Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The European Integration Experience, 1945-1958
- 2 The Founding Fathers
- 3 The Marshall Plan and Western European Reconstruction
- 4 The Management of Markets: Business, Governments and Cartels in Post-war Europe
- 5 Europe’s First Constitution: The European Political Community, 1952-1954
- 6 Agricultural Pressure Groups and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy
- 7 ‘Thank You, M. Monnet; I’ll Take Care of That’: Some Counterfactual Reflections on Institutional Creation and the Origins of European Integration
- 8 The Dynamics of Policy Inertia: The UK’s Participation in and Withdrawal from the Spaak Negotiations
- 9 The European Integration Experience, 1958-1973
- 10 ‘An Act of Creative Leadership’: The End of the OEEC and the Birth of the OECD
- 11 The United Kingdom and the Free Trade Area: A Post Mortem
- 12 ‘Two Souls, One Thought’? The EEC, the USA and the Management of the International Monetary System
- 13 A Dismal Decade? European Integration in the 1970s
- 14 EFTA and European Integration, 1973-1994: Vindication or Marginalisation?
- 15 The Concentric Circles of the European Union’s Trade Regime, 1989 to the Present
- 16 Lessons from the Euro Experience
- 17 European Identities
- 18 The Landscape of European Studies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Publications of Richard T. Griffiths
7 - ‘Thank You, M. Monnet; I’ll Take Care of That’: Some Counterfactual Reflections on Institutional Creation and the Origins of European Integration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The European Integration Experience, 1945-1958
- 2 The Founding Fathers
- 3 The Marshall Plan and Western European Reconstruction
- 4 The Management of Markets: Business, Governments and Cartels in Post-war Europe
- 5 Europe’s First Constitution: The European Political Community, 1952-1954
- 6 Agricultural Pressure Groups and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy
- 7 ‘Thank You, M. Monnet; I’ll Take Care of That’: Some Counterfactual Reflections on Institutional Creation and the Origins of European Integration
- 8 The Dynamics of Policy Inertia: The UK’s Participation in and Withdrawal from the Spaak Negotiations
- 9 The European Integration Experience, 1958-1973
- 10 ‘An Act of Creative Leadership’: The End of the OEEC and the Birth of the OECD
- 11 The United Kingdom and the Free Trade Area: A Post Mortem
- 12 ‘Two Souls, One Thought’? The EEC, the USA and the Management of the International Monetary System
- 13 A Dismal Decade? European Integration in the 1970s
- 14 EFTA and European Integration, 1973-1994: Vindication or Marginalisation?
- 15 The Concentric Circles of the European Union’s Trade Regime, 1989 to the Present
- 16 Lessons from the Euro Experience
- 17 European Identities
- 18 The Landscape of European Studies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Publications of Richard T. Griffiths
Summary
Jean Monnet, in his memoirs, tells how on 28 April 1950 he was about to send the copy of his preliminary scheme for a Franco-German coal and steel community to French Prime Minister Georges Bidault. Before he could, he met Bernard Clappier, a high official in the Foreign Ministry, who, on being shown the document, asked whether he could not take a copy immediately to his boss, Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. Schuman, in turn, raised the issue in cabinet the following Tuesday and secured their approval to proceed. Afterwards Monnet had an uncomfortable interview with Bidault who, feeling bypassed, complained about receiving the letter too late. Monnet was inclined to accept that Bidault had, in fact, read the letter before the meeting but distracted by other matters of state, had failed to act on it. Nonetheless, Monnet writes, this is how it became ‘not the Bidault Plan, but the Schuman Plan’.
The economic imperatives behind the Schuman Plan have already been amply demonstrated by historians. Yet the ECSC not only produced a common regime over the coal and steel industries of six countries, it aspired to regulating conditions of competition, to the execution of joint crisis management and to the implementation of a joint transport policy (since 60 per cent of rail freight comprised coal and steel produce).
In 1949 the Americans were concerned to raise the limits imposed on German industrial recovery and these aims had been reinforced by the installation of a sovereign federal government in the same year. At the same time, European demand for steel was beginning to slacken and the prospect of millions of tonnes of unused German capacity being reactivated was greeted with some trepidation. Moreover, an added worry for the French lay in the fact that their own steel expansion programme was predicated upon the supposition that they would continue to receive deliveries of Ruhr coal. This assumption was undermined by the possibility that German coal supplies might be diverted to German industry, a prospect made more likely by the existence of a domestic coal cartel and by the traditional ownership of mines by steel concerns.
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- 'Thank you M. Monnet'Essays on the History of European Integration, pp. 149 - 160Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013