ABSTRACT
The press conference from which the European Union dates the start of its history seems dramatic only in retrospect. There had been so little time to warn the lobby journalists that something important was afoot that many did not even attend. The event lived up to their lack of expectations. Schuman was a mumbler. At the back of the room not everything could be heard. Less than half the French papers next morning gave the state ment prominent treatment and even fewer understood its full import. In London, by contrast, government reaction was vivid, angry and alarmed. The Prime Minister, Bevin, Herbert Morrison the Lord President, Sir Stafford Cripps the Chancellor, Emanuel Shinwell the Minister of Defence, Sir William Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and Roderick Barclay, the Foreign Office official who was Bevin's Private Secretary, agreed in an ad hoc meeting the next morning, 10 May, that ‘the French Government had behaved extremely badly’.1 A Cabinet committee to consider the statement met the next day and the Prime Minister called also for a committee of officials to deal with this disturbingly assertive initiative. There was not, however, much that could be discovered about French intentions, only that without prior consultation they had taken a lead which was contrary to British policy. Schuman left Paris for London the day after his statement, to take part in a meeting of the three foreign minis ters about Germany's relations with the North Atlantic Treaty and the relationship of both to the future of the OEEC. Bevin met Acheson and Schuman outside this official tripartite meeting and complained angrily of the way the news had been sprung on him. Schuman's account of the speedy generation of his proposal was in essence true, although his state ment that the French government had not negotiated with anyone else, while factually correct, was misleading.2 Adenauer, whose government 49was the object of the tripartite conference, had been told sooner and more than Bevin, although by a private emissary. Schuman was not able to provide any details of the proposed composition of the High Authority or of its exact relationship to the industries it would supervise. Since controls over the German steel industry remained the business of the three occupying powers, this was a matter for understandable irritation on the part of Bevin and the Foreign Office, especially as the suspicion prevailed that Acheson was supporting this abrupt, unilateral French move. Monnet's team had deliberately drafted Schuman's press statement with proleptic vagueness. They had focussed attention on the High Authority as a promise of a permanent end to Franco-German enmity and a first step to a future European federation, deliberately omitting all detail of how it would be made up and what its powers would be in relation to existing controls over German output. What for Monnet was a policy of vagueness seemed to British ministers merely a vagueness of policy.
