IRSH 61 (2016), pp. 251–281 doi:10.1017/S0020859016000250
© 2016 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
Workers’ Politics, the Communist Challenge, and the
Schuman Plan: A Comparative History of the French
Socialist and German Social Democratic Parties and
the First Treaty for European Integration
BRIAN SHAEV
Department of Economy and Society/Centre for
European Research (CERGU),
University of Gothenburg
Viktoriagatan 13, 41125 Göteborg, Sweden
E-mail: brian.shaev@gu.se
ABSTRACT: The Schuman Plan to “pool” the coal and steel industries of Western Europe
has been widely celebrated as the founding document of today’s European Union. An
expansive historiography has developed around the plan but labor and workers are largely
absent from existing accounts, even though the sectors targeted for integration, coal and
steel, are traditionally understood as centers of working-class militancy and union activity
in Europe. Existing literature generally considers the role coal and steel industries played
as objects of the Schuman Plan negotiations but this article reverses this approach.
It examines instead how labor politics in the French Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the
German Ruhr, core industrial regions, influenced the positions adopted by two prominent
political parties, the French Socialist and German Social Democratic parties, on the
integration of European heavy industry. The empirical material combines archival research
in party and national archives with findings from regional histories of the Nord/
Pas-de-Calais, the Ruhr, and their local socialist party chapters, as well as from historical
and sociological research on miners and industrial workers. The article analyses how
intense battles between socialists and communists for the allegiance of coal and steel
workers shaped the political culture of these regions after the war and culminated during a
mass wave of strikes in 1947–1948. The divergent political outcomes of these battles in the
Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr, this article contends, strongly contributed to the
decisions of the French Socialist Party to support and the German Social Democratic
Party to oppose the Schuman Plan in 1950.
“We are the territory that the Schuman Plan will affect first”, Fritz Henssler told
a local congress of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Hagen in May 1951.1
1. “Gleich im Recht – gleich in der Verpflichtung. Referat auf dem Bezirksparteitag in Hagen am
26./27. Mai 1951”, in Günther Högl and Hans-Wilhelm Bohrisch (eds), “Die Person immer ganz
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Hagen is (rather: was) an industrial town in the Ruhr area, and Henssler
chaired the local SPD chapter, the party’s largest and most powerful one.
Henssler explained to the congress that “we are in favor of Europe” but
opposed to the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was
to become the first supranational organization of postwar Europe. The
ECSC treaty, signed only a few weeks before in April, had resulted from a
diplomatic initiative by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman to
“pool” Western Europe’s heavy industrial resources as a basis for European
economic reconstruction after World War II. The plan was the brainchild of
Jean Monnet (1888–1979), head of the French Planning Commission.
The six nation community, which opened in 1952, began an institutional
framework for postwar cooperation in Western Europe generally referred
to as “European integration”.
The Schuman Plan, actually a speech read by Schuman at a press
conference in May 1950, is the founding document of a community that has
since evolved into today’s European Union. Public ceremonies, centrist
politicians, and history books in Western Europe have long commemorated
the speech as the moment when European governments abandoned their
egoistic and self-destructive habits in order to build a more harmonious
future in common. Western European elites built a public culture of
commemoration around the speech almost the moment Schuman spoke his
last word to the press. The first histories of European integration by the
“federalist” school around Walter Lipgens were celebratory tales that
sustained this mythology of Europe’s postwar rebirth.2 A second wave
of historical interpretation, emerging in the early 1990s and led by Alan
Milward, presented a more sober account of Europe’s “saints”, first and
foremost Schuman and Monnet, and emphasized instead the work of
administrators in economic and foreign ministries who constructed a
weit hinter der Sache”. Fritz Henssler 1886–1953. Sozialdemokrat, Reichstagsabgeordneter
und Dortmunder Oberbürgermeister. Der Nachlass im Stadtarchiv Dortmund (Essen, 2003),
pp. 132–141, 132. All translations from German and French are mine.
2. See for instance his account of the formative period: Walter Lipgens, A History of European
Integration. Vol. 1, 1945–1947: The Formation of the European Unity Movement (Oxford, 1982).
The “federalist school” founded the historiography of European integration in the 1960s–1970s.
Often personally active in federalist “European” movements while holding university posts, the
work of its proponents blurred the line between activism and scholarship. They present a
progressive and teleological account of European integration history, with a vanguard federalist
movement nobly pressuring reluctant governments to abandon their outdated and dangerous
attachment to national sovereignty in favor of supranationalism and European unity. Actors in
their analyses are heroes or villains based on where they lie on a scale of “national” vs “European”
attributions. For a critical analysis of the “federalist school”, see Daniele Pasquinucci, “Between
Political Commitment and Academic Research: Federalist Perspectives”, in Wolfram Kaiser
and Antonio Varsori (eds), European Union History: Themes and Debates (Basingstoke, 2010),
pp. 66–84.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
253
European community in order to secure national economic interests.3
A number of collective works on early European integration history from a
variety of perspectives have added important nuances to this picture, by
examining industries, employers’ organizations, political parties and, less
often, trade unions.4 Workers, however, have played little if any role in most
histories of European integration.
Recent historical studies have continued a skeptical view of European
integration history, questioning its historical uniqueness, emphasizing the
ECSC’s institutional continuities with interwar cartels in heavy industry,
and tracing personal continuities with fascist and collaborationist
administrations.5 This article will contribute to such critical readings of
early European integration history by reversing the approach usually taken
by scholars to study European integration. Instead of focusing, once again,
on the impact of European integration on industries, workers, or regions,
this article will consider how labor politics in industrial regions affected
French socialist and German social democratic reactions to the Schuman
Plan. The French Socialist Party (Section française de l’Internationale
ouvrière – SFIO) campaigned for the plan in 1950–1951 while the SPD
opposed it, a disagreement that undermined transnational efforts to rebuild
socialist internationalism through inter-party cooperation on European
reconstruction after the war.6 This article challenges existing literature on
3. See for instance one of his most influential books: Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the
Nation State (London, 1992).
4. An incomplete list might include: Raymond Poidevin (ed.), Histoire des débuts de la
construction européenne, mars 1948–mai 1950. Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg 28–30 novembre
1984 (Brussels: 1986); Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Die Anfänge des Schuman-Plans 1950/51. Beiträge des
Kolloquiums in Aachen, 28–30 Mai 1986 (Baden-Baden, 1988); Andreas Wilkens, Le plan
Schuman dans l’histoire. Intérêts nationaux et projet européen (Brussels, 2004).
5. Kiran Klaus Patel, “Provincialising European Union: Co-operation and Integration in Europe
in a Historical Perspective”, Contemporary European History, 22, 4 (2013), pp. 649–673; Wolfram
Kaiser and Johan Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International
Organizations (Basingstoke, 2014); Kiran Klaus Patel and Wolfram Kaiser (eds), Hidden
Continuities: From Interwar to Postwar Forms of Cooperation and Integration in Europe
(forthcoming).
6. While disagreements between the SPD leadership and other West European social democratic and
socialist parties in the 1940–1950s is not at the center of this article, it is covered in a series of studies on
the re-foundation of the Socialist International and SPD policies toward postwar European
cooperation. See for instance: Guillaume Devin, L’Internationale socialiste. Histoire et sociologie du
socialisme international (1945–1990) (Paris, 1993); Rudolf Hrbek, Die SPD, Deutschland und Europa.
Die Haltung der Sozialdemokratie zum Verhältnis von Deutschland-Politik und West-Integration
(1945–1955) (Bonn, 1972); Talbot Imlay, “‘The Policy of Social Democracy is Self-Consciously
Internationalist’: The SPD’s Internationalism after 1945”, The Journal of Modern History, 86:1 (2014),
pp. 81–123; Rudolf Steininger, Deutschland und die Sozialistische Internationale nach dem Zweiten
Weltkrieg. Die deutsche Frage, die Internationale und das Problem der Wiederaufnahme der SPD auf
den internationalen sozialistischen Konferenzen bis 1951, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der
Labour Party (Bonn, 1979).
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the Schuman Plan that juxtaposes the SPD’s nationalism with the SFIO’s
internationalism by exploring how intra-labor dynamics, regional politics,
and goals for economic reconstruction intersected in different ways in
France and Germany. It builds its claims on archival work in both state and
party archives in France and Germany, on the complex historiography of
the Schuman Plan, on regional histories of the Ruhr as well as the Nord
and Pas-de-Calais departments and their local socialist chapters, and on
historical and sociological studies of miners and industrial workers, a
combination of sources that, so far, has scarcely been used in European
integration history.
Reading the history of the Schuman Plan through the lens of labor
conflict and politics in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr,7 the French
and German regions most immediately affected by the plan, will yield a
new perspective on the relationship between industrial workers, left-wing
political parties, and postwar reconstruction at the foundational moment of
“European integration”. The intense battles between communists and
socialists for the support of these regions’ workers which had characterized
the interwar period broke out anew after the war. Dire social conditions
culminated in massive strike waves in both regions in 1947–1948, just as
Cold War divisions were cementing into form. The SPD’s chair, Kurt
Schumacher, argued in March 1951 that, “[t]he implementation of the
Schuman Plan will have as a consequence the social disintegration of
the Ruhr […] [it] will first of all threaten workers and their jobs”, and “the
Communist Party will be given a [new] chance”.8 It is especially this aspect –
how the SPD’s anti-communist struggle in the Ruhr affected its policy
toward the integration of European heavy industry – which has remained
under-considered by historians.
The Schuman Plan gave rise to similar concerns in the center of French
mining, the Nord/Pas-de-Calais. Like the Ruhr, these departments had
experienced bitter competition between communists and socialists in the
interwar period and after 1945. However, whereas the SPD succeeded in
gaining Ruhr workers’ allegiance against a communist party in decline, the
opposite occurred in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. Diverging political
outcomes in the mines and steel factories of France and Germany in the
aftermath of the 1947–1948 strikes thus created different contexts for party
discussions at national levels in 1949–1951. Camille Delabre, a SFIO mayor of
the mining town Courrières in the Pas-de-Calais, told the party congress in
7. For the sake of simplicity, the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments are routinely identified in
this article as one historical region of coal and other industries while from 1982 until recently they
also officially functioned as an administrative region (and have been merged with Picardie as of the
beginning of 2016).
8. Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn [hereafter, AdsD],
SPD-Parteivorstand, Parteivorstand 9–10 March 1951.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
255
May 1950: “The coal-steel pool worries miners because they are aware that the
Ruhr deposits are important and have greater output; the miners know that
they possess a very developed social security regime that influences the price
of coal.”9 The next month, the SFIO announced its support for the plan
despite the negative impact it would likely have on the French coal industry.
In Germany, on the other hand, Schumacher and Henssler, after some initial
hesitation, actively opposed the plan from October 1950 in order to
consolidate the party’s gains in the Ruhr. This article begins by considering the
role of coal and steel in the history of French and German industrialization and
the importance of the industries’ workers for socialist parties, then examines
how political competition between communists and social democrats in the
regions intersected with postwar plans for economic reconstruction, and
finally analyzes how divergent political outcomes in the industrial regions after
the mass strikes of 1947–1948 are essential for understanding the parties’
different reactions to the proposal of a European common market for coal and
steel in 1950. As I will show, it was the growing political preferences of Ruhr
industrial workers for German social democrats, and for French communists
in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais that made SPD leaders more reluctant, and
SFIO leaders more willing, to embrace the Schuman Plan.
N AT I O N A L I N D U S T R I A L P O W E R , T H E “ S O C I A L
QUESTION”, AND WORKERS’ POLITICS IN THE RUHR
A N D N O R D / PA S - D E - C A L A I S
In the late nineteenth century, French industry fell behind in the second wave
of European industrialization that transformed Germany into an industrial
power. The French and German steel industries were by far the largest of
continental Europe, but German steel produced roughly twice the volume of
its French competitors.10 French industries were still largely family-run
enterprises, like the De Wendel steel company. In Germany, in contrast, by the
early twentieth century, professional managers ran much of the day-to-day
business operations of the Krupp and Thyssen steel conglomerates. German
industrial families became closely entwined with the financial industry,
opening up greater lines of credit for expansion.11 In 1926, four steel
9. Office Universitaire de Recherche Socialiste, Paris [hereafter, OURS], 42ème congrès national
de la Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), 26 au 29 mai 1950.
10. Françoise Berger, “La France, l’Allemagne et l’acier (1932–1952)”, Bulletin de l’I.P.R., 13 (2002),
available at: https://www.univ-paris1.fr/autres-structures-de-recherche/ipr/les-revues/bulletin/
tous-les-bulletins/bulletin-n-13-chantiers-2002/francoise-berger-la-france-lallemagne-et-lacier-1932-1952/,
last accessed 30 May 2016.
11. Françoise Berger, “Les patrons de l’acier en France et Allemagne face à l’Europe
(1930–1960)”, in Eric Bussière and Michel Dumoulin (eds), Milieux économiques et intégration
européenne en Europe occidentale au XXe siècle (Arras, 1998), pp. 179–195.
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producers combined to form the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the largest of all
businesses in Germany. This drive toward larger units experienced a certain
degree of internationalization already in the interwar period, with the
emergence of international steel cartels. These were built around “a notion of
continental central-western European ‘core Europe’, comprised of Germany,
France, Belgium, and Luxembourg”.12 At the same time, a national and
geopolitical outlook continued to mark the industry, and despite French
reacquisition of the iron-ore fields of Lorraine after World War I, the French
government chafed under the perception of French industry’s subordinate
status in these cartels. After World War II, it was determined to transform the
balance of industrial power between Germany and France.
This imbalance was in large part due to differences between the two nation’s
coal industries: French coal was more expensive, of lower quality, and less
abundant than coal mined in the German Ruhr. This territory was one of the
most concentrated industrial areas in Europe, possessing a strong vertical
integration economy that bound together coal and steel with transport and
manufacturing. Ruhr industry prospered from the district’s abundant reserves
of bituminous coal that it processed into high quality coke. The RhenishWestphalian Coal Syndicate (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Kohlen-Syndikat),
founded in 1893, controlled nearly ninety per cent of total Ruhr coal production.
Meanwhile, French coal mining was overwhelmingly concentrated in the
Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments, although the Midi had a small number of
mines and the southern industrial town Decazeville had a long-established
coal mining operation as well. Under pressure from Ruhr coal exports, the
Nord and Pas-de-Calais mining companies cartelized in 1891.13 This cartel was
much less effective than its Ruhr counterpart, in part due to squabbling with
coal producers in other French regions.14 The northern French mines fell
further behind as a result of World War I, when the western front calcified
for years across the northern French plain.
Coal mining was the heart of national industrial ambitions in both France
and Germany, but it was also the most conspicuous incarnation of “the
social question” that shaped political and social discussions in nineteenthcentury Europe. German miners had enjoyed privileged status under
Prussian laws inherited from the economic reforms under Frederick the
Great (1712–1786) but, during the nineteenth century, the status of miners
had very much deteriorated.15 At the end of the century, the Wilhelmine
12. Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe, p. 216.
13. Darryl Holter, The Battle for Coal: Miners and the Politics of Nationalization in France,
1940–1950 (Dekalb, 1992), p. 22.
14. Anita Hirsch, “Cartels et ententes”, in Alfred Sauvy (ed.), Histoire économique de la France
entre les deux guerres. Vol. 4. Sujets divers (Paris, 1975), pp. 49–73, 62–63.
15. Martin Parnell, The German Tradition of Organized Capitalism: Self-Government in the
Coal Industry (Oxford, 1994), pp. 11–23.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
257
state took steps to improve working conditions, setting up social and
medical assistance programs. At the same time, French coal miners, who
had launched their first strike in 1833, were symbols of working-class
militancy with a place next to the Communards in French socialist
iconography. The history of French mining is punctuated by the infamous
repression of the 1891 Formies strike, popularized in Émile Zola’s novel
Germinal, and by the 1906 disaster at the Courrières Mining Company,
when over 1,000 workers died. Jean Jaurès, the SFIO’s first leader,
represented the Southern mining town of Carmaux, which was rocked by a
traumatic labor conflict in 1892. French mining companies pioneered
paternalist patterns of social control, offering free housing, coal, and
other benefits that they rescinded if a worker terminated employment.16
Penalties, surveillance, privileges, and housing segregation between
management, engineers and workers led to a segmented social system in
mining regions largely based around class.17
A particularly dense form of social cohesion developed among miners, their
families, and the small shopkeepers who serviced a working-class clientele and
generally shared its values. Working, family, and leisure lives in the northern
coal regions revolved around mining, a situation embodied in the term
“la corporation”, which originally referred to the world of craft guilds and was
adopted for the mining communities at large. This cohesion facilitated the
emergence of the Vieux Syndicat, the “Old Union”, that combined collective
bargaining and political mobilization with mutual aid, pension, and associational activities. In 1908, it joined the Confédération générale du travail (CGT),
France’s largest labor federation. Miners propelled the rise of Jules Guesdes’s
Parti Ouvrier Français in the region, and other socialist groups as well.18 Many
of the preeminent names of the founding generation of French socialism came
from the northern federations. When the factions united to form the SFIO in
1905, the Nord was the largest federation of the new party, and the
Pas-de-Calais was among the largest as well. The new party demanded the
nationalization of the coal fields, a long-standing demand of the mining unions.
After World War I, SFIO mayors governed major cities in the Nord and
Pas-de-Calais, as well as mining municipalities. Allied with the Vieux
Syndicat, they implemented a reformist program that mediated between
miners and employers.19 In contrast to France, labor organization came
16. Yvez Jeanneau, “Le logement et son mineur”, in Évelyne Desbois, Yves Jeanneau, and Bruno
Mattéi, La foi des charbonniers. Les mineurs dans la bataille du charbon 1945–1947 (Paris, 1986),
pp. 151–177.
17. Holter, The Battle for Coal, pp. 25–27.
18. Martine Pottrain, Le Nord au coeur: Historique de la Féderation du Nord du Parti Socialiste,
1880–1993 (Lille, 2003), pp. 12–15.
19. Frédéric Sawicki, Les réseaux du Parti socialiste. Sociologie d’un milieu partisan (Paris, 1997),
pp. 92–94.
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relatively late to the Ruhr, in part because miners were overwhelmingly
Catholic and suspicious of socialist and labor agitators. The Ruhr became
the heart of the labor wing of the Catholic Center Party. Tensions ran high
between the social democratic and Catholic trade unions. The German
Revolution of 1918 marked a breakthrough for the SPD in the Ruhr. Franz
Klupsch chaired the SPD’s western Westphalia section (Bezirk Westliches
Westfalen) from his base in Dortmund, the most important city in the Ruhr.
He and his deputy, Fritz Henssler, were closely allied with the Allgemeiner
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), the trade union federation aligned
with the SPD. In January 1919, the moderate Majority Social Democratic
Party (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – MSPD) won
41.3 per cent in the Ruhr-based South-Westphalia electoral district and
30.6 per cent in the more agrarian North-Westphalia district, while the radical
Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische
Partei Deutschlands – USPD) underperformed compared to its national
average.20 The German Revolution resulted in a factory council law that
granted miners a form of representation on corporate boards but, considering this insufficient, trade unionists demanded nationalization.
The schism that took place between socialists and communists in 1919–
1920 in Europe after the Russian Revolution also shaped the interwar politics and culture of French and German industrial regions. Relations
between members of the competing parties were bitter and often violent.
When Wolfgang Kapp attempted a right-wing coup in 1920 against the
“Weimar coalition” government, the German Communist Party (KPD) was
able to gain a foothold in the Ruhr by taking an active role in defeating the
coup.21 When communists then tried to seize power in the region, the social
democrat Henssler demanded that soldiers crush this “terrorist minority”
until “the last man of the red bands [is] disarmed”.22 SPD leaders collaborated with Freikorps troops called in to suppress the revolt. They failed to
restrain the mass executions that followed. This kind of “white terror” fell
especially hard on miners and industrial workers in the Ruhr and support
for the SPD among workers fell substantially in 1920–1921. Still reeling
from the traumas of war, revolution, and counter-revolution, the region
then experienced not only a political, but also a social calamity when French
20. Uwe Schledorn, “Für die Soziale Republik. Die westlich westfälische Sozialdemokratie in der
Zeit der Weimarer Republik”, in Bernd Faulenbach et al. (eds), Sozialdemokratie im Wandel. Der
Bezirk westliches Westfalen 1893–2001 (Essen, 2001), pp. 78–91, 80.
21. Hans-Otto Hemmer, “Die Bergarbeiterbewegung im Ruhrgebiet unter dem Sozialistengesetz”,
and Siegfried Bahne, “Die KPD im Ruhrgebiet in der Weimarer Republik”, in Jürgen Reulecke (ed.),
Arbeiterbewegung an Rhein und Ruhr. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in RheinlandWestfalen (Wuppertal, 1974), pp. 81–110, 93–109; pp. 315–354, 318–319.
22. Cited from: Dieter Düding, Zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Die sozialdemokratische
Landtagsfraktion in Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1946–1966 (Bonn, 1995), p. 30.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
259
and Belgian soldiers invaded it in January 1923: Worst hit by the Ruhr
occupation of 1923–1924 were the region’s industrial workers, who
experienced sharply deteriorating working conditions under occupation
and chronic shortages of food.23 The occupation upended local politics. The
SPD emerged from the so-called “Ruhr crisis” a wounded party. Still a small
minority force in 1922, the KPD came to present a formidable challenge to
the SPD’s position in the Ruhr. In May 1924, the KPD won 29.4 per cent of
the vote in Dortmund, becoming the strongest party, while the SPD only
received a meager 16.2 per cent.24
French Socialists at first were able to better withstand the French
Communist (PCF) offensive in the industrial areas of Nord and Pas-de-Calais
in the early 1920s. Intense competition for miners’ support accelerated when
the PCF-aligned union, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire
(CGTU), launched a campaign in 1928 to wrest power from the CGT. This
resulted in a climate of hostility, including physical violence.25 The Great
Depression from 1929 on invigorated support for communists among miners
because socialist mayors seemed incapable of stemming the mass layoffs and
pit closures that hit the region. In Lens, an emblematic mining community, the
communist vote in national elections increased from nine per cent in 1924 to
15.9 per cent in 1928 and to 28.9 per cent in 1936.26 The implementation of the
hated Bédaux system to increase miners’ productivity by replacing payment
by teamwork with individualized wage rates caused an upheaval of traditional
working practices. The number of mining injuries nearly doubled from 1932
to 1935.27 At the same time, the social composition of the SFIO leadership in
the region was shifting from former miners to a younger, more radical, and
more urban generation in which teachers predominated.
Though support for German communists in the Ruhr declined in 1925–1929,
the KPD received new life during the early Great Depression. The communist
Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (Revolutionäre GewerkschaftsOpposition) made substantial gains in Ruhr factories.28 In 1930, the Ruhr was
23. Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 108–126.
24. Günther Högl, “Zur Biographie und zum Nachlass des Sozialdemokraten, Reichstagsabgeordneten
und Dortmunder Oberbürgermeisters Fritz Henßler (1886–1953)”, in Högl and Bohrisch, “Die Person
immer ganz weit hinter der Sache”, pp. 13–34, 20; Martin Martiny, “Arbeiterbewegung an
Rhein und Ruhr vom Scheitern des Räte- und Sozialisierungsbewegung bis zum Ende der
letzten parlamentarischen Regierung der Weimarer Republik (1920–1930)”, in Reulecke (ed.),
Arbeiterbewegung an Rhein und Ruhr, pp. 241–274, 248.
25. Pottrain, Le Nord au coeur, pp. 45, 56.
26. Sawicki, Les réseaux du parti socialiste, pp. 100–106.
27. Holter, The Battle for Coal, p. 34.
28. Alexander v. Plato, “‘Ich bin mit allen gut ausgekommen’, oder: War die Ruhrarbeiterschaft
vor 1933 in politische Lager zerspalten?”, in Lutz Niethammer (ed.), “Die Jahre weiß man nicht,
wo man sie heute hinsetzen soll”. Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet. Bd. 1. Lebensgeschichte
und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930 bis 1960 (Bonn, 1983), pp. 31–65, 32–36.
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the strongest area of KPD support in Germany. Workers increasingly supported
National Socialists as well. In 1932, as the crisis of Weimar Germany had already
become evident, the KPD surpassed both the Center Party and the SPD,
becoming the largest party in the Ruhr territory for the first and only time in its
history. Nazi repression then hit the Ruhr hard. The regime’s minister for labor
affairs severely curtailed the rights of miners and granted comprehensive
employer control over the workforce.29 Fritz Husemann, the mine trade
union leader, was shot in a concentration camp in 1935.30 At the same time,
employment in the Ruhr swelled and new workers were recruited as Germany’s
economy recovered and the rearmament program directed national resources to
heavy industry. The Ruhr became the center of the Nazi wartime economy.
Forced labor from conquered countries toiled in the Ruhr, many dying in the
factories of Krupp and other enterprises. Social democrats’ resistance to the
National Socialist government in the Ruhr largely involved circulating
pamphlets, while the communist underground organized more effectively, also
engaging in acts of sabotage.31 When Henssler returned to Dortmund in June
1945 after eight years in a concentration camp, he encountered a communist
movement strengthened by the prestige it had earned among opponents of
National Socialism and the war.
In France, communists played leading roles in the massive strikes that
followed the Popular Front victory in the 1936 elections. The strikes won higher
wages, the re-employment of laid-off workers and the abolition of the Bédaux
system, an impressive accomplishment that brought almost the entire mining
population into the trade unions. Employers struck back when the Popular
Front fell in 1938, reintroducing the Bédaux system and prolonging work hours.
The trade unions began to fall apart as relations between communists and
socialists deteriorated. When war came in 1940, German occupiers detached the
region from the rest of France.32 Miners and steel workers felt abandoned by
their countrymen and betrayed by their employers, managers, and trade union
leaders, whom they believed to be collaborating with the occupiers.
Communists were the driving force for resistance throughout the nation,
particularly in this region and its mines. They helped spark the first mass strike
against Nazi rule in the northern mine basin in May 1941. The strike resulted in
better working conditions but came at enormous cost: hundreds of workers
were deported to German factories and to concentration camps. Dozens were
29. Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Labour Policy in Industry”, in Christoph Buchheim (ed.), German
Industry in the Nazi Period (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 65–83, 66–68.
30. On the destiny of this and so many other social democratic labor activists see, Stefan Goch,
“Widerstand und Verfolgung: Sozialdemokraten aus dem Bezirk Westliches Westfalen unter dem
Nationalsozialismus”, pp. 125–141; and Wolfgang Jäger, “Fritz Husemann (1873–1935): Der
Bergarbeiterführer”, in Faulenbach et al. (eds), Sozialdemokratie im Wandel, pp. 144–146.
31. Goch, “Widerstand und Verfolgung”.
32. Holter, The Battle for Coal, pp. 37–39.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
261
executed. Miners believed that their employers provided the name of strike
leaders to German officials.33 A tense social climate continued for three more
years of occupation and exploded with the liberation of France in 1944.
COMPETITION BETWEEN SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS IN
FRENCH AND GERMAN INDUSTRY AFTER WORLD WAR II
After the war, working conditions in the principal industrial regions of
France and Germany was closely interrelated with, first, the national
program for economic reconstruction in France, and, second, with the
Western Allied program for European reconstruction in non-Soviet occupied
Germany. Local politicians in industrial regions, most prominently socialists
and communists, had to come to terms with the complex interplay of local,
national, and international pressures as well as the beginnings of the Cold
War. European reconstruction required a rapid increase in production from
the same industrial regions that experienced the fiercest competition between
communists and socialists of any region of postwar France, and of the
Western occupied zones of Germany, a competition that was intensely lived
at the grass-roots level. An analysis of the experiences of regional political
competition in the mines of France and in Ruhr heavy industry in 1945–1948
and of their divergent political outcomes is thus necessary to understand
national SFIO and SPD debates on the Schuman Plan in 1950–1951.
National liberation in France and occupation in Germany created, of
course, different contexts for the struggle between communists and socialists
in these industrial regions. In the northern French mining basin, driving out
the German troops had taken the form of a social revolution. French miners
downed tools against the wishes of CGT leaders and refused to work for
their former bosses, whom they accused of collaborating with the enemy.34
Purge commissions had difficulty proving miners’ accusations and, as
happened as well in the Ruhr’s de-Nazification program, officials often found
that purges and a rapid restoration of production were contradictory goals.
In France, SFIO Industrial Minister Robert Lacoste decreed the
nationalization of the mines in December 1944. He also set up comités
d’entreprise, a form of worker participation in management throughout
French industry. In the nationalized coal bodies, one-third of the seats on
steering committees were now reserved for miners’ representatives. The
French Assembly approved a new Miners’ Statute in June 1946, which
satisfied demands mining unions had pursued for decades, like a retirement
age of fifty-five and longer paid vacation. Lacoste raised miners’ salaries to
33. Évelyne Desbois, “Des ingénieurs perdus”, in Desbois et al., La Foi des Charbonniers,
pp. 105–136, 115.
34. Holter, The Battle for Coal, pp. 61–64.
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among the highest in industry. And only five months later, two
former miners, SFIO deputy Paul Sion and the Socialist leader of the Nord
federation, Augustin Laurent, oversaw the approval of a law guaranteeing
healthcare to miners.35
Ruhr industry faced an uncertain fate under occupation. The Allied
governments needed Ruhr coal to sustain Germany’s population and to fuel
European recovery; at the same time, they also prepared a dismantlement
program for the region’s steel and manufacturing industries. Wartime
damage to these industries was surprisingly small, while destruction in the
coal mines was considerably greater. The number of miners in the Ruhr fell
sharply with the release of foreign forced laborers.36 Extraction had almost
ground to a halt in April 1945, yet priority accorded to the sector led to a
partial recovery and increased employment by the beginning of 1946.37
In August 1945, British occupation authorities arrested 160 leaders of Ruhr
industry, including industrial titans Alfried Krupp, Hugo Stinnes, Jr., Fritz
Thyssen, and Walter Rohland, the director of Vereinigte Stahlwerke. Polls
showed overwhelming support for socialization among miners, a demand
backed by the coal union IG Bergbau and the region’s social democratic and
communist parties.38 Industrialists soon re-organized to resist socialization
and took the initiative to create a new employers’ association, out of which
grew the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI).39
At the first conference of the British zone Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund
(DGB), trade union delegates demanded co-determination (Mitbestimmmung)
in all industries, a form of employee participation in management. Sensing an
opportunity, industrialists in Duisburg, Oberhausen, and Essen offered the
trade unions parity representation on corporate boards in January 1947 in a
largely successful effort to build a collective front to save the factories from
closure and dismantlement.40 In November, trade unionists also achieved equal
representation with employers on the advisory trustee organization created
by the British authorities to manage the coal industry. Meanwhile, the
SPD threatened to pull its delegates from consultative assemblies in the
35. Bernard Vanneste, Augustin Laurent ou, Toute une vie pour le socialisme (Dunkerque,
1983), p. 64.
36. Christoph Klessmann and Peter Friedemann, Streiks und Hungermärsche im Ruhrgebiet
1946–1948 (Frankfurt a.M. 1977), p. 41.
37. Till Kössler, Abschied von der Revolution: Kommunisten und Gesellschaft in Westdeutschland
1945–1969 (Düsseldorf, 2005), p. 176.
38. Werner Abelshauser, Der Ruhrkohlenbergbau seit 1945. Wiederaufbau, Krise, Anpassung
(Munich, 1984), p. 30.
39. S. Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), pp. 54–55.
40. Horst Thum, Mitbestimmung in der Montanindustrie: der Mythos vom Sieg der Gewerkschaften
(Stuttgart, 1982), p. 20. Gabrielle Müller-List, “Die Entstehung der Montanmitbestimmung”, in Walter
Först (ed.), Zwischen Ruhrkontrolle und Mitbestimmung (Cologne, 1982), pp. 121–144, 126–128.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
263
Bizone (the occupation zone jointly administered by the UK and US) if the
British authorities continued to delay socialization. In an act of intra-labor
movement cooperation, social democrats and communists succeeded in
passing a socialization law in the regional assembly in 1947, even gaining
some Christian-democratic support, but US military officials scuttled the law.
Hence, while French coal was nationalized in the Charbonnages de France,
ownership of German coal and industry remained open and deeply
contentious.
Nonetheless, there are clear parallels in the political situation of the
Nord/Pas-de-Calais and Ruhr in the initial postwar years. First, socialists
confronted mass communist parties with strong support among miners
and industrial workers. In early postwar elections, communists won
approximately 20–25 per cent in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, about the
national average, but also 20–25 per cent in the Ruhr, by far the highest in
the western occupation zones of Germany.41 French communists took
control of the CGT miners’ union, the Syndicat CGT des mineurs, in
December 1944 and reinforced their majority by expelling union leaders
accused of collaboration. Socialists lost municipal elections in mining towns
that had long been socialist fiefdoms, most glaringly when Auguste
Lecoeur, a communist leader of the 1941 strikes, was elected mayor of Lens
in 1945.42 In Germany, communists had been operating illegally in the
mines at the end of the war, and the British authorities mostly tolerated their
activities when the region came under their control. The Ruhr communist
party quickly recovered its support among industrial workers who had
been party members in the early 1930s.43 In the September–October 1945
factory council elections, the KPD won a majority. A regional congress of
the metal workers’ union elected a communist chair, Karl Küll, infuriating
Walter Freitag, the social democratic leader of the national metal union
(which in 1949 would become IG Metall).44 In IG Bergbau, the miners’
union, the communist Willi Agatz fell only thirteen votes short of election
for chair of the miners’ union in 1946 against August Schmidt, the SPD
candidate.45 Never before had communists had so much support in German
industrial unions.
Second, the SPD and SFIO shared a prevailing view that communist
success in industrial areas resulted from miserable working and living
41. Kössler, Abschied von der Revolution, pp. 139–140.
42. Mattéi, “Après la guerre…la bataille (1945–1947)”, in Desbois et al., Foi des charbonniers,
pp. 17–55, 24–25. Holter, The Battle for Coal, p. 59.
43. Kössler, Abschied von der Revolution, pp. 43–49.
44. Johannes Kolb, Metallgewerkschaften in der Nachkriegszeit: Der Organisationsaufbau der
Metallgewerkschaften in den drei westlichen Besatzungszonen Deutschlands (Frankfurt a.M.,
1970), p. 24.
45. Klessmann and Friedemann, Streiks und Hungermärsche, p. 42.
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conditions. The KPD gained its largest proportion of votes (thirty-two per
cent) in the 1947 elections in Bochum, a city that had, with a calculated daily
average of only 629 calories per person, the worst nutritional situation of
the US–British Bizone. Conditions for Ruhr workers were indeed dismal:
Wartime bombing had a disproportionate impact on urban areas. In many
Ruhr cities, half of prewar housing lay in ruins.46 Heating, coal, and
electrical shortages made for dark and cold winters. Food shortages were
ubiquitous and rations fell to life-threatening levels. In addition, occupation
authorities lowered wages and stripped Ruhr miners of their special health
benefits and accident insurance.47 Miners and industrial workers often
arrived to work exhausted from long commutes. Factory reports depict
hungry workforces prone to apathy and gallows’ humor and workplaces
marked by shouting matches and outbreaks of violence.48
Meanwhile, in France, communist leaders announced a “battle for coal”
in the aftermath of the war and exhorted miners with Stakhanovite imagery
to produce more in the interests of the nation. PCF leader Maurice
Thorez told a Nord mining audience in July 1945 that, “it is your duty as
Frenchmen” to raise production and “miners must love the mine”.49
Communists took leading administrative positions in nationalized coal. The
CGT and PCF forcefully suppressed a strike that broke out in September
1945, reminding workers that nationalization “did not yet mean [that] the
mine [belonged] to the miners”.50 Workers generally greeted the “battle for
coal” with a mix of sarcasm, bitterness, and resignation.51 The campaign
met the large quotas demanded by the government at the expense of miners’
health. The rate of injuries doubled and free health care was of little use, as
doctors often saw hundreds of patients a day and did not have the training
in some cases to address illnesses that plagued mining communities.52
A technological innovation in drilling resulted in workers swallowing
large quantities of dust, which later resulted in increased rates of black lung
disease (silicosis).
Finally, the Ruhr SPD and the SFIO in Nord/Pas-de-Calais were among
the most anti-communist of their parties’ regional chapters and forcefully
rejected postwar efforts to unify the two workers’ parties. Laurent, leader of
the Nord-SFIO, and Henssler in the Ruhr worked tirelessly to sabotage
46. Ibid., pp. 22–26.
47. Abelshauser, Der Ruhrkohlenbergbau, pp. 32–40.
48. Karl Lauschke, Die Hoesch-Arbeiter und ihr Werk. Sozialgeschichte der Dortmunder
Westfalenhütte während der Jahre des Wiederaufbaus 1945–1966 (Essen, 2000), pp. 84, 98–99.
49. Cited from: Mattéi, “Après la bataille”, in Desbois et al., La Foi des charbonniers, pp. 33–43.
50. Cited from: Ibid., p. 47.
51. Yves Jeanneau, “Les murs de l’histoire. L’imagerie de la bataille du charbon”, in Desbois et al.,
La Foi des charbonniers, pp. 57–81, 74–75.
52. Évelyne Desbois, “La silicose. Un malheureux concours de circonstances”, in Desbois et al.,
La Foi des charbonniers, pp. 137–149.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
265
unification. Guy Mollet, leader of the Pas-de-Calais federation and
then SFIO secretary general, supported unification, but he faced resistance
in his region’s mining areas, where bitter memories of interwar animosities
predominated. Regardless of differences in their stances on unity efforts
with communists, both parties vigorously competed for the support
of miners and industrial workers in 1945–1946. Competition with
communists thus affected socialist leaders’ calculations of how to face the
harrowing social and political problems in mining and industry after
the war. For instance, SFIO leaders sought to take advantage of the
unpopularity of the PCF coal campaign, with the local socialist press
writing that, “soon [the communists] are going to make the worker sleep in
the mine”.53 Force Ouvrière (FO), a socialist minority faction in the CGT
created in 1947, channeled workers’ discontent and condemned the “battle
for coal”.54 This tactic yielded isolated victories: The socialist Sion defeated
Lecoeur, who was then a communist undersecretary of state for the mines,
in a 1946 election in Lens.55
MASS STRIKES AND THE DIVERGENT POLITICS OF
M I N E R S A N D I N D U S T R I A L W O R K E R S I N N O RT H E R N
FRANCE AND THE GERMAN RUHR
The parties responded rather differently when huge strikes broke out in
French and German industrial regions in 1947–1948. In Germany, protests
began in Essen in February 1947; by March, tens of thousands of workers
were demonstrating in all major Ruhr cities. Over 300,000 miners went on
strike in April.56 These were spontaneous, grassroots strikes driven by food
shortages – as is evident in the image in Figure 1 – and punctuated with
demands for socialization and co-determination. SPD leaders recognized
that hunger was at the root of the protests, but they also interpreted them
within the context of their anti-communist tradition and the escalating Cold
War. The local SPD press suspected that a “communist orchestra director”
was provoking the strikes to promote the KPD’s political schemes. It was
true that communists often spearheaded wildcat strikes at the time; yet,
more often than not they did so on their own initiative, not under orders
from their leadership. In April, Agatz advocated a one day miners’ strike, a
proposal approved by the miners’ union against the objections of August
Schmidt, its social democratic chair. In response to the protests, the region’s
SPD Economic Minister, Erik Nölting, introduced a point-rationing
53. Cited from: Évelyne Desbois, “La silicose”, in Desbois et al., La Foi des charbonniers, p. 141.
54. Alain Bergounioux, Force Ouvrière (Paris, 1975), pp. 60–61.
55. Mattéi, “Après la bataille”, in Desbois et al., La Foi des charbonniers, p. 37.
56. On the 1947–1948 strikes in the Ruhr see particularly: Klessmann and Friedemann, Streiks
und Hungermärsche.
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Brian Shaev
Figure 1. In 1947 and 1948, a series of massive hunger demonstrations and strikes broke out in
the Ruhr area. Here a protester holds a sign demanding coal and bread.
Source: Archiv für soziale Bewegungen, Bochum. Used with permission.
system for coal miners that assured them a far higher ration than the rest of
the population. Reforms succeeded in quieting the protests, but they broke
out again in January 1948 as the Ruhr food supply reached its nadir. This
time the impetus came from metal workers, rather than miners. The DGB
and SPD leaderships, while split over whether to support the 1947 strikes,
were overwhelmingly hostile to their repetition in 1948 and worked to
hasten their end.
While Ruhr miners faced occupation authorities, the 1947 strikes in
France pitted many Nord and Pas-de-Calais workers against a socialist-led
government. National politics in France had transformed after communist
ministers left the cabinet in May 1947. As the Cold War gathered pace,
the SFIO Minister of Industry, Robert Lacoste, sharply cut CGTrepresentation
on the coal boards, scaling back the say in management miners had only
recently acquired. Strikes broke out at Renault in April 1947 when the
government announced lower food rations. They quickly spread throughout
French industry and the mines, rising and subsiding through the year until they
culminated in a mass railway and mining strike in November. The government
forcefully suppressed the strike in a dark climate that also included a mysterious
train derailment. Then, in 1948, the government issued decrees cracking
down on absenteeism in the mines, forcing workers with “black lung” to return
to work, and limiting medical and retirement benefits. An enormous
miners’ strike called by the CGT to protest the decrees shook France in
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
267
Figure 2. Demonstrators scuffle with police during the 1948 miners’s strike in the Nord/Pasde-Calais.
Source: MaxPPP/Voix du Nord. Used with permission.
October–December 1948.57 The strikes were responses to poor social conditions but, like in the Ruhr, they had clear political implications. The workers’
claims struck at core government priorities. Demands for wage increases for
miners threatened to nullify the economic centerpiece of the socialists in government: the control of prices and wages to prevent inflation. They also threatened to deepen coal shortages and damage French industry. The government
decided to crush the strike. Lacoste laid off ten per cent of miners, cracked down
on chronic absenteeism, and ended subsidies for the coal industry. SFIO
Interior Minister Jules Moch sent in the national police to conquer the mines
one by one.58 Skirmishes, sabotage, and shootings turned the region into a
veritable battleground, a glimpse of which is captured in Figure 2. Some
workers rebelled against the CGT, the leading union federation at the time, and
tried to reopen the mines. The FO called for a return to work and split from the
CGT, forming a new union federation informally aligned with the SFIO. It
supported the SFIO’s policy on wages, as did Laurent, the leader of the Nord-
57. For a general assessment of the strike see: Marion Fontaine and Xavier Vigna, “La grève des
mineurs de l’automne 1948 en France”, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 121 (2014), pp. 21–34.
58. Holter, The Battle for Coal, pp. 123–124, 146–169.
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SFIO and a former miner.59 In December, the CGT surrendered, and those
defeated miners who had not been dismissed returned to work.
The strikes of 1947 set off completely different political dynamics in the
two countries, dynamics that also reflected the different contexts of stateled reconstruction in France and reconstruction under military occupation
in postwar Germany. French miners and industrial unions, lionized as
heroes in the initial postwar period, increasingly felt alienated from the
state. The bitter outcome of the strike renewed support for the communist
party among many industrial workers, who felt betrayed by socialists in
government. After 1948, the Nord federation of the SFIO lost a high proportion of its dues-paying members, and votes for socialists in the mining
areas of the Pas-de-Calais fell by over twenty thousand votes from the
legislative elections of 1946 to 1951, while votes for communists rose by
over ten thousand. The SFIO federations experienced less of a decline in the
northern regions than elsewhere in France, but this was primarily due to
their strength outside of mining areas, where communists consolidated their
gains.60 The FO, the union federation now aligned with the SFIO, remained
weak in industry and strong among public servants, the latter of whom
made up much of the SFIO electoral base as well. The March 1948 comités
d’entreprise elections in the Nord confirmed the FO’s weakness: the CGT
won over fifty per cent of the vote; the FO received a disappointing fourteen per cent. Steel workers overwhelmingly preferred the CGT to the FO
as well.61 The miners’ and metal workers’ unions became solid communist
strongholds at a time when an acceleration of Cold War tensions encouraged socialist leaders to view their domestic dispute with the PCF through
an international lens of threat and confrontation. Workers’ sense of alienation from both the socialists and the government had implications for how
they viewed proposals for European unity: in November 1948, forty-two
per cent of CGT members supported a European economic union and forty
per cent opposed it, whereas eight-seven per cent of FO members favored
economic union and ten per cent were against. Eleven months earlier, a poll
had support among communists for a European federation at over sixty per
cent, not far short of the seventy per cent of socialists who expressed a
favorable opinion, the most supportive among all party memberships.62
The polls were not longitudinal or consistent in the question or groups
measured. Still, the impact a year of transformative events in industrial
59. Bergounioux, Force Ouvrière, pp. 42–43; Vanneste, Augustin Laurent, pp. 60–62.
60. Henri Adam, Yves-Marie Hilaire, André Legrand, Bernard Ménager, Robert Vandenbussche,
Atlas de géographie électorale Nord-Pas-de-Calais 1946–1972 (Lille, 1972), pp. 148–151.
61. Michel Freyssenet, La sidérurgie française, 1945–1979. L’histoire d’une faillite. Les solutions
qui s’affrontent (Paris, 1979), p. 12.
62. Jean-Jacques Becker, “L’opinion de gauche française et les débuts de l’Europe”, in Poidevin
(ed.), Histoire des débuts, pp. 241–259, 244–256.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
269
relations and politics had on the sociological base of support for European
unity, now clearly understood as Western European unity, is evident.
In Germany, on the other hand, the trade unions and SPD made a
concerted effort in 1948–1951 to win the allegiance of Ruhr workers and
succeeded in significantly reducing communist party influence in the Ruhr.
The Ruhr factory councils were the largest bastion of KPD power in postwar
western Germany and had acted as a counterweight to the DGB’s efforts
to end the strikes. The Ruhr SPD thus intensified its campaign to defeat
communists in the mines and factories.63 Henssler wrote Schumacher that the
SPD must “activate our factory council groups to resolve the situation”
because “the trade unions themselves unfortunately do not seem to clearly see
the danger”.64 Further, communists came under increasing pressure after the
Berlin blockade began in June 1948. The eastern German ruling party, the
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), began exercising greater
financial and political control of the western KPD. It forced through a policy
of denouncing the official union leaderships, distributing eastern German
propaganda in the factories, and pressuring the factory councils to take
a pro-Soviet stance in the Cold War. This policy turned out to be increasingly
self-defeating, and many communist trade union officials began distancing
themselves from the KPD. In March 1950, DGB leader Hans Böckler called
for a “purge” of communists, and communists lost most of their remaining
seats on the factory councils, most dramatically in Essen.65 While the metal and
mining unions expelled officials who refused to sign loyalty pledges or who
publicly took pro-communist positions, they otherwise exercised a skillful
policy of integrating communist officials and union members. Votes for KPD
candidates in North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest region in which the
Ruhr district is located, had already collapsed by half between October 1948
and August 1949. The KPD membership in the region fell by almost half from
1949 to 1953.66 In 1949–1950, the SPD cemented its role as the hegemonic
party in the industrial Ruhr, a position it has held for decades since.
The social democrats’ push to stamp out communism in the Ruhr
coincided with a French diplomatic offensive to gain control of the Ruhr’s
industrial development. The June 1948 Allied London Accords promised
the French government an International Authority for the Ruhr (IAR) in
63. For the outlines of this campaign see, for instance, the following documents from March–
April 1947: “Sozialdemokratische Partei, Bezirk Westliches Westfalen Entwurf Richtlinien für die
Arbeit der Betriebsgruppen”, reprinted in Klessmann and Friedemann, Streiks, pp. 114–115, and
“Brief W. Hansens an J. Kappius v. 21.4.1947 zum Richtlinienentwurf für die Arbeit der (SPD)
Betriebsgruppen, pp. 116.
64. Cited from: Lauschke, Die Hoesch-Arbeiter, p. 246.
65. Kössler, Abschied von der Revolution, pp. 298–304.
66. Hartmut Pietsch, Militärregierung, Bürokratie und Sozialisierung: Zur Entwicklung des
politischen System in den Städten des Ruhrgebietes 1945 bis 1948 (Duisburg, 1978), p. 24.
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Figure 3. Fritz Henssler speech in 1948 in Hansaplatz, Dortmund’s central square.
Source: Stadtarchiv Dortmund. Used with permission.
exchange for French agreement to the creation of a West German state.
There was substantial support for this agreement in the SPD national
executive.67 Henssler, however, labeled the IAR a “colonial statute” that
would ensure French industries cheap coal while burdening German
industry with production quotas and dismantlements.68 With coal prices
subject to Allied approval, over seventy per cent of Ruhr coal mines were
operating at a loss, and there seemed little prospect of wage increases for
miners under an international management dedicated to ensuring low
prices for coal exports. Further, French oversight of Ruhr industry raised
frightful memories of the political and social damage wrought by the
interwar Ruhr occupation. The Ruhr SPD and SPD regional ministers in
North-Rhine-Westphalia used their powerful positions to pressure the
national party to oppose the IAR. It was their influence, to date largely
overlooked in the literature, that set the national party’s intransigent line on
French proposals for the Ruhr. Henssler in particular – pictured giving a
speech in Dortmund in 1948 in Figure 3 – was responsible for a
67. See the minutes of the SPD national executive: AdsD, SPD-Parteivorstand, Parteivorstand
und Parteiausschuss, 29–30 June 1948.
68. AdsD, Nachlass Fritz Henssler, Mappe 48, Henssler to Parteivorstand, 10 May 1948.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
271
hardening of SPD attitudes over the following year.69 Such proposals
threatened to undermine the progress social democrats had made against
communists in the region. In a March 1949 article entitled “Ruhr Statute
and Peace Settlement”, Schumacher explicitly linked the SPD’s position to
its competition against the communists in the Ruhr: “The communists see
here a chance for their politics. And they are saying that ‘The Ruhr must
remain German!’.”70
FRENCH SOCIALISTS AND THE POLITICS OF COAL:
FROM THE “MONNET” TO THE “SCHUMAN” PLAN
Ruhr coal and coke, meanwhile, were essential for the success of France’s
program for postwar economic reconstruction. The postwar planning
commission, led by Jean Monnet, intended to modernize the French economy
by increasing the competitiveness of French manufacturing and capturing a
larger share of global trade for French industrial exports. By 1950, however, the
success of the “Monnet Plan” seemed highly endangered: Indifference by the
other Western Allies and subversion by German industry and by the government of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany had paralyzed the
IAR, which was designed to attain the lower energy costs required by the plan.
German coal companies practiced “double-pricing”, a policy by which they
exported coal at higher prices than they sold it on the domestic market. These
higher coal prices raised costs for French industry. The Schuman Plan was an
attempt by the French government to save its postwar economic program by
offering the West German government an international framework it could
accept. Jean Monnet’s idea was to create a European common market for coal
and steel that would allow French manufacturing to compete on the world
market on an equal footing with German industry. The modernization program required lower coal prices – if need be at the expense of the French coal
industry and French miners. French communists had supported this policy
until they left government in 1947. As the Cold War bolted the door behind
them, the CGT and PCF fell back on a sectoral defense of industries where
they had strong support from workers.
French socialists retained governmental responsibilities after the communists
left office. When SFIO ministers harshly suppressed the 1947–1948 strikes, coal
69. See the dispute in the SPD national executive about whether to accept the Ruhr Statute in
January 1949, in which the overwhelming majority in the executive supported Henssler’s
opposition. The executive approved a resolution (with only two dissenting votes) that denounced
the Ruhr Statute and launched a public campaign against it. AdsD, SPD-Parteivorstand,
Parteivorstand, 21–22 January 1949.
70. Kurt Schumacher, “Ruhrstatut und Friedensordnung”, Die Gegenwart, Nr. 5, 1 March 1949.
Cited in: Arno Scholz and Walther G. Oschilewski (eds), Turmwächter der Demokratie: Ein
Lebensbild von Kurt Schumacher, Band II (Berlin, 1953), pp. 355–362, 361.
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and steel workers saddled them with much of the blame. This brought recriminations within the party but not a change in party policy. Although members
of the SFIO parliamentary group condemned Lacoste’s “anti-worker” positions, they did so behind closed doors.71 Lacoste replied that French coal costs
had to come down to compete with the lower price of foreign coal. At a 1949
party congress, the SFIO secretary general Mollet said that “especially in the
mines […] a demagogic campaign against us has borne fruits”. After he noted
that, “[w]e have lost many thousands of votes on the name of Lacoste”, an
audience member shouted “Bravo!” Mollet icily replied, “No, not bravo, it is
unfortunate, it is terribly unjust”.72 In 1949, less productive mines in northern
France began to close down, and the planning commission lowered the targets
for domestic coal production. These pressures reflected themselves within the
SFIO, where leading representatives disputed with one another whether miners’
wages could rise without increasing coal prices.73 Meanwhile, socialists were
especially attentive in this period to the growing concerns of French manufacturers. The business historian Matthias Kipping demonstrates how representatives of this diverse sector influenced economic policy in 1949–1950.74
They became forceful advocates for the Schuman Plan, which was designed to
decrease their production costs by lowering the prices of coal and steel. This was
also the goal of SFIO economist André Philip (1902–1970), who told the 1949
congress that after the liberation it had been necessary to invest in French coal
and steel, but new investments henceforth had to be shifted toward manufacturing. He was among the first to advocate a coal and steel common market
in 1949.
The Schuman Plan thus grew out of a French domestic policy rationale of
forcing its own nationalized coal industry to attain coal and steel prices in France
at the levels of those prevailing in Germany. It sought to Europeanize the
Monnet Plan and aid French manufacturing by extending its reach as purchasers
to Ruhr coal. It was clear that competition within a coal and steel common
market threatened to bring more layoffs of miners and perhaps of steel workers
in France. The northern French mines had higher wages, poorer resources, and
lower productivity than the Ruhr mines. An official of the French Planning
Commission told the National Assembly’s Economics Commission that,
“because of unequal productivity, there are at the moment clear differences in the
conditions of coal production in Germany and in France”. These differences, he
said, “may lead to a displacement of production, which means that German coal
71. Archives d’histoire contemporaine, Paris [hereafter, AHC], Groupe Parlementaire Socialiste,
GS 1, 1 June 1949.
72. OURS, Congrès national extraordinaire, 13 et 14 décembre 1949.
73. See the discussion between Daniel Mayer and Christian Pineau, OURS, Conseil national
SFIO, 6 November 1949.
74. Matthias Kipping, Zwischen Kartellen und Konkurrenz. Der Schuman-Plan und die
Ursprünge der europäischen Einigung 1944–1952 (Berlin, 1996), pp. 127–141, 182–189.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
273
will take the place of French coal in certain markets”.75 André Philip was willing
to accept this sacrifice because, as he and others noted, French manufacturing
employed more workers than the coal industry. He concluded that it “seems
necessary to close businesses that are not able to adapt to the new conditions
[…]”.76 Philip was often an isolated figure within the party but his view was also
that of most SFIO ministers in government in 1947–1950, who accepted the
possibility of mine closures in hopes of economic gains elsewhere.77
The CGT immediately denounced the Schuman Plan employing a Cold
War rhetoric: the common market was part of a US plan to rearm Germany
and use Ruhr resources to launch a war against the Soviet Union. French
communists also claimed that the planned coal and steel community would deindustrialize France and cause the “deportation” of French workers to the
Ruhr, pictured as a kind of industrial Moloch. French industry would have to
align salaries with the low wages of West Germany and even then it would
probably not be able to compete.78 Many in the French steel industry had
concerns as well. For instance, steel industrialist Humbert de Wendel thought
that French steel could not compete with German industry.79 Georges Villiers,
the head of France’s umbrella employers’ association (Conseil national du
patronat français – CNPF), however, supported French manufacturing interests and endorsed the plan against the wishes of the French steel industry.80
The European Industrial Council, in turn (and with Villiers as president),
criticized the terms of the emerging Paris treaty for granting to the community’s executive body, the High Authority, power it believed should be the
prerogative of employers.81 The French business community was divided by
competing interests and, on the eve of the ECSC ratification, the CNPF urged
the vote be delayed.82 (The nationalized coal industry, as an arm of the
government, had no independent say in these inter-industry debates.)
75. Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Commissions, Affaires économiques Procès-verbaux
des séances, 14 December 1950, C//15331.
76. 1re Séance de Mardi 25 Juillet 1950, Journal Officiel de la République Française, 25 July 1950,
pp. 5913–5975, 5942.
77. For André Philip’s role in the Schuman Plan debates, see Mattias Kipping, “André Philip et les
origines de l’union européenne”, in Christian Chevandier and Gilles Morin (eds), André Philip,
socialiste, patriote, chrétien (Paris, 2005), pp. 387–403.
78. Jean-William Dereymez, “La CGT et le plan Schuman (1950)”, in Élyane Bressol, Michel
Dreyfus, Joël Hedde, and Michel Pigenet (eds), La CGT dans les années 1950 (Rennes, 2005), pp.
331–342.
79. François Roth, “Les milieux sidérurgiques lorrains et l’annonce du Plan Schuman”, in
Schwabe (ed.), Die Anfänge, pp. 367–380.
80. Philippe Mioche, “Le patronat de la sidérurgie française et le Plan Schuman en 1950–1952. Les
apparences d’un combat et la réalité d’une mutation”, in Schwabe (ed.), Die Anfänge, pp. 305–317.
81. Kipping, “Zwischen Kartellen und Konkurrenz”, pp. 232–233.
82. Sylvie Lefèvre, “Les milieux d’affaires français et les institutions dans les années cinquante et
soixante”, in Marie-Thérèse Bitsch (ed.), Le couple France-Allemagne et les institutions
européennes. Une postérité pour le plan Schuman? (Brussels, 2001), pp. 261–279, 252.
274
Brian Shaev
In this clash of interests, the French Socialist Party chose to support manufacturing over the interests of French miners. That it could do so without a
public clash was due to the positive attitude adopted by the SFIO federations
that represented the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. Augustin Laurent, chair of the
SFIO Nord federation, supported the Schuman Plan even though experts
expected it would lead to layoffs and closures in the mining regions. Had he
opposed the plan, he surely would have caught the party leadership’s attention
like Henssler did in Germany. Mollet, for his part, had an iron grip over the Pasde-Calais federation. As party leader, he was focused more on national than
regional issues. With their constituencies shifting from mining areas to towns,
the northern federations did not face the same pressures as the Ruhr SPD to
defend the interests of miners. When the SFIO parliamentary group met to
discuss the pending ratification of the ECSC on 11 December 1951, Guy
Desson, who represented a mining district in the Ardennes, voiced miners’
concern that, “[t]he repercussions are going to be considerable for a great
number of businesses, the ratification of the treaty will lead to an acceleration in
the process of liquidation of unequipped businesses […] and it is the workers
who are going to suffer”. He continued that, “we are going to plunge these
regions into unemployment”. Another socialist, Jean Le Bail, replied that he
could “not follow Desson’s argumentation for a very simple practical reason: we
are going to ratify the Schuman Plan”. Despite his own “reservations about the
Schuman Plan”, he said that, “it is not a good idea to make the mistake of giving
reasons against” the plan that would assist its opponents “after having pushed
the idea and in the end voting for it”.83 Paul Ramadier, who represented the
southern industrial town of Decazeville and had been SFIO Prime Minister in
1947, was also reluctant but in the end voted for the ECSC.84 Without support
from the powerful Nord and Pas-de-Calais party federations or from Ramadier,
the dissident Desson was isolated. A few days later, he was the only French
socialist in the National Assembly to vote against the ratification of the ECSC.
DEFENDERS OF THE RUHR: GERMAN SOCIAL
D E M O C R AT S , T H E S C H U M A N P L A N , A N D
DISAGREEMENTS AMONG GERMAN TRADE UNIONS
In Germany, SPD leaders were at first unsure what to make of the Schuman
Plan. Kurt Schumacher welcomed it in May 1950 but called it “a frame”
without a “picture”.85 The SPD, he said, would not define a position until it
had more information about the community’s design and its impact on
83. AHC, Groupe Parlementaire Socialiste, GS 3, 11.12.51.
84. OURS, Conseil national SFIO, 1 December 1951.
85. Cited from a press clipping stored in the Schumacher collection: AdsD, Nachlass Kurt
Schumacher Mappe 51, “Berlin – ein politischer Faktor. Pressekonferenz mit dem SPDVorsitzenden Dr. Schumacher in Berlin”, Volksblatt, 27 May 1950.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
275
German coal and steel industries. The DGB was silent for ten days but then
applauded the plan.86 A small team of trade unionists from the DGB
executive and the miners’ union attended the Schuman plan negotiations in
Paris as part of the German delegation. Hans vom Hoff, who led the DGB
delegation, praised the atmosphere at the Paris negotiations and expressed
optimism about its outcome to the DGB executive in July.87 Officials in the
IG Metall union were less enthusiastic. Their exclusion from the ECSC
delegation fomented suspicion that the DGB executive would not
adequately defend their members’ interests, concerns that they passed on to
the SPD leadership.88 Gustav Henle, a steel industrialist and a Christian
democratic (CDU) deputy close to Germany’s CDU chancellor, Konrad
Adenauer, was enthusiastic about the plan. Most steel industrialists were
skeptical though. They were pleased that the executive powers envisioned
for the High Authority were reduced over the course of 1950 but were
unhappy about plans to permanently sever the steel industry’s traditional
links with coal mining.89 The SPD also fervently supported maintaining the
Ruhr’s vertical integration economy.
The negotiations took a decisive turn when Monnet, heading the French
delegation, suddenly insisted in September 1950 that the community’s High
Authority be invested with legal powers to dissolve cartels, a power that
would imperil not only the Ruhr’s vertical integration economy, but its coal
sales syndicate as well. There was revulsion in German industry and in the
unions against the new set of French demands. Henssler considered the sales
cartel essential for the coal industry’s stability and for preserving jobs in less
productive mines. SPD leaders also opposed ending the double-pricing of
German coal, a policy that allowed the party and unions to push for wage
increases for miners through higher export prices without damaging
employment in other German industries by raising domestic coal prices. The
SPD leadership thus came out in October 1950 against the coal and steel
community, reviving its critique from 1948 against the IAR that French
86. Bernd Bühlbäcker, “Debatten um die Montanunion. Gewerkschaften und europäische
Integration in den 1950er Jahren”, in Jürgen Mittag, (ed.), Deutsche Gewerkschaften und
europäische Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen, 2009), pp. 43–62, 54–61.
87. Hitoschi Suzuki, “The High Authority of the ECSC, the European Trade Unions and the
DGB: Ideas, Strategies and Achievements”, in Ibid., pp. 63–88, 68.
88. Karl Lauschke, “Zwischen Mitbestimmungs- und Europapolitik: Die IG Metall und die
Anfänge der europäische Integration”, in Ibid., pp. 89–122, 90–92. Also see: Karl Lauschke and
Jürgen Mittag, “Quelle Europe, pour quels intérêts? Les syndicats allemands, le Plan Schuman et
la Ruhr après 1945”, in Michel-Pierre Chélini and Pierre Tilly (eds), Travail et entreprises en
Europe du Nord-Ouest (XVIIIe–XXe siècle): La dimension sociale au coeur de l’efficacité
entrepreneuriale (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2011), pp. 241–256.
89. Werner Bührer, “Die deutsche Stahlindustrie und die Montanunion”, in Manfred Rasch and
Kurt Düwell (eds), Anfänge und Auswirkungen der Montanunion auf Europa. Die Stahlindustrie
in Politik und Wirtschaft (Essen, 2007), pp. 172–189.
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proposals intended to colonize the Ruhr by exploiting its raw materials while
stifling German industry. The SPD’s position matched the increasingly critical
view in IG Metall. Freitag, the metal workers’ chair and a SPD member of the
Bundestag, said that “under no circumstance can we approve the Schuman
Plan”. The ECSC, he claimed, was a “reparation to France”, because it would
build up the French steel industry using German coal at the expense of
German steel.90 The specter of a communist resurgence in the Ruhr drove the
party’s opposition to the ECSC. In May 1951, a month after the Treaty of
Paris was signed, Schumacher told a SPD conference:
All of this means the beginning of a process of social disintegration of the Ruhr […]
[with] dangerous political consequences. It has hardly been remarked by the public yet
it is decisive for German politics that we have largely snatched the Ruhr territory from
the communists. But social disintegration, whatever the [political] form [it takes], be it
old-communist, new-communist or national-communist, would mean to incite the
rebellion of the deprived people in the Ruhr […]. I have privately told the Americans:
the Schuman Plan is the birth certificate for a new communist movement and [due to
U.S. support for the Plan] you Americans are the state officials issuing the certificate.91
After the SPD began its campaign against the community, the DGB leadership
decided to take advantage of the controversy over the plan to demand
concessions on co-determination from the German government.92 By 1948–
1949, co-determination was the norm in Ruhr mining and industry but business
leaders were working to prevent its spread to other industries and to reduce
labor’s representation on company boards. In November 1950, ninety-eight per
cent of IG Metall members voted to go on strike if the German parliament did
not approve a co-determination law and in January 1951 ninety-three per cent
of IG Bergbau members followed suit.93 Under pressure, Adenauer
conceded and the German parliament passed a co-determination bill in
April 1951, the same month that six governments signed the Treaty of Paris to
create the ECSC. The passage of the co-determination bill strengthened the
hand of the pro-ECSC faction within the DGB. On 7 May, the DGB federal
committee expressed approval for the Schuman Plan, though with a series of
reservations that included the maintenance of the Ruhr coal sales cartel.94
90. Cited from: Lauschke, “Zwischen Mitbestimmungs- und Europapolitik”, p. 95.
91. “Die Entscheidung über Kohle und Stahl. Konferenz der Sozialen Arbeitsgemeinschaften der
SPD, Gelsenkirchen, 24.5.1951”. Cited in: Scholz and Oschilewski (eds), Turmwächter der
Demokratie, pp. 363–386, 373.
92. This is the general thesis of Thum’s study Mitbestimmung in der Montanindustrie.
93. Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg, “Ursprünge und Entwicklung der Mitbestimmung in Deutschland”,
in Hans Pohl (ed.), Mitbestimmung: Ursprünge und Entwicklung (Wiesbaden, 1981), pp. 7–73,
54–55.
94. Bernd Bühlbäcker, Europa im Aufbruch. Personal und Personalpolitik deutscher Parteien und
Verbände in der Montanunion, 1949–1958 (Essen, 2007), pp. 69–85; Suzuki, “The High
Authority, the European Trade Unions and the DGB”, in Mittag (ed.): Deutsche Gewerkschaften
und europäische Integration, pp. 72–73.
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
277
The DGB executive thus broke with the SPD, a situation which created
considerable unrest in the unions. Riding a wave of discontent at the DGB
congress the next year, Freitag defeated the pro-ECSC union leadership and
became chair of the trade union federation. After years of unease and conflict
that had begun with a split over the French plans on the IAR in 1949, social
democrats were firmly back in charge in the DGB. From then on, the SPD and
the unions would coordinate their approach in the new common market for
coal and steel to defend the interests of Ruhr industry and its workers.95
T H E L A B O R P E R S P E C T I V E : E U R O P E A N I N T E G R AT I O N ,
S O C I A L I S T PA RT I E S , A N D P O L I T I C A L C O M P E T I T I O N
IN FORMER INDUSTRIAL REGIONS
Scholars have often explained the SPD’s decision to oppose the ECSC as
resulting from the “nationalism” of party leader Kurt Schumacher,96 but
German social democrats did not oppose the Schuman Plan because they were
against “European unity”. They opposed it because they thought that it
would damage their working-class constituency in the Ruhr that was
increasingly turning their backs on the communists in this period in favor of
social democrats. In 1945–1949, French socialists and German social
democrats engaged in intense competition, particularly on a grass-roots level,
with communists for power in the factories and mines of industrial areas rich
with historic and symbolic importance. As this article has highlighted, SPD
intransigence toward French policies and its opposition to the Schuman Plan
were in large part an effort to thwart a communist revival in the Ruhr.
Opposition to ECSC, in this context, should therefore be read less as a kind of
“anti-European” stance than as the result of the party’s anti-communist
policy. In France, on the other hand, the socialist party had lost its battle
with communists for the support of a majority of miners in the Nord/
Pas-de-Calais and was willing to sacrifice French coal to attain broader
economic goals. Divergent postwar political outcomes in the central industrial
regions of France and Germany therefore contributed to the SPD’s rejection
of the Schuman Plan, and the SFIO’s decision to accept it.
Fixated on politics at the national level, scholars have overlooked how
regional influences and labor politics affected national party policies on
European integration. For over half a century now, the Ruhr has been a
SPD stronghold. The political dominance of social democrats in the Ruhr
95. Close coordination was ensured by the appointment of IG Metall trade unionist Heinz
Potthoff as commissioner in the ECSC High Authority and by the presence of important trade
unionists in the SPD’s delegation to the Common Assembly, especially Heinrich Deist (DGB
executive) and Heinrich Imig (IG Bergbau).
96. One example of many is V. Stanley Vardys, “Germany’s Postwar Socialism: Nationalism and
Kurt Schumacher (1945–1952)”, The Review of Politics, 27 (1965), pp. 220–244, 233.
278
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was, to a high degree, an accomplishment of Fritz Henssler, who denounced
the Schuman Plan due to the impact he foresaw it would have on Ruhr
workers. The SPD responded to these concerns by naming Henssler as one
of the party’s delegates to the emerging ECSC Common Assembly, the
quasi-parliamentary body which opened in 1952. He died in 1953 after a
long illness, and the defense of Ruhr workers in the community passed to
other SPD officials. In the end, his fears of French exploitation of the Ruhr
would not bear out. A tacit “grand coalition” of German industry, trade
unions, social democrats and Christian democrats defeated the 1951 French
vision of a coal and steel community free of cartels. By 1954, the SPD had
made its peace with a community it had so doggedly opposed.
That same year, many French socialist supporters of the ECSC voted
against the European Defense Community (EDC), a treaty for another
supranational European community that failed to pass the French National
Assembly in August 1954. Most French socialists who opposed the EDC
were not against the idea of “European integration”, which was a novel
and amorphous concept at the time, any more than were German
social democratic opponents of the ECSC.97 Rather, they voted against
German rearmament and for negotiations to peacefully end the Cold War.
Here again, it seems less that those French miners who believed that their
jobs were on the line when the Schuman Plan came to a vote were driven by
“anti-European” feelings or were explicitly opposed to supranational forms
of international cooperation. In the 1950s, CGT leaders denounced
the initial steps of European integration using two levels of analysis: a
geopolitical frame of Cold War aggression against the Soviet Union and a
national-economic claim that the government and the Socialist Party did
not care about workers’ problems. SFIO leaders, for their part, insisted
that the forces that we today label as “globalization” required economic
modernization, the reconversion of declining industries, and the retraining
of their workers to other occupations. After the ECSC opened, the High
Authority and later the European Commission made halting efforts to
mitigate the protracted crisis of de-industrialization that hit Western
Europe’s miners in the 1960s, and then its steel workers in the 1970–1980s.98
More recently, the far right has gained substantial support in former
97. For further elaboration of this argument see chapter four, “Cold War Politics and a Crisis of
Conscience: The SFIO and SPD Debate German Rearmament and Defense Integration,
1950–1954”, of: Brian Shaev, “Estrangement and Reconciliation: French Socialists, German Social
Democrats, and the Origins of European Integration, 1948–1957” (P.hD., University of
Pittsburgh, 2014).
98. For an analysis of the social dimension of the early European Community’s efforts at
managing the decline of European mining as well as of the failed campaign by miners and their
supporters to achieve a “European Miners Statute” in the early 1960s, see Nicolas Vershueren,
Fermer les mines en contruisant l’Europe. Une histoire sociale de l’intégration européenne
(Brussels, 2013).
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
279
industrial areas with its anti-EU message, especially in the areas of northern
France discussed in this article, where the socialist party is currently in
crisis. It is worthwhile reflecting more deeply on why workers at times have
opposed European integration – including, as discussed in this article, why a
fair number opposed it before it even began.
TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS
FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISH
Brian Shaev. Politique des travailleurs, le défi communiste et le Plan Schuman. Une
histoire comparative du Parti socialiste français et du Parti social-démocrate
d’Allemagne et le premier traité pour l’intégration européenne.
Le Plan Schuman pour créer un “pool” des industries du charbon et de l’acier de
l’Europe occidentale fut largement salué comme le document fondateur de l’Union
européenne contemporaine. Une vaste historiographie se développa autour du plan,
mais la main d’œuvre et les travailleurs sont fortement absents des comptes existants,
même si ces secteurs visés par l’intégration - le charbon et l’acier - sont traditionnellement compris comme des centres de la militance de la classe ouvrière et de
l’activité syndicale en Europe. La littérature existante considère généralement que les
industries du charbon et de l’acier eurent pour rôle d’être des objets des négociations
du Plan Schuman, mais cet article renverse cette approche. Au lieu de celle-ci, il
examine la manière dont politique ouvrière dans le Nord et le Pas-de-Calais en
France et la Ruhr en Allemagne, régions clés de l’activité industrielle, influencèrent
les positions adoptées par deux partis politiques prééminents, le Parti socialiste
français et le Parti social-démocrate d’Allemagne, sur l’intégration de l’industrie
lourde européenne. Le matériel empirique combine la recherche d’archives dans les
archives de parti et nationales avec des conclusions tirées de l’histoire régionale du
Nord/Pas-de-Calais, de la Ruhr, et leurs chapitres des partis socialistes locaux, ainsi
que de la recherche historique et sociologique sur les mineurs et les travailleurs
industriels. L’article analyse la manière dont des luttes intenses entre socialistes et
communistes pour l’allégeance des travailleurs du charbon et de l’acier façonna la
culture politique de ces régions après la guerre et culmina durant une vague massive
de grèves en 1947. Les résultats politiques divergents de ces luttes dans le Nord/
Pas-de-Calais et la Ruhr, soutient cet article, contribuèrent largement à la décision du
Parti socialiste français de soutenir et le Parti social-démocrate d’Allemagne pour
s’opposer au Plan Schuman en 1950.
Traduction: Christine Plard
Brian Shaev. Arbeiterpolitik, die kommunistische Herausforderung und der
Schuman-Plan. Eine vergleichende Geschichte der Sozialistischen Partei Frankreichs,
der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands und des ersten Abkommens zur
europäischen Integration.
Der Schuman-Plan zur “Zusammenführung” der westeuropäischen Kohle- und
Stahlindustrien ist häufig als Gründungsdokument der heutigen Europäischen
280
Brian Shaev
Union gefeiert worden. Zum Schuman-Plan gibt es mittlerweile eine umfangreiche
historiografische Literatur. Arbeiter und die Arbeiterbewegung tauchen jedoch in den
meisten vorliegenden Schilderungen kaum auf, obwohl die zur Integration auserkorenen
Sektoren (Kohle und Stahl) traditionellerweise als europäische Zentren der Arbeiterklassenmilitanz sowie gewerkschaftlicher Aktivität gelten. Werden die Kohle- und
Stahlindustrien in der bisherigen Literatur im Allgemeinen als Objekt der mit dem
Schuman-Plan einhergehenden Verhandlungen betrachtet, so wird in diesem Aufsatz der
entgegengesetzte Ansatz verfolgt. Untersucht wird, wie die Arbeiterpolitik in industriellen Schlüsselgebieten wie dem Department Nord/Pas-de-Calais und dem Ruhrgebiet
die Positionen zur Integration der europäischen Schwerindustrie beeinflusst hat, die von
zwei bedeutenden politischen Parteien vertreten wurden: den französischen Sozialisten
und den deutschen Sozialdemokraten. Als empirische Grundlage der Untersuchung
dienen zum einen Recherchen in Partei- und staatlichen Archiven, zum anderen Studien
zur Regionalgeschichte der Departments Nord und Pas-de-Calais und des Ruhrgebiets,
aber auch zu den entsprechenden sozialistischen beziehungsweise sozialdemokratischen
Ortsgruppen. Darüber hinaus wird auf historische und soziologische Untersuchungen zu
Arbeitern aus Bergbau und Produktion zurückgegriffen. Der Aufsatz analysiert, wie
die heftige Konkurrenz der Sozialisten und Kommunisten um die Gefolgschaft der
Kohle- und Stahlarbeiter die politische Kultur der entsprechenden Regionen in der
Nachkriegszeit prägte, um dann während der Welle von Massenstreiks in 1947 ihren
Höhepunkt zu erreichen. Das politische Ergebnis dieser Kämpfe war im Department
Nord/Pas-de-Calais ein anderes als im Ruhrgebiet. Das wiederum trug, so die im Aufsatz
vertretene These, dazu bei, dass die Sozialistische Partei Frankreichs beschloss, den
Schuman-Plan zu begrüßen, während die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands sich
ihm widersetzte.
Übersetzung: Max Henninger
Brian Shaev. Las políticas obreras, el desafío comunista y el Plan Schuman: una
historia comparada del Partido Socialista Francés y del Partido Socialdemócrata
Alemán ante el primer tratado para la Integración Europea.
El Plan Schuman para “compaginar” las industrias del carbón y del acero en Europa
Occidental ha sido celebrado de forma generalizada como el documento fundacional
de la actual Unión Europea. De forma creciente se ha desarrollado toda una
producción historiográfica alrededor del Plan. Sin embargo, el trabajo y los
trabajadores quedan completamente ausentes de los estudios existentes, incluso a
pesar de que los sectores objeto de la integración, el carbón y el acero, se han
considerado tradicionalmente como centros de militancia de la clase obrera y del
activismo sindical en Europa. La literatura existente generalmente ha considerado el
papel jugado por las industrias del carbón y del acero como objetivos de las
negociaciones del Plan Schuman pero este artículo da la vuelta a tal interpretación. En
su lugar en él se analiza como las políticas laborales en los departamentos franceses
Nord y Pas-de-Calais y en la región alemana del Ruhr, unas de las principales
regiones industriales, influenciaron en las posiciones adoptadas por dos partidos
políticos prominentes, el Partido Socialista Francés y el Partido Socialdemócrata
Alemán, en la integración de la industria pesada europea. El material empírico
combina la investigación en archivos estatales como tanto en los centros de
Workers’ Politics and the Schuman Plan
281
documentación de los propios partidos junto con las historias regionales del Nord/
Pais de Calais y el Ruhr, y las secciones locales de los respectivos partidos socialistas,
así como la indagación histórica y sociológica de los mineros y los trabajadores
industriales. En el artículo se analiza cómo la intensa rivalidad entre socialistas y
comunistas por la adhesión de los trabajadores del carbón y del acero determinó la
cultura política de estas regiones tras la guerra y culminó en una masiva oleada de
huelgas en 1947. En el texto se señala cómo los resultados políticos divergentes de
estas pugnas en Nord/Pais de Calais y en el Ruhr, contribuyeron de forma decisiva en
la articulación de las decisiones del Partido Socialista Francés, a favor, y del Partido
Socialdemócrata Alemán, en contra, respecto al Plan Schuman de 1950.
Traducción: Vicent Sanz Rozalén