ABSTRACT
One day after the official celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and barely a year after the promulgation of the de facto constitution of the Federal Republic of divided Germany, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made an announcement in the name of his government. The Schuman Declaration,3 as the speech came to be known later, proposed that “Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe.”4 Schuman advocated harmonization of production quotas, joint economic planning and reduction of tariff barriers, measures that were expected, in turn, to spur shared Franco-German and, indeed, by extension, pan-west-European economic development, boosting west European solidarity and leading to a “change in the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.”5 The Schuman Declaration can thus be summarized as combining two radically different ideas: (1) a modest, short-term and relatively easy-to-implement suggestion for a system of production coordination (a cartel agreement of sorts) in two key strategic commodities between two hitherto competing partners; and (2) a long-term, indeed historic blueprint for large-scale west European integration, a project whose ambition far exceeded the scope and scale of the Marshall Plan. As Schuman’s implicit reference to western Europe’s colonial past-embodied in his suggestion that, should this plan succeed, “[w]ith increased resources Europe [sic] will be able to pursue the achievement of one of its essential [sic] tasks, namely, the development of the African continent”6
—indicates that what was at stake was not simply a set of coal and steel quotas but a set of historic and global considerations.
