Walter Hallstein
Walter Hallstein was a German academic, diplomat and statesman who was the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community and one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
Hallstein began his academic career in the 1920s Weimar Republic and became Germany's youngest law professor in 1930, at the age of 29. During World War II he served as a First Lieutenant in the German Army in France. Captured by American troops in 1944, he spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States, where he organised a "camp university" for his fellow soldiers. After the war he returned to Germany and continued his academic career; he became rector of the University of Frankfurt in 1946 and spent a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown University from 1948. In 1950 he was recruited to a diplomatic career, becoming the leading civil servant at the German Foreign Office, where he gave his name to the Hallstein Doctrine, West Germany's policy of isolating East Germany diplomatically.
A keen advocate of a federal Europe, Hallstein played a key role in West German foreign policy and then in European integration. He was one of the architects of the European Coal and Steel Community and the first President of the Commission of the European Economic Community, which would later become the European Union. He held the office from 1958 to 1967 and was the only German to be selected as president of the European Commission or its predecessors until the selection of Ursula von der Leyen in 2019. Hallstein famously described his role as "a kind of European prime minister" and dismissed national sovereignty as a "doctrine of yesteryear."
Hallstein left office following a clash with the President of France, Charles de Gaulle; he turned to German politics as a member of the Bundestag, also serving as President of the European Movement from 1968 to 1974. He is the author of books and numerous articles and speeches on European integration and on the European Communities.
Early life and pre-war academic career
Walter Hallstein was born on 17 November 1901 in Mainz, Germany. After primary school in Darmstadt he attended a classical school in Mainz from 1913 until his matriculation in 1920.From 1920 Hallstein studied law in Bonn, later moving to Munich and then to Berlin. He specialized in international private law and wrote his doctoral dissertation on commercial aspects of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. He obtained his doctorate from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1925 – at the age of 23. From 1923 to 1926 he was a legal clerk at the Kammergericht, and in 1927, having passed his qualifying examination, he was employed for a very brief spell as a judge. He then worked as an academic at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Private and International Private Law in Berlin, where he specialized in comparative commercial and company law, working under Professor Martin Wolff, a leading scholar of private law. He would remain there until 1930. In 1929 he obtained his Habilitation from the University of Berlin, based on a thesis on company law. In 1930, at the age of 29, he was appointed professor of private law and company law at the University of Rostock, making him Germany's youngest professor of law. He was made Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law in 1935 and then Dean in 1936. He remained in Rostock until 1941. From 1941 to 1944 Hallstein lectured at Frankfurt University, where he was Director of the Institute for Comparative Law and Economic Law.
In 1935, Hallstein attempted to start a military career alongside his academic duties. In 1936, he managed to integrate a voluntary military service in an artillery unit. In the years between 1936 and 1939, he attended several military courses and was made a reserve officer.
Hallstein was a member of several nominally Nazi professional organizations, but he was not a member of the Nazi Party or of the SA. He is reputed to have rejected Nazi ideology and to have kept his distance from the Nazis. There was opposition from Nazi officials to his proposed appointment, in 1941, as professor of law at the University of Frankfurt, but the academics pushed through his candidacy, and he soon advanced to become dean of the faculty.
Soldier and prisoner of war (1942–1945)
In 1942 Hallstein was called up; he served in an artillery regiment of the Wehrmacht in Northern France with the rank of first lieutenant. In early 1944, Hallstein's name was submitted by the University of Frankfurt as a potential Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier to the National Socialist Lecturers League. On 26 June 1944, during the Battle of Cherbourg, he was captured by the Americans and sent to Camp Como, a prisoner-of-war camp in Mississippi.As a German prisoner of war in the United States, Hallstein started a "camp university", where he held law courses for the prisoners. As part of the Sunflower Project, a project to re-educate German POWs, he attended an "administrative school" at Fort Getty, where teaching included the principles of the Constitution of the United States. Hallstein remained a prisoner of war from June 1944 to mid-1945.
Post-war academic career (1945–1950)
In November 1945 Hallstein returned to Germany, where he campaigned for Frankfurt University to be re-opened. Turning down an offer from Ludwig Erhard to be deputy minister at the Bavarian Ministry of Economics, he became a professor at Frankfurt University on 1 February 1946, and in April he was elected its rector, a position he retained until 1948. He was president of the South German Rectors' Conference, which he founded. From 1948 to 1949, he spent a year as visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.Hallstein was co-founder of the German national UNESCO committee and was its president from 1949 to 1950.
Diplomatic career (1950–1957)
Foreign affairs at the Chancellery (1950–1951)
Against the background of the Second World War, a conflict that had caused massive destruction and left the continent split in two by the Iron Curtain, there were calls for increased cooperation in Europe. The French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, put forward a plan, originating from Jean Monnet, for a European Coal and Steel Community that would unify control of German and French coal and steel production, and talks were started with this aim.Germany had still not regained its sovereignty following defeat in World War II, and was represented internationally by the Allied High Commission. There was no German foreign office and, for a time, foreign affairs were dealt with by the Chancellery.
Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor, called Hallstein to Bonn, at the suggestion of Wilhelm Röpke, and in June 1950 he appointed him to head the German delegation at the Schuman Plan negotiations in Paris, which were to lead to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community. Jean Monnet, the leader of the French delegation, and Hallstein drew up the Schuman Plan, which was the basis for the European Coal and Steel Community, established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951. The ECSC was to develop into the European Economic Community, and later the European Union. In August 1950, to general surprise, Hallstein was made head of the Office of Foreign Affairs at the Federal Chancellery. At this time, little was known about Hallstein, except that he had not been a member of the Nazi Party and that he was on good terms with US officials.
State Secretary at the Foreign Office (1951–1958)
Following a change in the Occupation Statute, the German Foreign Office was re-created in March 1951, but the post of Foreign Minister was filled by Adenauer himself. On 2 April 1951, Hallstein was made the leading civil servant at the newly created Foreign Office. Foreign policy continued to be managed by Adenauer himself with his group of intimates, including Hallstein, Blankenhorn and others. In many respects, Hallstein was the West German Foreign Minister in all but name, but there was a growing awareness that a separate officeholder was needed. Adenauer is said to have considered Hallstein for the position, even though he was not a member of a political party.Hallstein also played an important part in promoting West Germany's goals of regaining sovereignty and creating a European Defence Community, of which West Germany would be a member. Negotiations at first resulted in two international agreements:
- On 26 May 1952, the Treaty of Bonn was signed by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and West Germany; on ratification, it would largely restore sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany.
- On 27 May 1952, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and West Germany; on ratification, it would have established the European Defence Community.
After the ratification of the Paris Accords on 5 May 1955, the General Treaty, which largely restored German sovereignty, took full effect; the Federal Republic of Germany became a member of NATO.
Once the major foreign policy objectives were in hand, Hallstein set about restoring Germany's diplomatic service and re-organizing the Foreign Office, based on the findings of the Maltzan Report, a report commissioned by Hallstein on 26 June 1952 and produced a month later by Vollrath Freiherr von Maltzan, a former diplomat, at that time on loan from the Ministry of Economics.
There was criticism of a lack of information and consultation and an atmosphere of secrecy, possibly resulting from Adenauer's distrust of the old hands at the Foreign Office, the Wilhelmstraße veterans, as well as the desire to fill top jobs with outsiders not tainted by having served as diplomats under the Nazis.
There were suggestions of a disconnect between the leadership on the one hand and the division leaders at the Foreign Office and the diplomatic missions on the other. In particular, Hallstein was also criticised in the press after the European Defence Community was rejected by the French National Assembly, as had been predicted by the German diplomatic mission in Paris.
File:Dr. Heinrich von Brentano.jpg|thumb |After Heinrich von Brentano was appointed Foreign Minister, Walter Hallstein retained his very influential status at the Foreign Office.|alt=Portrait photograph of Heinrich von Brentano
On 6 June 1955, Adenauer, who had until then been Foreign Minister as well as Chancellor, appointed Heinrich von Brentano foreign minister and there was a reshuffling of responsibilities, but Hallstein retained the trust of Adenauer and continued to attend cabinet meetings. Herbert Blankenhorn, who until then been the head of the Political Department of the Foreign Office, became the German Permanent Representative to NATO in Paris; Wilhelm Grewe took over the Political Department under Hallstein and was made Hallstein's deputy.
Hallstein was involved in discussions with the French concerning the return of the coal-rich Saar to Germany. In October 1955 there was a referendum held to decide whether the Saar would remain separate from Germany or be re-integrated into Germany, following which it was agreed with France that there would be political integration into the Federal Republic of Germany by 1 January 1957 and economic integration by 1 January 1960. In September 1956, Hallstein announced that France had agreed to hand over control of the Saar to Germany; on 27 October 1956, the Saar Treaty was signed.