The Treaty establishing the European Defence Community, also known as the Treaty of Paris, is an unratified treaty signed on 27 May 1952 by the six 'inner' countries of European integration: the Benelux countries, France, Italy, and West Germany. The treaty would have created a European Defence Community (EDC) with a pan-European defence force. The treaty failed to obtain ratification in the French Parliament and it was never ratified by Italy, so it consequently never entered into force. Instead, the London and Paris Conferences provided for West Germany's accession to NATO and the Western European Union (WEU), the latter of which was a transformed version of the pre-existing Western Union. The treaty was initiated by the Pleven plan, proposed in 1950 by then French Prime Minister René Pleven in response to the American call for the rearmament of West Germany. The formation of a pan-European defence architecture, as an alternative to West Germany's proposed accession to NATO, was meant to harness the German military potential in case of conflict with the Soviet bloc. Just as the Schuman Plan was designed to end the risk of Germany having the economic power on its own to make war again, the Pleven Plan and EDC were meant to prevent the military possibility of Germany's making war again. Planned organisation The European Defence Community would have entailed a pan-European military, divided into national components, and had a common budget, common arms, centralized military procurement, and institutions. Diagram showing the functioning of the institutions provided for by the Treaty establishing the European Defence Community (EDC), the placing of the European Defence Forces at the disposal of the Community, and the link between the EDC and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, with reference to this organisation's Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Council): The main contributions to the proposed 43-division force: France: 14 divisions, 750 planes Germany: 12 divisions* Italy: 12 divisions, 450 planes Benelux: 5 divisions, 600 planes *Germany would have had an air force, but a clause in the EDC treaty would have forbidden it to build war-planes, atomic weapons, guided missiles and battleships. Reporting In this military, the French, Italian, Belgian, Dutch, and Luxembourgish components would report to their national governments, whereas the West German component would report to the EDC. This was due to the fear of a return of German militarism, so it was desired that the West German government would