Office of the Historian

Bruce Mission files, lot 57 M 38, “Agricultural Pool”

No. 248
Memorandum by the Consul of the Embassy in France (Cleveland) to the Acting United States Representative to the European Coal and Steel Community (Tomlinson)

[Paris,] November 13, 1952.

In our conversation the other day on the phone, Van der Lee also told me he had received a visit on November 7 from Tasca,1 who was in The Hague and said he wanted to discuss integration, agricultural and otherwise. Tasca was, allegedly at least, on a mission of information, but I gathered from Van der Lee that he did most of the talking himself. Van der Lee was struck by the fact that Tasca seemed very ill-informed about most of the recent progress about European integration as concerned the agricultural pool, but he was unaware of the existence of the Interim Committee of the Agricultural Conference which has been working in Paris since last March.2 He was also unaware of the Luxembourg Resolution3 and the developments on EPC.

In his own remarks Tasca was very negative on the whole subject of European integration and very skeptical that anything worthwhile could be accomplished. He stressed the monetary problem and said he didn’t think that anything useful in the field of integration could be done unless the monetary problem was solved first. Van der Lee explained at some length the approach that by starting with a field like agriculture you would force discussions of the other problems and sooner or later make it necessary to deal with all of them. But Tasca was not impressed. Furthermore, Tasca apparently went on at some length to the effect that there was in any case a great danger that an integrated Europe would become protectionist and that this would be a bad thing both from the U.S. point of view and from the point of view of the European economy itself.

  1. Henry J. Tasca, Director of Plans and Policy in the Office of the U.S. Special Representative in Europe, at Paris.↩
  2. For information concerning this Green Pool meeting in Paris, see Document 243.↩
  3. For the text of the “Luxembourg Resolution,” see Document 103.↩