The Western European Union
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The Western European Union

Sally Rohan

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eBook - ePub

The Western European Union

Sally Rohan

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About This Book

This full-term study of the Western European Union (WEU) brings to life the history of Europe's search for a co-operative security and defence order, from its post World War II origins to the present day. Establishing the WEU as a support organization, designed to promote the two security "ideas" ofcollective defence and integration through the primary organizations of Alliance and Community, this book offers a window onto the challenges faced in the development and management of NATO and the evolving EC/EU over time. As the WEU's historical journey unfolds, the frequently competing visions of the future organization of the European security space are exposed in the fluctuating nature of its own functional evolution and devolution. A hybrid organization driven by its dual support role, the constructively ambiguous and conveniently autonomous WEU was to provide a mechanism through which divergent interests could converge and inherent tensions be relieved, preventing NATO and EC/EU stagnation. This book offers fresh insight into the means by which the gradual transformation of the institutional framework of European security was enabled, and stakes the WEU's claim as a fundamental and life-long contributor to the stability of the European security system.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2014
ISBN
9781135767631
Topic
History
Edition
1

1
Birth of the Union

1945–55
The WEU has its roots in the security debate of the final years of the Second World War. Weakened and demoralized by this second major conflict of the century, the European allies sought to find a better means of managing future European relations. The continuing American presence in Europe provided immediate reassurance, but fears of a resurgent Germany and a potential Soviet threat, combined with recognition of general European decline, led many to seek alternative solutions to the seemingly intractable problem of constructing a stable Europe. Whilst talks on the development of a collective security regime under a ‘United Nations’ began amongst the major Allied Powers as early as 1941, the conflict-preventing potential of cooperative and integrated behaviour in the European arena was beginning to foster interest in elite European circles. The route to the WEU lies along the path leading from these initial debates regarding the very nature of post-war security and the appropriate mechanisms for its management.
This chapter traces the development of these debates from the Dunkirk Treaty of 1947, to the Brussels Treaty of 1948 and on through the failed EDC negotiations of 1950 to 1954. In 1955, as a consequence of the signing of the Modified Brussels Treaty in October 1954, the WEU emerged as an element of the institutional order of post-war Europe. Although the WEU’s ascendance was to be short-lived, as it was quickly outshone by NATO and the emerging EC, the WEU was to have a significant influence on these institutional developments. Through an examination of the central influences and interests at play in the emergence of the final post-war compromise, as articulated and institutionalized through the WEU, this chapter explores the significance of the WEU for the management of the emerging European security order.

The Early Years

Discussions regarding West European peacetime security arrangements had taken place consistently between the French and the British since the Declaration of London proposals of June 1940, which had envisaged the possibility of a Franco-British Union covering defence, foreign, finance and economic policy as well as joint citizenship.1 These discussions had been encouraged by the smaller West European governments in exile, with the primarily economic Benelux alliance between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg emerging in September 1944 following approaches to Britain regarding the establishment of a broader-based custom union.2 Within the British establishment, consideration of a possible West European security arrangement had accompanied the ongoing allied talks on a world security organization that would eventually lead to the signing of the United Nations Charter in October 1945. Most notable amongst the plans emerging from the British Foreign Office in the final years of the war was the report by Gladwyn Jebb, Head of the Economic and Reconstruction Department, in June 1944, which considered the advantages and disadvantages of UK involvement in a peace-time West European Security Grouping. Conscious of the risk that such a grouping might undermine Britain’s important relations with the Americans, the Soviets and her Dominions, Jebb concluded that some form of West European arrangement would nevertheless be in Britain’s strategic interests if a dangerous political vacuum was not be left on the continent.3 Under his plan, Jebb proposed a regional security tier, possibly in the form of a ‘United Nations Commission for Europe’, subordinated to the envisaged world organization. The tier would involve a West European system of mutual bilateral or multilateral defence pacts that would balance a parallel Soviet arrangement to form a wider ‘dumbbell’ balance of power in Europe that would prevent future German aggression. Based initially on an Anglo-French arrangement, the report went so far as to envisage common military planning and the standardization of armaments. The alternative view held by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, along with the War and Colonial Offices, was that an alliance with the West Europeans could act as the wartime cordon sanitaire against the Soviets, whilst the continuation of the alliance with the US would be the key to meeting the Soviet threat.4 Rising concerns about this threat and the potential requirement for a German contribution to meet West European security needs were recognized in the response of the Chiefs of Staff to the Jebb proposals and in the following plans drawn up by the interdepartmental Post Hostilities Planning Staff (PHPS). The PHPS concluded that, whatever the outcome of the discussions on a United Nations organization, it was vital that Britain form a West European Security Group, including the French, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries and possibly even Germany, and that this organization should co-operate with the Commonwealth and the US with the intention of eventually establishing a North Atlantic organization to counter the Soviet threat to Western Europe.5
The election of Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s Labour Government in July 1945 led to the appointment of a new British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who was sympathetic to the Foreign Office concept of a ‘Western Union’ based on close Anglo-French co-operation.6 Although Bevin was a keen supporter of the Anglo-American relationship, he foresaw the possibility of a ‘fortress America’, protected economically by a high tariff wall, and thus the need for some level of European economic independence from Washington. The British Labour Party’s support, during wartime ‘opposition’, for federal union had largely dissipated on election in July 1945, when Britain’s great-power role and great-power interests excluded her from Euro-centric integration. Nevertheless, Bevin did maintain some real enthusiasm for economic, commercial and political co-operation between Britain and other Europeans. By turning the Foreign Office ‘defence first’ approach on its head, Bevin sought an economic partnership as the basis of an Anglo-French relationship in which military co-operation would be an indirect result.7 He was to write to the French socialist Leon Blum, in September 1945, that his policy was ‘aiming at increasing economic and cultural co-operation in the hope that out of such co-operation should arise a common outlook in defence matters’.8 Thus Bevin’s view of a Western Union was based on economic co-operation and an Anglo-French axis, supported by the development of an internationally controlled Ruhr, severing from Germany its economic potential for aggression, and the ‘long term objective [was] to make the Ruhr industries the central pivot in the economy of an eventual “western union”’.9
A partnership with the US may have been Bevin’s preferred option, but this compromise solution of WU was further promoted by Soviet antagonism and American unilateralism at the London Council of Foreign Ministers in September–October 1945, which did much to increase Bevin’s interest in establishing a strong Anglo-French axis as a potential ‘third force’ between the emerging superpowers.10 He approached the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, on the day after the Council meeting to propose opening negotiations on an Anglo-French treaty.11
The foreign policy of the French Fourth Republic had been inherited largely from Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government of 1944 to 1945.12 The containment of Germany was central in French deliberations, and it was recognized that this could only be achieved by a combination of political, economic and military factors. The internationalization of the industrial Ruhr and the return to France of the coal-rich Saar region13 would be a central plank in the policy of denial of German economic and military capabilities; alliance formation, the benefits of which had been mobilized too slowly to secure immediate French interests, remained of secondary relevance. De Gaulle believed that the future security of Europe would require economic and military co-operation between France, the Benelux states and possibly Britain. However, he sought an essentially economic association through a customs union of West European states which ‘would seem to constitute a central pillar in a world organization of production, trade and security’.14 The persistence of a strong colonial orientation in French foreign policy in the immediate post-war years was a reflection of the benefits seen to accrue from French overseas possessions during the war and the foothold that these might provide for the status of France between the two emergent superpowers.15
Following the elections to the French National Assembly in October 1945, de Gaulle, formally confirmed President in November, sought to establish a tripartite government representative of the popular vote split between the three main political groups—the Communists, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. Recognizing British and American concerns at the communists’ strength in French politics, de Gaulle presented his foreign and domestic economic agenda as the alternative to a Communist France.16 However, by 20 January 1946, his inability to garner international support combined with internal political divisions led to the President’s resignation from his weak coalition government. The apparent political instability of France did little to reassure the British Government. British rejection of the removal of the Ruhr from Germany on 17 April 1946, acceptance of which had been a precondition of French participation in any alliance, was at least in part a response to these increasing concerns which had served to undermine British enthusiasm for an Anglo-French alliance.17 The offer, made by US Secretary of State Byrnes in the same month, of a 25-year Four Power treaty for the demilitarization of Germany, suggested a level of American engagement with Europe that would be preferable to any Anglo-French arrangement.18 Bevin’s interest in a customs union for Europe did result in some minor agreements with France on the removal of destructive economic practices in the autumn of 1946, but the notion of an Anglo-French cornerstone to a WU had been all but abandoned.19 Consequently, the negotiations that followed the Anglo-French CommuniquĂ© of 16 January 1947 focused specifically on the development of a treaty against German aggression.20

The Dunkirk Treaty

Signed on 4 March 1947, the Anglo-French Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance, known as the Dunkirk Treaty, consisted of a bilateral agreement to provide for each signatory ‘all the military and other support and assistance’ possible and was specifically aimed at the containment of any future German revanchism.21 In the absence of an Anglo-French consensus on a still prostrate Germany, the Dunkirk Treaty may seem to have offered little more than the ‘gilding for the pill that no coal was available’, the offer of alliance simply shoring up the French Government at a time of instability and persuading it to give up its plans for the Ruhr as the Moscow Foreign Ministers Conference on Germany began.22 Certainly, Bevin was keen to reassure the Russians in his speech at the signing of the Dunkirk Treaty that this did not represent the formation of an exclusive ‘Western bloc’, but rather that it should be seen as ‘an attempt to make one contribution, woven into the fabric of Europe and the world, to a pattern of universal peace’, a peace in which the Soviets might equally play a part.23
The Dunkirk Treaty has been presented by some as the first tentative step by the UK towards alliance creation with the US, resulting in the Brussels Treaty and NATO as a natural consequence of post-war Foreign Office planning.24 However, it is clear that neither direction nor path was so clearly determined. The Dunkirk Treaty may rather be regarded as a pragmatic response to an uncertain future, meeting immediate needs whilst leaving options open.25 Not least, as Larres notes, it ‘would allow Britain to either take the road to reliance on a Western European Union or to opt for pursuing the path of Atlantic Alliance’ dependent upon whether US support would be forthcoming.26
The elucidation of the Truman Doctrine on 11 March 1947 and the concomitant US acceptance of responsibility for Greece, Turkey and Iran served to convince the British Government that the US was indeed prepared to tie itself, if loosely, to a defensive system with Western Europe against the Soviet threat. When this was followed in June by ...

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