European Community: Statesmen of six European countries sign treaties for a European Common Market and European Atomic Pool. From left to right: Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, West German Chancellor and Foreign Minister Konrad Adenauer and his undersecretary Walter Hallstein, and Italian Prime Minister Antonio Segni
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The declared goal of the ECSC was to establish "the basis for broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared." That language had more to do with the prevention of war than with the regulation of coal and steel production — which is just as well, because the ECSC never fully succeeded in subsuming national rivalries to broader community goals. Nevertheless, it established the pattern of "practical achievements" that produced the document that is modern Europe's constitution: the Treaty of Rome.
In keeping with Monnet's piecemeal style, the treaty, signed on March 25, 1957, dealt mainly with mundane agricultural policy for six member nations: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Though the "Common Agricultural Policy" soon became notorious for its huge costs and subsidy-created "wine lakes," the Rome treaty set forth the principles for a united Europe. The treaty comprises 248 articles, but its essence is known as the Four Freedoms: freedom of movement for goods, people, services and capital. Though less grand than a U.S.-style bill of rights, this simple principle of porous borders suited the Monnet style of gradualism. It created a kind of bureaucratic road map that pointed wary Europeans toward unity but did not shove them — a process that continues to this day. Much of the success of Monnet and his busy, bureaucratic colleagues was owing to their very obscurity. Monnet himself never assumed a ministerial portfolio. His loftiest title was president of the high authority of the ECSC, which he held for only three years before resigning in deference to opposition from coal and steel cartels. That modest style made it possible for him to proceed with his bricklaying while the great leaders of the day dealt with the excruciatingly visible tensions and confrontations of the cold war. The likes of Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harold Macmillan fixed their minds upon the Suez crisis, rebellion in Hungary and tank-to-tank face-offs in Berlin.
The solution to that security problem was as grand and comprehensive as the EEC was modest and piecemeal. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a large organization with an equally large mission, best expressed by Britain's Lord Ismay: to keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in. In all that it succeeded. West Germany, locked within the U.S.-led NATO structure, lacked the possibility (or the desire, after the disaster of Nazism) for independent military action. Largely because of NATO, the Soviet Union could neither attack Europe, nor — more important — intimidate it. And America, after first demobilizing and withdrawing at the end of World War II, poured back into Europe with a 300,000-member armed force that made it the protector of Europe for nearly half a century. Almost from the beginning that protection included the deployment of nuclear weapons and the eventual creation of a U.S.-controlled "nuclear umbrella" intended to protect NATO members from attack by the far larger forces of the Soviet bloc. NATO's nuclear umbrella made nobody happy, least of all the French, who began building their own nuclear force and eventually left the military structure of NATO. But under its protection, Europe prospered.
The German Wirtschaftswunder, the "economic miracle," was the most remarkable national recovery in the history of Europe's many wars. In the 1950s Germany went from a devastated land of ruined cities and shattered morale to Europe's most powerful economy. Led by the German boom, the EEC became by 1962 the world's largest single trading power, as it soaked up the lion's share of raw materials to feed its burgeoning factories and turned them into products to sell on a world market.
Of the major countries of the Continent, only Britain continued to stagnate in shabby isolation. By the end of the decade, British leaders had begun to realize that their country's economic future lay with Europe, not the crumbling Commonwealth or the European Free Trade Association it founded to compete with the EEC. But by then De Gaulle opposed British entry, and it was not until 1972 that Britain was permitted into the club.
Not only the British recognized the success and permanence of a united Europe. By 1961 the Soviet Union acknowledged it as well, in the only way it knew how: the building of the Berlin Wall to prevent the impoverished citizens of a failed system from pouring en masse across the divide to a thriving one. Although the Wall froze the division of East and West, it also allowed the West Europeans to continue their incremental construction of an open and prospering economy. When the Berlin Wall fell almost three decades later, Jean Monnet had been dead 10 years and was mostly forgotten by the jubilant crowds that battered it to pieces with hammers and chisels. But he was there in spirit, patiently chipping away at Europe's last great barrier to eventual unity.