Word: mend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...could this "something better" now be applied to Europe? The State Department had few if any answers. Asked if the U.S. would prefer Mendés-France's emasculated EDC to no EDC at all, a State Department official replied: "That is like offering us the choice between the guillotine and the electric chair...
Until last week all this passion and misgiving had produced only delay. Then along came France's Premier Mendés-France, with his policy of timetables and . alternatives. At Brussels he confronted the other five members of EDC with a choice: he could push EDC through the French Assembly, but only if France's partners would agree to amendments that would make it an old-fashioned military alliance. Gone was the controversial notion of a common army for a United Europe...
...technique that had served Mendes so well at Geneva failed him at Brussels. From its birth, EDC had stood in danger of being killed by its enemies; but at Brussels it was EDC's friends who preferred to see it killed rather than emasculated. In its death struggle, EDC provided one unforeseen consolation. By forcing five sovereign governments to stand up and defend its supranational clauses, EDC, in death, had given proof of the life that was in the ideal. Mendés the realist, with his ability to weigh facts, apparently had not known how to measure...
Brussels was no one's victory; it was too soon for even its participants to know whose defeat it would be. Adenauer in sisted desperately that EDC is not yet dead. Winston Churchill got into the act, bringing Eden back from vacation, inviting Mendés-France to fly over for lunch. Topic for discussion: the speedy return of sovereignty to West Germany...
...moment, all that anyone really knew was that Brussels had been both a death and a beginning. For that moment of clarity, at least, Mendés-France could be thanked...