From the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Economic Community (1951-1957)
18.6.1 The 1951 Treaty of Paris and the Creation
of the ECSC
The next step was the establishment of a specialized committee to handle the project’s technical details, which Monnet chaired himself.
Soon representatives from France and Germany joined those from Italy and the three Benelux countries. The negotiations were carried out on new bases, as they were no longer adversaries but “teammates” who, as stated by Schuman, were engaged in a “common search”.The committee worked quickly. On April 18, 1951 the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was signed in Paris. This first European Community was essential because it heralded the three basic institutions of the European integration process: an executive power, the High Authority— today the Commission—with sovereign powers which was responsible to an assembly (the current European Parliament) and whose decisions were monitored a posteriori by a European Court of Justice (today the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg) (Wilson 2003, 133).
The ECSC was dissolved on July 23, 2002, but not before playing an essential and historic role by paving the way for the European communities that succeeded it (Gillingham 2002, 299-363). In fact, the constitution of the ECSC was a great blow to the statist camp, in particular the British, as the United Kingdom was excluded from the process.[1216]
For the first time the ECSC implemented the “Community Method”, aimed at supranationality by assigning the High Authority power[1217] that superseded that of the member states.
18.6.2 From the Failure of the EDC to the Treaties of Rome (1951-1957)
The six signatory states decided to forge ahead with the integration process, despite British resistance. Current events at the time seemed to affect the course taken towards integration, as on June 25, 1950 the Korean War began.
The confrontation with the communist bloc, of which Mao’s China now formed part (October 1, 1949), made Europeans uneasy, spurring them to request the formation of a military alliance with the United States, which led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on April 4, 1949 (Hanhimaki and Westad 2004, 107).It is, then, understandable that the next step in European integration was the creation of a European Defense Community (EDC), a new idea of Jean Monnet’s endorsed by Rene Pleven, then France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (Bossuat 1996, 191). The objective was to create an organization of European armed forces, integrating West Germany (FRG) into the European Community. The treaty was signed by the six members of the ECSC on May 27, 1952 and was ratified by five national parliaments. In the end, it failed because the French National Assembly, the parliament of the country that had advanced it, voted against ratification on August 30, 1954 (Sanderson 2003, 336).[1218] It would not be until the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999 that Europe considered adopting a common defense policy again.
The failure of the EDC prompted Jean Monnet to resign from the presidency of the High Authority of the ECSC to concentrate his energies on establishing and leading an “Action Committee for the United States of Europe”, established in 1955 (Fransen 2006, 125). This was a pressure group comprised of qualified leaders (politicians, trade union representatives and employers) with the authority to make decisions in their respective fields, and charged with promoting European integration (Hayward 2008, 15-27).
As in France nationalist politicians had triumphed, the political initiative for European integration fell to the “Benelux” countries, then led by Joseph Bech (Luxembourg), Paul Henri Spaak (Belgium), and Jan Wilem Beyen (Netherlands). Thanks to them the decisive Messina Conference (June 1955) was held,[1219] which yielded two new European communities: the European Economic Community (EEC), or Common Market, and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or EURATOM). Their founding treaties were signed on March 25, 1957 in Rome (Gilbert 2012, 51-56).
18.7