Jean Monnet, in his memoirs, tells how on 28 April 1950 he was about to send the copy of his preliminary scheme for a Franco-German coal and steel community to French Prime Minister Georges Bidault. Before he could, he met Bernard Clappier, a high official in the Foreign Ministry, who, on being shown the document, asked whether he could not take a copy immediately to his boss, Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. Schuman, in turn, raised the issue in cabinet the following Tuesday and secured their approval to proceed. Afterwards Monnet had an uncomfortable interview with Bidault who, feeling bypassed, complained about receiving the letter too late. Monnet was inclined to accept that Bidault had, in fact, read the letter before the meeting but distracted by other matters of state, had failed to act on it. Nonetheless, Monnet writes, this is how it became ‘not the Bidault Plan, but the Schuman Plan’.

The economic imperatives behind the Schuman Plan have already been amply demonstrated by historians. Yet the ECSC not only produced a common regime over the coal and steel industries of six countries, it aspired to regulating conditions of competition, to the execution of joint crisis management and to the implementation of a joint transport policy (since 60 per cent of rail freight comprised coal and steel produce).

In 1949 the Americans were concerned to raise the limits imposed on German industrial recovery and these aims had been reinforced by the installation of a sovereign federal government in the same year. At the same time, European demand for steel was beginning to slacken and the prospect of millions of tonnes of unused German capacity being reactivated was greeted with some trepidation. Moreover, an added worry for the French lay in the fact that their own steel expansion programme was predicated upon the supposition that they would continue to receive deliveries of Ruhr coal. This assumption was undermined by the possibility that German coal supplies might be diverted to German industry, a prospect made more likely by the existence of a domestic coal cartel and by the traditional ownership of mines by steel concerns.