Treaty of Dunkirk
contract
The Treaty of Dunkirk was signed on 4 March 1947, between France and the United Kingdom at Dunkirk in France, as a Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance against a possible German attack in the aftermath of World War II. It entered into force on 8 September 1947 and according with article VI paragraph 2 of its text, it remained in force for a period of fifty years.
According to Marc Trachtenberg, the German threat was a pretext for defence against the USSR.
This Treaty preceded the Treaty of Brussels of 1948 (also known as the "Brussels Pact"), which established the Western Union among Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, that became Western European Union in 1955, after the entry into force of the Treaty of Brussels of 1954 (also known as "Modified Brussels Treaty (MBT)"), when Italy and West Germany were admitted.
The treaty within the historical timeline
Since the end of World War II, most sovereign European countries have entered into treaties and thereby co-operated and harmonised policies (or pooled sovereignty) in an increasing number of areas, in the European integration project or the construction of Europe (French: la construction européenne). The following timeline outlines the legal inception of the European Union (EU)—the principal framework for this unification. The EU inherited many of its present organisations, institutions, and responsibilities from the European Communities (EC), which were founded in the 1950s in the spirit of the Schuman Declaration.
The public source identifies “Treaty of Dunkirk” as contract. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Treaty, Dunkirk and contract.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q911590. VIAF identifies the subject as 205802611. The Library of Congress control number is no2009033892. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1948, 1955 and 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “Treaty of Dunkirk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.