For political reasons, too, uniting Europe is a far cry from uniting the original American states two centuries ago—and even they took about a dozen years to progress from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. For centuries these European states have gone to war against each other, and have each in turn known military power and glory—and something of this inevitably remains in their attitudes toward each other today. Yet the essential point in what must be a long drawn-out effort is that never in 1950, when Mr. Schuman launched his famous plan, or even more in 1954, when E.D.C. failed, would anyone have dared predict that European integration would have advanced so far by 1957.
When, on May 9, 1950, Mr. Schuman announced his plan, it was almost ten years to the day since the German invasion of the Low Countries and five years since Germany's surrender after a war which nearly ruined all Europe. The two thoughts uppermost in his mind were inevitably how to bring Germany peacefully, as an equal partner, into the Western fold; and how to give Europe an economic future on the vast scale which the expansion of the United States and Russia has made necessary today.
I have spent much of my life in America and have seen with my own eyes the enormously superior opportunities a continental market affords. Europe's countries, whose trade had for decades been stunted by protectionist policies carried out behind narrow frontiers in markets with 10 to 50 million consumers, had to have the same opportunity for progress. A continental common market was needed in Europe, too.
But a common market today is necessarily a complex creation. It could not work without rules of cooperation applied by a federal government working in the general interest. Here was the instrument by which Germany could be delivered from the temptation of national isolation and be given the equal treatment she must have if the old mistrusts were not to be perpetuated. In a common market Germany, no more than France or Holland, would be a separate entity carrying out the jungle law of rival nations to its consummation in war, but a partner in a common enterprise where problems are treated on their own merits and not as accidents of the balance of power.
The European Coal and Steel Community, covering six countries with 160 million consumers, as many as the United States, has on the whole been a remarkable technical success. For instance, while steel pro
duction has risen over one-third in four years (the Community, with its output of 62 million tons a year, is a bigger producer than Russia), steel trade across frontiers within the common market has risen by 250 per cent —which shows the effects of the old customs barriers in restricting commerce.
The political realities behind that success cannot, to my mind, be stated too often: the Community's daily action would have been inconceivable without a federal executive whose decisions, in its own sphere, are as effective as those of a national government. The High Authority has played a vital role, not only in setting up and running the common market, but in making the politicians of the member-states themselves experience the advantages and ways of working of a federal European government.
The political leaders of the six member countries would not now be almost unanimously in favor of European unity had they not found by working in the Community's Assembly (which can oust the High Authority by an adverse vote) that they could work in the larger frame as effectively as, or more effectively than, in their national frameworks, and certainly more effectively than in ordinary international organizations in which each country can veto decisions.
I know from my own conversations with them that the German Social Democrats and labor unions were in great part encouraged to support European unity by their own work in the Coal and Steel Community. The Community has shown that the technical problems of integration, though complex, are not insurmountable, and that the advantages in political cooperation and in the competitive vitality of the larger market greatly outweigh them.
In the same way, I am convinced from my contacts with them that the British, who respect facts rather than hypotheses, would never have given the European over-all common market project much serious study had they not seen that the Coal and Steel Community, which they viewed at first as an overlogical French construction, worked in practice. The public response in Britain to the British Government's proposal to see whether the United Kingdom can be closely associated with the European common market shows how great a distance the British, too, have traveled since 1950.