Summer 1951

Fifty Years Ago
Eisenhower calls for a "United States of Europe"
Summer 1951

By JT Dykman
 

America was the only major combatant of World War II without wrecked cities and ruined economies. We were helping our free-world allies to deal with their devastation when North Korea invaded the south. By the summer of 1951 the Chinese were routing United Nations Forces on the peninsula and an atmosphere of crisis haunted the White House and the Pentagon. Isolationist sentiment had by no means been swept from the halls of Congress and considerable political resistance remained toward the idea of permanently stationing American troops abroad for any reason. The Senate was engaged in an often heated debate as to whether the President had the Constitutional authority to send troops overseas without a declaration of war.

In Europe, the massive and seemingly monolithic armies of the Soviet Union and her Eastern satellite nations were deeply worrisome to our Western European allies. The Treaty of Washington, which created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been signed in April of 1949, but eleven of the twelve signatory nations were only just beginning to rebuild their war-wrecked economies; their peoples were largely dispirited, their leaders remained badly divided on issues of defense and suspicious of collective security itself. More than a year after NATO ratification, no military commander had been appointed, no headquarters had been established and no troops of any signatory nation had been assigned to Alliance control.

NATO in the Summer of 1951
By the end of 1950 the communist attack in Korea had made it clear to all political leaders of the Alliance, and especially to the United States Secretary of State, that a large integrated military force controlled by a centralized command organization under a single NATO commander was needed for Europe to deter the same fate from its communist neighbors. The allies unanimously petitioned President Truman to nominate a Supreme Commander Allied Powers Europe. Only one possible candidate came to the President's mind: Dwight David Eisenhower.

By July, General Eisenhower was seven months into his term as the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and was completely involved in creating a headquarters structure, Supreme Allied Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Probably no other person was better able to create the command structure for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Only Eisenhower had the level of prestige among European leaders to build a political ideology of common defense and an infrastructure capable of carrying it out. Eisenhower's legendary ability at alliance building was strained to its limits by the countless frustrations of dealing with allies who distrusted each other and feared the prospect of a rearmed Germany.

Eisenhower was convinced that Germany would have to be integrated into the common European defense structure, but recognized the fears, which had so far led the allies to exclude Germany from NATO. His diary entry of July 2, 1951 summarized his feelings on the subject, "At of this moment we ought to showing Germany how definitely her national interests will be served by sticking and working with us."

On July 3, 1951, General and Mrs. Eisenhower were honored at a dinner hosted by the English Speaking Union ant Grosvenor House in London. Over 1,000 guests were present for the event, including former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the then current Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, and many other luminaries of the time. Eisenhower gave a speech that evening in which urged political unity and full economic integration of the free nations of Europe.

The thrust of his speech was a call for European unity through a political federation. A few days later Eisenhower wrote Averell Harriman that, "I most fervently urged the formation of the United States of Western Continental Europe." Thus, his call for a single European nation came several years before the formation of the European Economic Community and the Common Market, and decades before the European Union achieved any real measure of economic integration. Winston Churchill later wrote General Eisenhower that his July 3rd speech was "one of the greatest speeches delivered by any American in my lifetime - which is a long one - and that it carries with it on strong wings the hope of salvation of the world from its perils and confusions."

To read the full text of the speech click here DDE speech 3 July, 1951

1 The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XII, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, page 415.