Balancing between Atlanticism and Continentalism or subject to inevitability? The Belgian and Dutch parliaments and their conspicuous U-turn to the European Defence Community

Abstract

Ever since the beginning of European integration, there have repetitively been voices that posed the question whether the European bloc should also integrate with regards to defence. The first concrete suggestion to that end, plan Pleven, was put forward as early as 1950, after the Atlantic partner in Washington had made West German rearmament one of their priorities in light of increasing tensions with the Soviet Union. It is argued that Pleven’s proposal tried to encapsulate in a federalist, Continentalist framework the threat of this German rearmament. This thesis puts the considerations of the Belgian and Dutch parliaments vis-à-vis the development and eventual failure of the European Defence Community (EDC, the name of the entity that emerged from plan Pleven) centre stage. We analyse how these parliaments regarded collectivisation of European security from certain Atlanticist, Continentalist, and Sovereigntist doctrinal viewpoints. This demonstrates that additionally to interchanging applications of these doctrines by parliamentarians, a non-negligible factor in their argumentations was that of inevitability. Despite initial criticism of the EDC, enduring senses of inevitability strengthened interparty concord in both countries, whereas intraparty Sovereigntist cleavages remained. Eventually, the two parliaments adopted the EDC. Collective European security was gen-erally seen as inexorable, despite fallacies in the effective structure of the EDC Treaty. The parliaments in The Hague and Brussels viewed collective European security as the only option for swift rearmament, for Franco-German reconciliation, for meeting the American demand for German rearmament, and for moving towards a politically integrated Europe in an insecure world.