Alcide De Gasperi and the European Defence Community: Lessons for Today’s Europe

In March 2025, opening a European Parliament debate on defence, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen cited Alcide De Gasperi, recalling that 70 years earlier he had urged Europeans not merely to keep the peace but to build a common defence. The reference was not simply a rhetorical flourish: the collapse of the European Defence Community in 1954 still shapes Europe’s unfinished security architecture. This article traces the European Defence Community from the Pleven Plan (1950) to the rejection of this proposed treaty by the French National Assembly (1954), and reconstructs De Gasperi’s federalist reading of it, embodied in Article 38, which tied military integration to a democratic political community. The article then weighs that vision against what the EU has since built and what is still missing, concluding with three lessons learned from the analysis: this is Europe’s last call for a common defence, unpopular decisions demand courage, and the future lies not in ceding sovereignty but in maintaining it within an association of sovereign states.