Professor Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol (Professor of History of European Integration, European University Institute)
Le crime du 30 août: this is how the MPs of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), a French Christian Democratic Party supporting European integration, described the rejection by the French National Assembly of the Treaty of the European Defence Community (EDC). According to them, this rejection represented a missed opportunity for further integration of European states, especially France and Germany.
Why did France reject the project it had launched four years earlier? In October 1950, the then French prime minister René Pléven proposed the creation of a European army of which Germany would be part. The outbreak of the Korean War made the need for German rearmament more pressing.
This project provoked passionate debates between the so-called cédistes (pro-EDC) and anticédistes (against EDC). Philosopher Raymond Aron wrote that this wrangle was the greatest ideological and political debate in France since the Dreyfus affair. Politician Jules Moch said that no other vote than the one of 30th August 1954 “has troubled our conscience so much since the vote of the National Assembly of Vichy in July 1940.” But the arguments against the EDC eventually outweighed those in favour of it and led the French National Assembly to postpone sine die the ratification of the Treaty.
Three reasons contribute to explain the French rejection.
First, by 1954, little remained of the anxiety which dominated French and European minds when the Pléven Plan was launched. Stalin died in March 1953, and the Korean War ended in July of the same year. The international context gave the impression of an easing of world situation, making thus German rearmament less acceptable for the French.
Second, opposition to the EDC gained more and more traction both in French public opinion and in the French National Assembly between 1951 and 1954. French public opinion was deeply opposed to the European army project. The national elections of June 1951 saw both the decline of pro-European parties, such as the MRP and the Socialists, and the rise of declared opponents to the European army, such as the Gaullists and the Communists. The political personnel changed, and some people known to be less favourable to the EDC entered government. The arguments of the anticédistes were manyfold: they were against any form of German rearmament; they criticised the supranational character of the project; they feared German domination of the EDC; and they feared the EDC would weaken the Franco-British relationship. The arguments of the cédistes appeared comparatively weak. The prospect of a Soviet aggression in 1954 did not seem as realistic as in 1950. They presented the EDC as a mean to maintain the Atlantic alliance strong, rather than a free choice.
Third, the EDC project itself had changed in the meantime. While the initial Pléven Plan was discriminatory against Germany, the Germans had successfully removed these very discriminatory clauses from the treaty signed by the French in May 1952. For instance, the French eventually accepted the fact that Germany would have its own Defence Ministry and that instead of a single Commissioner – very presumably French – there would be a collegial body. That is why the French parliament, which did not approve these concessions, had added some preliminary conditions to any ratification of the treaty.
Ironically, however, after the French failure to ratify the EDC treaty, Germany would regain sovereignty and rearm thanks to the Western European Union and membership in NATO – that is to say, much more than Germany would have gained from the EDC treaty that the French National Assembly had rejected.
