Treaty establishing the European Defence Community

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Treaty establishing the European Defence Community

Ratification statuses in signatory states:   Ratified   Aborted   Rejected
Type	Military pact
Context	Cold war, European integration
Drafted	24 October 1950
Signed	27 May 1952
Location	Paris
Effective	Never
Condition	Ratification by all member states
Expiry	50 years after entry into effect
Parties	6  Belgium  France  West Germany  Italy  Luxembourg  Netherlands
Depositary	Government of France
Full text
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The Treaty establishing the European Defence Community, also known as the Treaty of Paris,^[1] is an unratified treaty signed on 27 May 1952 by the six 'inner' countries of European integration: the Benelux countries, France, Italy, and West Germany. The treaty would have created a European Defence Community (EDC), with a unified defence force acting as an autonomous European pillar within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The ratification process was completed in the Benelux countries and West Germany, but stranded after the treaty was rejected in the French National Assembly. Instead, the London and Paris Conferences provided for West Germany's accession to NATO and the Western European Union (WEU), the latter of which was a transformed version of the pre-existing Western Union. The historian Odd Arne Westad calls the plan^[which?] "far too complex to work in practice".^[2]

The treaty was initiated by the Pleven plan, proposed in 1950 by then French Prime Minister René Pleven in response to the American call for the rearmament of West Germany. The formation of a pan-European defence architecture, as an alternative to West Germany's proposed accession to NATO, was meant to harness the German military potential in case of conflict with the Soviet bloc. Just as the Schuman Plan was designed to end the risk of Germany having the economic power on its own to make war again, the Pleven Plan and EDC were meant to prevent the military possibility of Germany's making war again.