AHC/WI: Earlier and more intensified EU integration?

[hirsch91]

With a PoD of right after WW2 ended in 1945, how can we federalize/unify Europe the fastest? Please no meme answers like Soviet Union/France conquers all of Europe. Would making the Treaty of Rome be more far reaching -such as establishing a EU military (with the provision not to fight colonial wars) and creating a unified foreign policy- do the trick?
Is an early adoption of the Euro possible? Would Italy and Germany grow as fast as they did IOTL in the post war period with the Euro, considering Germanys undervalued currency and Italys weak currency helped both boost exports and in case of Italy allowed them more fiscal flexibility? Would the Euro ITTL be weaker?

Would other European countries still want to join if foreign policy and the military sovereignty was EU? I would argue for yes, they would want to maybe even more so than IOTL. Yes, they would be giving up significant rights to the EU but the EU would be much more successful than it was OTL.
For one, earlier common foreign policy and military would make the EU a lot more dominant and would make it a heavy weight militarily ensuring the protection of its members and interests.
Secondly, an earlier EU military would make the European predecessors of the EU clear that it would be a political union thus avoiding the luke warm approach the EU took OTL.
With an EU constitution, there would also be huge benefits for the common market as there would only be 1 regulator instead of 1 for each member state on top of EU regulators thus making the process of expanding into other EU countries less tedious and making fewer EU companies migrate to the US.
Furthermore, a EU military would save all of its members a lot of money as they would have to employ fewer soldiers and have the benefit for economies of scale in terms of military procurement.

 

[Tripwire]

A military counterpart to the EU going hand-in-hand with economic integration was originally envisioned in the early 1950s, as a division of a three-part NATO. (Atlantic, Continental, and Mediterranean). It failed at the last minute because France didn’t want to be in an alliance that West Germany was in and the US wasn’t in, although the US would still have been in the larger alliance. The fear was that the US would see itself as no longer committed to the European mainland and would remove its troops.

Britain also wasn’t going to be in the “continental” division of NATO and planned to be in the “Atlantic” division instead. Some British politicians even suggested that the UK should form into an Atlantic economic union with the US and Canada in tandem with the continental Western nations forming into their economic union, though it was quickly pointed out that this was a very bad idea because any such union would be completely dominated by the US.

Source: I’m doing a 1950s deep-dive.

 

[Tripwire]

These countries, with the exception of the UK, were also dead broke and were described as “punch-drunk,” with civilians having little faith in their governments to protect them and the devastation of WWII hanging over them too heavily to try and build themselves up as any sort of a military center of power. This should continue until the mid-fifties “economic miracles” had been going on for a number of years, the start of the 1960s.

Western European military decisions in the 1950s were driven mostly by fear. These countries absolutely didn’t want to spend badly-needed money on arms instead of their post-war recovery, but sheer fear that massive Soviet hordes might come charging over the border one day forced them to start spending on defense. The fear was still strong that these forces wouldn’t be enough. France was deeply afraid of West Germany building up an army (they were so afraid that they vetoed a purely European army at the last minute) but was even more afraid of a potential Soviet attack. There wasn’t much of an air of optimism, mostly just trying to choose least-bad options out of fear of much worse things happening.

Keep in mind that in the 1950s the overwhelming thinking is that Communism is ascendant or at least forcing the democratic countries on the back-foot, and all military decisions are taken with that in mind.

So if you wanted to change all this, I think the biggest factor would be that the economic boom in Europe would need to start years sooner so that these countries aren’t mainly thinking “How do we not die?”