Did Winston Churchill Really Follow The EDC?

Conservative government of Winston Churchill came into office again during the negotiations on EDC. Churchill did not follow the EDC because that would threaten the British sovereignty directly. On 28 November 1951, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, said that Britain would not participate in the EDC in a NATO Council meeting in Rome. Specifically, Eden strongly believed that the Pleven Plan would fail because the cost of joining in the EDC for potential states was considerable. Meanwhile, there was also opposition to the EDC from civil servants, who thought Britain would get in trouble with merging its armed forces into a European army and would surrender British sovereignty to European authority (Stephen, 1991, p. 40-41).
On 30 August 1954, the European Defense Community was not ratified by the French Parliament, the EDC had to collapse, which was regarded as a setback of the
However, the six member states of the ECSC did not agree with Britain. Indeed, Britain sought to get the United States’ support to promote the intergovernmental cooperation under the framework of the OEEC rather than the Customs Union when the Eden visited President Eisenhower in Washington. Yet, the United States supported the Messina initiative and Britain had to find other methods to address their concerns about the Customs Union.
In July 1956, Britain proposed a program to establish a regional free trade area, which included all the member states of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. However, this plan was not widely accepted by six members of the ECSC. Take France as an example, the French government deemed this plan as a British political tactic, in order to sabotage the Messina initiative and regain the intergovernmental cooperation within the