Bachiller

Desmond Dinan – Chaper 1: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Integration, 1945-1957
* Monnet – de Gaulle made him head of the newly established economic planning office at the end of the war – charged with economic restructuring of France
* September 1946 – Churchill called for a “United States of Europe” in a famous speech in Zurich
* May 1948 – the Hague congress (the Congress ofEurope), a meeting of over 600 influential Europeans, was called to give particular form to European integration and to create a new European organization with a parliamentary body
* it gave rise to the Council of Europe
* it was far from a supranational entity and became a forum for the Exchange of ideas and information on social, legal and cultural matters
* the mainachivevement was the organization’s Court of Human Rights (placed in Strasbourg) soon became a bulwark for the protection of civil liberties throughout Europe
* Monnet did not participate in the Hague congress as he believed the way to European integration lay in functional economic integration pushed forward by powerful politicians in the privacy of their government ministries
* as the ColdWar intensified integration came to be seen as a means by which Western Europe could strengthen its security, in close collaboration with the US, against external Soviet aggression (immediate US intervention as in Greece in 1947, military alliance building and leadership – NATO from April 1949) and internal Communist subversion (restoring Western Europe to sound economic health)
* theMarshall Plan – announced in a famous speech of June 1947, in which US secretary of State George C. Marshall pledged US financial support for European post-war reconstruction
* motivation behind the Plan:
* US
* without economic growth in Europe, US exports would stagnate and decline
* postwar US security depended on increasing international involvement in a Cold Warenvironment
* in order to meet the prerequisite for US assistance, recipient governments established the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in April 1948, (later renamed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), which came to be entirely intergovernmental in ethos
* the Marshall plan involved the reconstruction of West Germany as part of thereconstruction of Western Europe, which France viewed as a threat to its own economic recovery and security
* 1949 – the Federal Republic of Germany was born
* the French hoped that the International Ruhr Authority would maintain strict control over the coal-rich Ruhr area of Germany, but it proved unrealistic as the US pushed for German industrial recovery as a prerequisite for European economicrecovery
* the US plan for German economic recovery changed the sentiment in official French circles from punitive policy towards Germany towards a possible future economic association
* Monnet approached Schumann with the idea of a supranational coal and steel community
* 9th May 1950 – Schuman Declaration – coal and steel, the two key sectors of industrial production and war-makingpotential, would be removed from national management and placed under the regulátory control of a single supranational authority
* Germany knew that only by integrating closely with neighbouring countries it could hope to remove the remaining controls on its domestic and foreign politics
* European integration aimed first and foremost at resolving the German question
* countries that joinedthe ECSC and became the founding members of the European Communities, the Six: France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Benelux countries and Italy
* GB decided not to join the ECSC:
* political culture that emphasized national sovereignty
* a long history of detachment from continental European affairs
* the special wartime experience of having escaped invasion
*...