JEAN MONNET'S INSTITUTIONAL WORK

The General Commission on the Plan At the Liberation, the human toll of the war was heavy, with 600,000 dead and dramatic material losses. Compared with 1938, the national income had decre ased by half, agricultural production diminished by one-fifth and industrial production was down by 50%. With the destruction of ports, roads, railway tracks and locomotives, the communications network was gravely affected. France lacked labour, equipment, food products, fertilizer, cultivated land, fuel, coal and steel.

Still in Washington in 1945 but struck by the economic difficulties of his country, Jean Monnet had already formulated several proposals and defined several precise objectives. Philippe Lamour, who thenceforth would work in close contact with him, emphasized: "His great idea was to impose priorities, a hierarchy of values." [Roussel, p. 431].

In August 1945, General de Gaulle went to Washington at the invitation of President Truman and met Jean Monnet there, who spoke to de Gaulle in very clear terms: "You speak of grandeur, but the French are small today. There will be grandeur only when the French assume the stature which justifies grandeur. They are made for that. To do so, they must modernize, because they are not modern. More production, more productivity is needed, the country must be transformed from the material point of view." Concrete and practical, the head of the French Government answered Jean Monnet on this point: "You are surely right. But what do you want to try? I do not know what I could do but I am going to work on it." [Roussel, p. 428].

The experience acquired in the United States between 1940 and 1943 proved to Monnet the effectiveness of economic mobilization which, beginning with the plan for weapons manufacture, had made it possible to get the country out of under-employment and stagnation (cf. question 13, the Victory Program).

In a note to General de Gaulle on 5th December 1945, Monnet suggested establishing a Commission for a Modernization and Equipment Plan responsible for assembling the administration, experts and professional representatives to define the fundamental objectives. A modernization commission would be created for each basic sector. Completely innovative in France, this method would make it possible to convene men and organizations who generally never met except in a context of confrontation.

In his book, Eric Roussel notes that "We would understand nothing of Jean Monnet's approach at that time if we forget that he saw France from the viewpoint of a man who had long been out of the country and whose familiarity with financial institutions had made him sensitive to sluggishness, routines and delays." [p.431].

Adopted by the Council of Ministers on 3rd January 1946, the General Commission of the Plan moved into offices on the Rue de Martignac, headed by Jean Monnet as General Commissioner and composed of a small team of no more than thirty people. Among them were notably Pierre Uri, Paul Delouvrier, Robert Marjolin, Etienne Hirsch, Félix Gaillard, Jean Fourastié and Alfred Sauvy. This small team was directly attached to the Council President's office, as proof of its total independence vis à vis the other ministries. ("No ministerial post would have given me such a broad field of action as the one which opened up the undefinable job as Plan Commissioner […]. I occupied a territory which had no name and no master." [Mémoires, p. 285]. The Plan Council (the President of the Council, 12 ministers and 12 distinguished experts) met on 16th March 1946 and set its objectives: attaining the production level of 1938 to late 1948 and exceeding the 1929 production level by 25% in 1950. This would be achieved by centring efforts on the six basic industries, the veritable "columns of modernization": coal, electricity, steel, building materials, transportation and farm machines - and later, farm production.

Given these ambitious objectives, the "Monnet Plan", initially designed to terminate in 1950, was extended to 1953, despite the Marshall Plan aid which was available as of 1948. The Plan was a success in the industrial field, but the objectives set for farming and trade were not attained. In view of French planning, and its limits, Jean Monnet saw that it was necessary to structure the recovery of France proper in the framework of the recovery of all Europe.

Inauguration of the Plan Council, 7th January 1947 Jean Monnet (centre) with Léon Blum, Paul Delouvrier, Robert Marjolin, Félix Gouin, Jean Vergeot

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)

(For the historic context and the development of the project, cf. question 16)

Following the declaration made by Robert Schuman on 9th May 1950 concerning the creation of a European coal and steel pool, the negotiations relative to the implementation of communal institutions were held in Paris for one year. Finally, the Paris treaty establishing the ECSC for a period of 50 years was signed on 18th April 1951. The treaty spelled out an innovative institutional system.

First, the High Authority was created, supranational in nature and independent of the European States. Appointed by common agreement by the six governments, its nine members exercised their power directly (in collegial fashion) over the coal and steel companies. To control the potentially "technocratic" and "despotic" character of the High Authority, a Special Council of Ministers was created, which was to ensure the bond between the coal-steel sector and the other economic branches of the various countries. With a "concordant opinion", the Council of Ministers was to give its approval for the most crucial decisions of the High Authority, either by a unanimous vote for the most important questions, or by a majority vote. At the request of Parliament members, who wished to implement democratic control over the High Authority, a Common Assembly was also created. Composed of 78 deputies designed by the Parliaments of the member countries, the Assembly had the power to overturn the High Authority by a two-thirds majority on the occasion of its annual report. Finally, the Court of Justice was instituted to ensure that the Treaty was respected and to resolve differences among the member countries and the High Authority.

The Treaty also provided for a European tax paid directly by the coal and steel firms to the community bodies and based on a certain percentage of their turnover. Financing the ECSC thus circumvented the member states' governments, which was intended to give the High Authority that much more freedom of action.

With the transfer of certain state powers to a High Authority independent of the member states, whose decisions applied directly to the companies and to the citizens of member states, and with autonomous financing, the Paris treaty created an institutional group of a federal nature.

Once the ratifications of the six national parliaments were obtained in 1952, the High Authority, presided over by Jean Monnet, and the Court of Justice were temporarily set up in Luxembourg, while the Common Assembly's headquarters were in Strasbourg. The ECSC went into effect on 23rd July 1952, the Common Market was opened on 10th February 1953 for coal, scrap iron and iron ore; and on 10th May 1953 for steel products. Planned for a duration of 50 years, the ECSC treaty will expire in 2002, at which time it will probably be integrated into the EC treaty.

The first of the European communities, the ECSC laid the groundwork and prepared the subsequent development of European construction by virtue of its inventiveness in political institutions; its provision for joint availability of European production and the ensuing trade; and its promoting collaboration among national administrations, corporations and trade unions. To design this project at age 62, Jean Monnet profited from the experience of a lifetime in implementing effective structures without the defects of the classic international organizations: the lack of political and financial independence, the risks of blockage by the systematic recourse to the unanimous vote and the inequalities which create frustration and bitterness. The man who played a fundamental rôle in the two World Wars sought to make a decisive contribution to maintaining peace and solidarity among European countries and peoples.

Letter to Jean Monnet from a former Prussian non-commissioned officer in the FirstWorld War

Click on the envelope

Jean Monnet, Luxembourg, 1952. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC): The First Common Market, the first European team

Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Strasbourg, 1952

The European Defence Community (EDC)

The ECSC treaty had hardly been signed on 9th May 1950 when the Europeans, then in the midst of negotiations on the common coal and steel market, were confronted with a new complication from the outside. The Korean War broke out on 25th June 1950: Urgently, the West had to pose the burning question regarding Germany's place in the defence of Europe, all in a growing context of conflict between the two blocs.

The position of the United States was clear. It saw the security of the European countries in terms of their capacity to resist the Soviet menace, which was perceived as a real danger at the time. This capacity to resist was economic, social but also military, now that the war in the Far East had produced a turning point in the Cold War. On 12th September 1950, the U.S. Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, spelled out his government's desire: "An integrated army, under a single command, obviously U.S., with international headquarters but which would include, in addition to Allied forces, a number of German divisions to be determined."

This perspective of "German divisions" aroused great emotion in France and was in any case judged unacceptable by Robert Schuman, who had declared the previous year that "Germany has no arms, and it will not have any," thus echoing the sentiment of his government and of his Parliament.

Between the U.S. vow to see another Wehrmacht, the French refusal to see an army once again creating the spectre of war, and the German wish to recover its full sovereignty, the search for a compromise appeared delicate.

For Jean Monnet, who was in Paris presiding over the negotiations on the future ECSC treaty, there was no alternative: German rearmament was possible and acceptable only with a view to the federal construction of Europe. To meet the new demands created by the circumstances of the Cold War, Jean Monnet envisaged reproducing on the military level the integration method initiated in the coal and steel sectors: a European Army which would combine German soldiers under a common uniform and command.

Proposed to the President of the Council and his friend René Pleven, the European Army project was announced to the National Assembly on 24th October 1950. The European Defence Community provided for calling up six European divisions alongside national batallions, with international headquarters under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Forces, all placed under the responsibility of a European Defence Minister; he in turn would be responsible to the ECSC Common Assembly. Jean Monnet saw a double logic in the European Army project: it would enable Europe to ensure its defence by its own means, and insofar as an army generally applies the decisions of a political authority, the creation of a European defence mechanism would invariably lead to the edification of a political European Community. The governmental declaration was approved by 349 votes against 235 and the work leading to the signature of a treaty opened in Paris on 15th February 1951 in the presence of the six future member-countries of the ECSC.

On 27th May 1952, the European Defence Community (EDC) Treaty was signed by the Six in Paris. The Treaty differed from the initial project represented by the Pleven plan: recruitment, instruction and appointments alone were the responsibility of the Defence Minister in each country; and there was no longer a European Defence Minister but a Council of Ministers which determined the policy of the Community by unanimous vote on important questions. This backing down was the first threat to the level of supranationality which Jean Monnet had wished to incorporate into the EDC. More fundamentally, while the objectives of the ECSC were clear and avowed - create a single market in which the competition would have a rôle; rationalize production and its transport, all for the benefit of the member states - what would be the objectives of a European army? For what State, in the service of what policy, against what enemy would this supranational army serve? Would the rule of unanimous vote in the Council of Ministers enable it to send troops to a field of operation with the rapidity and effectiveness needed for these kinds of maneouvres? Confronted with this institutional void, the ECSC Common Assembly was charged with undertaking the legal elaboration of a federal political structure, an indispensable complement of a Defence Community.

On 10th March 1953, the Common Assembly adopted a project for a European Political Community (EPC) with a truly federal tone. On the constitutional level, an 87-member Senate was provided for, designated by the national members of Parliament, along with a 268-deputy Chamber of the Peoples, elected by universal suffrage and disposing of a censure motion vis à vis a European Executive Council. This executive body had the right to take initiatives and make obligatory decisions. On the economic level, the EPC was to implement a Common Market of Europe of the Six. The EPC institutions were designed to absorb those of the ECSC and the EDC in the long run, while also creating a form of political and economic European union. However, the birth of the EPC was conditioned by the implementation of the EDC, which itself was dependent on the ratification of the treaty by the national Parliaments of 27th May 1952.

From March 1953 to July 1954, five national Parliaments - those of Federal Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy - ratified the EDC Treaty, thereby burying the EPC federal project. The French Parliament was very late (November 1953) in examining the European Army project, thus delaying the final debate on the ratification of the Treaty. In 1954, i.e. four years after the announcement of the Pleven plan, the international situation had changed. The Korean War, which had precipitated a climate of tension in which the EDC had been conceived, was ended by an armistice signed on 27th July 1953. And above all, with the death of Stalin on 5th March 1953, the "Soviet danger" was seen by the West as less serious. The rearmament of Federal Germany then appeared as a less pressing priority. Further, for reasons of French domestic politics, the debate on the EDC became heated.

As Raymond Aron noted in 1956, "Between January 1953 and August 1954, the largest political-ideological quarrel that France had ever known probably since the Dreyfus case broke out; the most visible question was the rearmament of Germany but in the final analysis what was at stake was the very principle of the existence of France, of the national State."

After having imposed modifications in the EDC treaty on the States which had already ratified it, and after having insisted on seeking prior guarantees vis à vis its partners before any ratification, France finally buried the European Army project: On 30th August 1954, the National Assembly rejected the EDC treaty by a vote of 319 for and 264 against a prior motion, thus ending the debate and adjourning the discussion of the text sine die. After four years of negotiations, France had rejected the project that the country had itself proposed, which disgruntled its partners exceedingly and which did nothing to solve the German rearmament problem. Jean Monnet was disturbed by the failure of the project that he had conceived and, realizing that the construction of Europe had now been called to a halt, he decided to change his work strategy radically. Rather than remain attached to an official post in the ECSC, he preferred to keep a certain freedom of action. On 9th November 1954, he announced that he would not request a new term as President of the High Authority, which expired in February 1955. -

The Action Committee for the United States of Europe

His availability thus ensured, Jean Monnet turned his energies to the service of a new form of action to which he remained faithful thereafter. On 13th October 1955, he announced the constitution of an Action Committee for the United States of Europe, which for twenty years was to prove an extraordinary instrument of influence and action vis à vis the political parties, the press, the trade unions and the European governments. The activity of this "Monnet Committee will consist first in its intervention and that of the organizations within it to show their determination, vis à vis governments, parliaments and public opinion, to make the Messina resolution of 2nd June 1955 a true step towardss the United States of Europe." [The Messina Conference, held from 1st to 3rd June 1955 and attended by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Six, amounted to the launch of the "European revival" following the failure of the EDC]. Consisting of a small team as in the past and backed up by a solid network of competent, distinguished professionals and personalities who had been known since the Plan and the ECSC, the "Monnet Committee" set up in offices in a vast apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris. The organism created by Jean Monnet brought together some one-hundred influential people, representatives of the large European political parties (Liberals, Christian Democrats, Socialists) and large non-Communist trade unions: The former President of the High Authority had remembered the conditions of the EDC failure, i.e. that Parliamentary opposition had won out over the government's commitment. The Action Committee thus intended to act like a lever within the political parties represented on the benches of the Assemblies.

Among those on whom the Action Committee relied for information were the men of the press: mediators, information gatherers, opinion makers, and French, European and American journalists were part of this world of information which enabled Monnet to greatly expand his Committee's scope of action.

From 1956 to 1973, the Committee met for eighteen sessions in the course of which each resolution was generally adopted unanimously. Many of the Action Committee's resolutions were put into effect, notably the treaty on the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom); elections for the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage; and the European Council of Chiefs of States and Governments. The Action Committee for the United States of Europe was dissolved by its founder on 9th May 1975. Jean Monnet was then 86 years old.

The Treaties of Rome: the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom)

With the first sessions of the Action committee, it was clear that priority should be given to creating the Atomic Energy Community. First, such a Community corresponded perfectly to the method adopted by Monnet whereby sovereignty is delegated in a limited but decisive field, justifying the implementation of a supranational structure (the EDC had failed in part because of its excessive political ambition.) Next, the atomic sector lent itself to the "community" structure: It would make possible a greater control of the inevitable future development of the German nuclear industry and, used essentially for non-military purposes, the "atom" would associate European construction with an image of peace and modernity. However, the Benelux countries and Germany were skeptical about the interventionist aspects of a possible atomic community and favoured instead another possibility: a general economic common market, of free-trade inspiration. This position was defended by the Dutch Minister Johan Willem Beyen, who aspired to the development of a common market which would bring about European unity. Would the incompatibility of the French and German/Dutch views lead to an impasse?

While Monnet's Euratom project greatly displeased Germany, the Frenchman remained skeptical regarding the German desire to create a large free market. For Jean Monnet did not wish to renew the unfortunate EDC experience and thus remained reserved on the feasibility of a multi-sectorial, immediate integration of Europe of the Six. How might a compromise be brought about?

Jean Monnet and the Action Committee worked out a compromise solution: Euratom and the Common Market would be related but would be two quite distinct communities. The synthesis work was given to the Spaak Committee presided over by the Belgian Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, President of the ECSC Common Assembly. The Committee drew up the report designed to prepare the negotiations on Euratom and the Common Market in minute detail. On 25th March 1957 in Rome, three years following the failure of the EDC, the EEC and the EAEC Treaties were signed.

Jean Monnet; Harold MacMillan, British Prime Minister; and Professor Jean Piaget from Geneva, were given the Doctora Honoris Causa Degree of Cambridge University. Senante House, 8th June 1961.

The European Council of Chiefs of State and Government In the early 1970s, while the institutions created by the treaties of Rome had been functioning for more than ten years, Jean Monnet did not for an instant think of calling them into question but rather of adapting them to the new world. He envisaged giving incontestable legitimacy to the European Commission by having the Assembly designate it with a right to veto in the Council. Jean Monnet was also convinced that it was necessary to elect the Parliament by direct universal suffrage, thus making it truly representative. But above all, he felt the Community needed a body capable of grappling with important decisions as they loomed on the horizon. The "Inspirer" had often observed that the major turning points were taken during summits among Chiefs of State or Government and that this intergovernmental method made it possible to make concrete progress.

Thus, in February 1972 the Action Committee established a commission specially charged with studying this problem. In October of the same year in Paris, the French President Georges Pompidou called the first Europe of the Nine summit, with the objective of "transforming before the end of the present decade and with absolute respect for the treaties already in force, all relations of the member States into one European Union." However, the meeting did not take place under extremely favourable conditions: The French president had not obtained the agreement of his European partners for setting the date of the meeting. In September, Jean Monnet travelled to London and met Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, who was displeased to have been placed before a fait accompli: "I have duties to the British people; I cannot give them the impression that I am doing what Mr. Pompidou says. I will not join the meeting unless concrete decisions are made. We are all for concrete meetings but not necessarily those desired by Mr. Pompidou…. We want discussions." [Roussel, p. 889].

The European Summit in Paris and the reactions it aroused served as a trigger in Jean Monnet's thinking regarding the future of the political authority of which he dreamed. Having worked out a solution by August 1973, he wrote a note entitled "Constitution and Action of a Provisional European Government". The Monnet project stipulated that the Chiefs of State and of Government, in order to respect the treaties, would have to give adequate instructions to the member States' ministers in the Council. A European Union project was to be submitted for the ratification of the member States. Finally, Jean Monnet provided for meetings to be held at least every three months. The politician who would make Jean Monnet's idea his own was the new President of France, elected on 19th May 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Out of luck and chance in the political agenda, France was the country which presided over the Community for the second half of 1974. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing agreed with Jean Monnet on the European Council project, particularly as he himself had had the idea.

On 10th December 1974, following a meeting of the nine Chiefs of State and Government in Paris, a communiqué was published announcing the institutional reform. The fundamental key was the creation of the Council of Europe, complemented by the limitation of the unanimous vote and the project for electing the European Parliament by universal suffrage beginning in 1978. Out of this simple resolution of the Chiefs of State and Government but under constant pressure from Jean Monnet, the Council of Europe showed itself to be the unique intergovernmental body in charge of political cooperation and the supreme authority of the European Community, giving meaning to its construction.