Word: mende
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...last cruel moments, Premier Mendès-France did not conceal his hostility to EDC or his sense of personal humiliation. He sought to promise everyone that West Germany would get its sovereignty soon and its arms later (some day, some way), that the Atlantic alliance is still the foundation of French policy. Nothing about the way the French Assembly handled EDC suggested that it was ready to accept the logical alternative: a West Germany rearmed...
...Mendèes' allies were furious. "Nine-tenths unacceptable," snapped Dutch Foreign Minister Johan Willem Beyen. Cracked the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten: "The only regulation really missing is one requiring German soldiers to turn in their rifles every evening...
Special Train to Brussels. Confronted with such plain-spoken unanimity from his EDC partners, Mendes urgently needed U.S. and British backing. He signally failed to get it from the U.S. John Foster Dulles was exasperated by Mendès' suggestion that Russia would have several months' time-between the French As sembly's approval of the emasculated EDC and final ratification by the French Senate-to talk "concessions" over Germany. Said a tough State Department cable to the British Foreign Office: "A new delaying condition prior to complete ratification [would convince the U.S.] that France cannot...
...Delicate Situation." The ministers were unconvinced. Mendès insisted that his version of the treaty would still achieve the four basic aims of EDC: to bind Germany to the West, to arm the Germans in Western defense, to strengthen the government of Dr. Adenauer and to prepare the way for European political union. But what the Frenchman failed to see was that the "European" clauses of EDC, which one of his advisers defined as "mystique" were to the other ministers the heart and soul of the treaty. Mendès confronted the conference with what he felt...
...once, Mendès' technique of threatening alternatives failed to carry the day. The five other ministers, particularly the German and the Dutch, had already faced up to the consequences of rejecting Mendès' protocols and decided that, bad as those consequences were, the acceptance of an EDC that would make a mockery of a united Europe was infinitely worse. The Netherlands' Johan Willem Beyen gave Mendes a direct answer: "I apologize for not being able to agree with the French proposals." Konrad Adenauer followed, looking grey, tired, and deeply suspicious of the facile Frenchman opposite...