It only remained for the French National Assembly to ratify the Treaty and Western Europe would have acquired something resembling a European army, with integrated and intermingled national contingents, including a German one. The French, however, were still unhappy. As Janet Flanner shrewdly observed in November 1953, ‘for the French as a whole the EDC problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans.’ France’s hesitations frustrated the Americans—at a NATO Council meeting in December 1953 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’
It only remained for the French National Assembly to ratify the Treaty and Western Europe would have acquired something resembling a European army, with integrated and intermingled national contingents, including a German one. The French, however, were still unhappy. As Janet Flanner shrewdly observed in November 1953, ‘for the French as a whole the EDC problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans.’ France’s hesitations frustrated the Americans—at a NATO Council meeting in December 1953 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of American policy if the EDC were to fail. But even though the Pleven Plan was the brainchild of a French prime minister, public debate had revealed the extent of French reluctance to countenance German rearmament under any conditions. Moreover, the proposals for German rearmament and a European army could not have come at a worse time: the French army was facing defeat and humiliation in Vietnam, and the new French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendès-France, rightly calculated that it would be imprudent to stake the future of his fragile coalition government on an unpopular proposal to re-arm the national enemy. Accordingly, when the EDC Treaty finally came to the National Assembly for ratification, Mendès-France forbore to make of it an issue of confidence, and the Treaty was rejected, on August 30th 1954, by a vote of 319–264. The plan for a European Defense Community, and with it a re-...
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