Action Committee for the United States of Europe
He immediately gave an interview in France's major daily newspaper Le Monde, in which he hinted at the new project: "To persuade the governments [whose representatives had met in Messina] to make the choices they have delayed, and to propose to their respective parliaments the federal institutions that are indispensably needed, it is necessary and urgent for political parties, trade unions, and all those in favor of European unity to organize themselves in order to make their convictions prevail in the public and with governments.
[2] On 12 October 1955, Monnet circulated a press release, under embargo until noon the next day, with the names of the Action Committee's 33 initial participants and their respective organizations.
[2] The Action Committee was Monnet's response to the challenge of bringing the European integration project forward in the face of nationalist pushback, political inertia, and special interests.
It brought together leaders from political parties and European trade unions in an inclusive format that favored candid discussions and the emergence of consensus positions which were subsequently made public.
[2] As soon as he returned from Luxembourg in June 1955, Monnet had established his personal office in an apartment owned by his brother-in-law Alessandro de Bondini at 83, avenue Foch in Paris.
Swiss scholar Henri Rieben [fr] assisted it by creating a nonprofit entity in Lausanne, the Société de gestion administrative du Comité d'Action pour les États-Unis d'Europe, in June 1957.
[11]: 697 A committee for legal, administrative and financial matters chaired by German trade union leader Ludwig Rosenberg helped to organize funding, on the basis that the overall contribution of participating political parties would equal that of participating trade unions, but individual contributions within each of these two groups were determined on an ad hoc basis under a general principle of perceived fairness.
In December 1956, that committee together with Monnet decided to establish an in-house think tank, initially dubbed the bureau d'études and later the centre de documentation, which from early 1958 was led by Duchêne.
This partial outsourcing of research work allowed some revenue to be raised from outside the participating European countries, which Monnet had committed to his German interlocutors not to use for the core activity of the Action Committee itself, including two loans from the Ford Foundation in 1959-1961.
After Charles de Gaulle returned to power in France in May 1958, the Action Committee shifted to a more defensive role, helping to safeguard the legacy of already established European institutions as opposed to creating new ones.
[7] 20 political party leaders: 13 trade Union leaders: Later members included Edmond Leburton and Leo Tindemans from Belgium; Gaston Defferre, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Pierre Pflimlin, and Antoine Pinay from France; Rainer Barzel, Willy Brandt, Walter Scheel, Helmut Schmidt, and Herbert Wehner from Germany; Arnaldo Forlani, Giovanni Malagodi, Aldo Moro, Pietro Nenni, Flaminio Piccoli, Mariano Rumor, and Giuseppe Saragat from Italy; Pierre Werner from Luxembourg; Barend Biesheuvel and Joop den Uyl from the Netherlands; and Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, and Roy Jenkins from the UK.
