European Integration: An American Intelligence Connection

Abstract

‘newspapers, radio stations, magazines, airlines, ships, businesses, and voluntary organizations had been bought, subsidized, penetrated or invented as assets for the cold war’ .1 After 1945, many in Europe and the United States presumed rapid European unification to be a key precondition of stabilisation and reconstruction in postwar Europe. The encouragement of European unification constituted a central and consistent component of American President Harry Truman’s policy, and received even greater emphasis under his successor Dwight Eisenhower. This chapter suggests that one of the central achievements of political elites associated with the European Movement was to secure substantial covert financial assistance from senior figures in the American intelligence community, notably General William J. Donovan and Allen Welsh Dulles.2 The European Movement led a prestigious group of national public organisations pressing for rapid unification, focusing their efforts on the Council of Europe. This prominent body counted Winston Churchill, Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum and Alcide de Gasperi as its five Presidents of honour. But the Movement had extreme difficulty in raising substantial campaign funds to promote the message of unity in Europe.KeywordsEuropean UnityLabour PartyAmerican Foreign PolicyMarshall PlanEuropean YouthThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.