European Defence Community

The European Defence Community (EDC) was an ambitious early Cold War project to integrate the armed forces of Western European states under supranational command. It originated in the October 1950 Pleven Plan, proposed by French Prime Minister René Pleven, which sought to allow West German rearmament without recreating an independent German national army — a politically toxic prospect only five years after World War II.

The EDC Treaty was signed in Paris on 27 May 1952 by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — the same six states that had founded the European Coal and Steel Community a year earlier. It envisaged:

• A unified European army with integrated divisions
• A common defence budget
• Shared procurement and military institutions
• A Commissariat, Council of Ministers, Assembly, and Court paralleling ECSC structures

The treaty was closely linked to a parallel project for a European Political Community that would have provided democratic oversight of the joint army.

Ratification proceeded in five of the six signatories, but the project collapsed when the French National Assembly voted on 30 August 1954 not to consider the treaty — a procedural motion that effectively killed it. Opposition fused Gaullist concerns over sovereignty, Communist opposition to rearmament against the USSR, and unease about German military revival. Stalin's death in 1953 and the end of the Korean War had also reduced the urgency.

The failure was a major setback for federalist visions of European integration. The practical problem of German rearmament was solved instead through the London and Paris Agreements of 1954, which brought West Germany into NATO and created the Western European Union (WEU) from a modified Brussels Treaty. Defence integration would not return seriously to the EU agenda until the Maastricht Treaty's Common Foreign and Security Policy (1992) and, later, Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) launched in 2017.