French Ratification of the EDC: Competing Anglo-American Approaches, January to July 1954

Abstract

During the first months of 1954, the Foreign Office in London, working closely with the chiefs-of-staff and the ministry of defence, set about reviewing the premises upon which British EDC policy had previously rested. As Lord Hood, Head of the Foreign Office’s Western Organizations Department, explained to the service chiefs in January 1954, the review was prompted by insights into American thinking provided at both the Bermuda conference and Paris NATO Council the previous month, and by the linked realization that ‘a very serious situation will arise if the French fail to ratify’. Given that the US policy of the ‘stick’ was, on its own, unlikely to secure approval, Hood argued that it was ‘important that both we and the Americans should be able to offer, at the psychological moment, some inducements which would make the EDC less unpalatable to the French Assembly and which might be decisive in getting it accepted’.¹