French Socialist (SFIO) and German Social Democratic (SPD) responses to early European integration initiatives indicate that there was a postwar generation of SFIO and SPD leaders who were informed by similar experiences rooted in memories, policy proposals, and outcomes from the interwar period. They formulated similar visions of the postwar period that drew upon existing socialist ideology and narratives, but at crucial moments they were perplexed as to how to respond to dilemmas that placed different socialist objectives in conflict with one another.