European Defense Community

European Defense Community (EDC), an abortive attempt by western European powers, with United States support, to counterbalance the overwhelming conventional military ascendancy of the Soviet Union in Europe by the formation of a supranational European army and, in the process, to subsume West German forces into a European force, avoiding the tendentious problem of West German rearmament. The idea was originally mooted at the Hague Conference of 1948. Influenced by the Korean War, the French politician René Pleven evolved a plan that later was put forward by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman at a meeting of the Council of Europe in 1951. Though the weaker members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were keen, the Scandinavians were cool toward the idea, and opinion in France and Italy was divided. A treaty was actually concluded in Paris in 1952, but tension between eastern and western Europe lessened, and by 1954 the necessity for the EDC seemed also to diminish. In its place there arose the Western European Unity Treaty (May 6, 1955), setting up the Western European Union.