"America's Europe". Discuss with reference to the origins of european integration

Résumé du document

The American dimension to European integration has stirred up great debate, conventionally crystallized in the ‘traditionalist/revisionist' dichotomy. A central concern in any study of the origins of European integration consists in determining how far the development of intense patterns of cooperative management and integration was dependent upon the provision of security and hegemonic political and economic leadership by the United States within the Cold War ‘western order', rather than on the efforts of European leaders themselves or the dynamics of intra-European politics.

Extraits

[...] In this framework, by giving France the backing it needed to enter a coal-steel pool with Germany, the United States helped to link the two thus making an important contribution to European integration. Under this light, integration stems from the reconcilability of interests under political, economic and historical circumstances which all point to the idiosyncratic momentum for integration. Bibliography - Duchene, Francois, Jean Monnet, the First Statesman of Interdependence. New York: Norton - edited by Gowan, Peter, and Anderson, Perry, The Question of Europe. [...]

[...] Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p.447. John Palmer, Europe without America?, p.57. Francois Duchene, Jean Monnet, the First Statesman of Interdependence, p.167. [...]

[...] Thus, liberal institutionalism allocates the origins of European integration to the federalist visions and ideas of a supranational Europe developed by, above all, Monnet and is circle, the practitioners of the ‘Community method'. For the institutionalist pioneer Ernst Haas, institutional feedback led on to the EEC, the ECSC's supranational agents led domestic groups to perceive interests in extending the ECSC to EDC and EEC. In the same line of thought, constructivists, such as Craig Parsons, have brought forward the claim that ‘only certain ideas led Europeans to the EEC' rather than to less extensive cooperation in much weaker international institutions; that is, only advocates of a new ideology of integration ‘Community model'- perceived interests in the unprecedented institutional projects of ECSC and EEC. [...]

[...] In this respect, the US contribution to the origins of the 1950 Schuman Plan was vital: the US pushed Europe away from the politics and economics of the 1930s and towards liberalization. Another important aspect of American involvement in European integration is the Cold War context; in this particular respect, European integration would mean double containment of the Soviet Union and Germany. John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of the ‘American Committee for a United States of Europe' in 1947 and 1948, and US President Eisenhower informed French foreign minister Christian Pineau in 1955 that the realization of the Treaty of Rome would be of the finest days in the history of the free world, perhaps even more so than winning the war'[2], which is indeed indicative of the clear political undertones to the American support to European unity. [...]

[...] In Marshall Plan diplomacy, the recovery of Western Europe, the future of Germany, and Soviet containment, were all bound up together. Thus, concurrently with these developments affecting Germany, the Cold War and Marshall aid gave rise to both the first official proposals on European union and to the first pacts on collective security, European and Atlantic, all of which interacted with one another. Another aspect of the United States' crucial involvement in the initial design of European integration is the special relationship of Jean Monnet -one of the ‘founding fathers' of European integration- with American officials. [...]