The importance of steel, as well as the coal needed for coke, is that it is a raw material for capital goods. Steel is vital for infrastructure and other forms of construction, so a healthy steel industry was particularly important in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Steel went into bridges, buildings, and other household goods needed for recovery. In and of itself, steel's importance meant that individuals like France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and the economist Jean Monnet would be deeply concerned about the state of the postwar steel industry. But there were two deeper factors at work in the abortive Monnet plan and its successor, the Schuman Declaration besides the importance of steel as a capital good.

Firstly, the two French proposals to regulate and coordinate the Rhineland areas steel and coal production emerged out of immediate postwar political milieu. The Western occupation of Germany was on the horns of a dilemmas: how to restore the German economy but at the same time ensure that Germany would not again threaten to conquer Europe. The main American plan for the postwar German occupation, JCS 1067, proposed a wide-ranging restructuring of the German economy, including the break-up of various cartels and trusts within German industry. Additionally, various Allied agreements during the war called for German reparations for wartime damages. For France, this included a significant amount of deliveries of Ruhr coal, which would be used to restore the French steel industry.

The problem was that JCS 1067 was not only unworkable, but encountered significant resistance among both German industrialists as well as a distinct lack of support from the American military government (OMGUS) and the US State Department. JCS 1067 had at best vague ideas of the breakup of German industry and the emerging Cold War made OMGUS chiefs Lucius Clay and his successor James McCloy leery of attacking private enterprise or weakening the German economy. Both the British and American military governments walked away from agreements to dismantle German war industries between 1946 and 1947, often reclassifying them as non-war related concerns. The unification of the British and American zones' economy, Bizonia, in 1947 was not only a signal of the impending formation of a separate West German state, but also a sign that the Americans. and to a lesser extent, the British, had thrown their weight behind a quick German economic recovery.

These developments put the French government in an awkward position within the Western occupiers. France had consistently pushed for breakups and reparations as well as international control of the German economy. France was one of the main proponents of international control over the Ruhr, which eventually culminated in the Ruhr Statute of 1948 in which the Western powers and Benelux countries controlled the production and allocation of the Ruhr's industries. But this French position was increasingly out of step with their two allies' German policy and caused increased tensions. The British in particular were upset that they had to provide France Ruhr coal at a lower price than the global average because raising the price was under the purview of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, of which both the French and Soviets could block any raising of the price.

Monnet and Schuman, as well as other French leaders recognized the potential danger of pursuing a punitive economic policy and the emerging Realpolitik of German economic reconstruction. Internal documents and debates suggested a fear that if France did not act, then Germany would not only rearm, but her strength would put France at a further economic and geopolitical disadvantage. Monnet's proposed union of coal and steel fit within this adjustment to realities. While denationalization and international control of the Ruhr was now unachievable, more grounded schemes of cooperation were still viable. An internal memo circulated in Quai d'Orsay in December 1948 outlined this logic:

It is in a European framework in which we can still try to settle the German problem. It is no longer a question, to take a specific example, of limiting Germany's production of steel, but of creating with Germany a European steel pool, in which French and Germans would operate equally and exercise a common control over the production of European steel.

Both the Monnet plan and the subsequent Schuman proposal framed coordination of steel and coal as not serving the interests of the French steel industry, but rather the idea of "Europe" itself.

The French proposals, simultaneously Gaullist and Europeanist, found two unlikely allies: the US and the emerging West German government. The new US Secretary of State Dean Acheson was an advocate for greater French participation in Western Europe's stand against Communism and one of the central planks of American strategy was the interrogation of Western Europe into common networks. The outbreak of the Korean War further underscored the need for a strong European economic recovery. Within Bonn, the Adenauer government welcomed the the French proposals for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, Adenauer perceived that on the domestic front, cooperation would not only denude the powerful German steel industry of its political and economic power base, but that Franco-German accord would deny his SPD opponents a form of political attack. French attempts to carve out a protectorate in the Saar had prompted SPD complaints of the Adenauer government giving sanction to an Oder-Neisse line in the West, and the Schuman plan prevented a further loss of German territory. Secondly, coal and steel cooperation also was a signal of a normalization of West Germany as a proper European state and a symbol of the success of Adenauer's political strategy of Westbindung (binding to the West). Economic reconstruction within a Western European framework paved the way for other initiatives for West Germany to reclaim its national sovereignty such as rearmament and a diplomatic presence. As the Schuman proposal morphed into the European Coal and Steel Community, Adenauer praised it in a meeting of the Allied High Commission(the successor to the Allied Control Council):

Because we see in this plan the cornerstone of a truly lasting foundation for a European confederation, we intend to work for it with all our strength.

Moreover, by championing the European imperatives of the Schuman plan, Adenauer and the German steel industry had cover to fight against the remnants of decartelization policy such as the AHC's Law No. 27 which called for the deconcentration of the Ruhr's industrial concerns into smaller units.

But aside from this overall geopolitical context of 1945-1950, there was a second reason why French economic and foreign policy experts gravitated towards the steel and coal. There was a long tradition of economic cooperation and price-fixing between French, German, and Benelux steel production that stretched back to the mid-1920s and even earlier. German steel producers' desire to dominate their neighbors' steel production in the First World War was much more of an aberration in the German steel industry, which rather preferred cooperation on pricing and deals to carve up markets. Counter-intuitively, Franco-Benelux-German steel and coal cooperation rose during the 1930s. The Depression revived the International Steel Cartel (ISC), founded in 1926, and it expanded into the International Steel Export Cartel (ISEC) and sought to set quotas and pricing for the steel industry in Western Europe. Quai d'Orsay likewise pushed for greater Franco-German cooperation in steel and coal as a means of economic appeasement that would muzzle Hitler and prevent war. The Rhine countries were characterized by a thickening network of deals over steel and coal as the thirties dragged on. The onset of war changed the direction of this economic relationship into a more German-centric direction, but the steel magnates of Belgium and France were among the few non-German elites who had any sort of measurable enthusiasm for the German-led new order. The Belgian banker Belgian banker Baron de Launoit, for example, envisioned the region as a solid economic unit and that "We businessmen should burst state borders and learn to cooperate." But such economic collaboration proved to be short-lived under the avaricious German occupation policy, which not only alienated Western European industrialists, but also left a sour taste among some German steel and coal magnates as their industries became subordinate to the Economics Ministry and other NSDAP cronies.

So, in short, much of Western Europe was primed to make coal and steel cooperation one of the cornerstones of postwar recovery and a return to normalcy. Not only was steel important, but coordination ticked off a number of political boxes for the various parties involved and the French packaging the initiatives as "European" was able to smooth out a number of the contradictions in pooling the Rhine basin's resources. Much of the institutional groundwork had been laid in the 1920s and 30s and even the wartime experience of forced integration served to make the ECSC possible by providing a negative model of how not to coordinate the regions' steel and coal industries.

Sources

Gillingham, John. Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Granieri, Ronald J. The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.

Hitchcock, William I. France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.