” (Ellwood, 1992, p. 125). In short, it was only through the creation of NATO that European countries were finally able to first envision a unified Europe and begin to have a strategy to work toward European unity.

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