Usually you are a little more on top of things than this one. Churchill was out of office between 1945 and 1950 the period during which the ECSC got organized, the original predecessor to the EU. The key parties were French, notably Jean Monnet, "le pere de l'Europe", and Schuman, as well as the Germans, the Franco-German steel and coal industries being the heart (and field) of the original organization. Britain was not in the original Six, as you presumably well know. If anything, the US was a bigger supporter, at least initially, and to some degree the ECSC spun out of the planning and coordination efforts associated with the Marshall Plan. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:22:13 +0000 Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <3.0.1.32.19981126155856.0071ddc0 at pop.mindspring.com>, pms
> <laflame at mindspring.com> writes
> >Please some questions to clarify my thoughts.
> >
> >1) Do you think that one of the early forces driving the formation of EU
> >was a serious discussion of the possibility of the current economic
> >situatiion coming to pass.
>
> If you mean the European Union, it began life as a scheme of cooperation
> in mining and steel just after the war. Churchill was a prime mover,
> seeking to re-build France principally, as part of a European bulwark
> against America. But the Americans, rather than react against that
> supported the early union as a vehcile for restoring capitalism in
> Europe (and American markets) - conflict with the US came later. Being
> generally oriented towards the market it was wholly a pro-capitalist
> policy in Britain, and the left was intransigently opposed to it right
> up until about 1992. There was an underlying theme in the discussion
> that co-operation between the former 'Great Powers' of Europe was vital
> to avoid the conflicts of 1914 and 1939.
>
> --
> Jim heartfield
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu