Birth of the European Community

The story

From the rubble to reconciliation

In 1945, when the Second World War ended, Europe lay in ruins. Millions of people were dead, cities were destroyed, many factories were idle and hunger was widespread. In less than eighty years France and Germany had gone to war three times. Many people asked how to stop it happening again.

One answer was simple and brave: to tie the European countries together so closely that war between them would become impossible. On 9 May 1950 the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, inspired by the official Jean Monnet, proposed putting the coal and steel production of France and Germany, the materials needed to make weapons, under a common authority. In 1951 six countries signed the treaty: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The ECSC had been born, the European Coal and Steel Community.

The next step

The project, however, did not head straight for a political union. In 1954 the French parliament rejected the idea of a common European army, and many people thought the European dream was over. The six countries then decided to start again from the economy, which was more concrete. In June 1955 their foreign ministers met in Messina, in Sicily, and asked the Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak to prepare a plan. After two years of work and negotiations, the plan was ready.

On 25 March 1957, in a rainy Rome, the representatives of the six countries gathered on the Capitoline Hill, in the Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and signed two treaties. For Italy there were the prime minister Antonio Segni and the foreign minister Gaetano Martino; for Germany Konrad Adenauer; for Belgium Paul-Henri Spaak. The first treaty created the European Economic Community (EEC), that is, a “common market”; the second created Euratom, so that nuclear energy could be used together for peaceful purposes only. The two documents were written in four languages, all equally valid: Dutch, French, German and Italian.

What is a common market?

The common market promised something that seems normal today: goods, workers, services and money could move between the countries without customs duties, that is, without the taxes paid at the border. The six countries promised to remove duties between themselves, to set a common duty towards other countries and to coordinate their economic policies, for example farming. Tariffs between the countries were abolished completely on 1 July 1968, a year and a half ahead of schedule.

The treaties came into force on 1 January 1958. In time the institutions grew: the European Commission, which proposes laws, the Council, which brings together the governments, a parliamentary Assembly, later to become the European Parliament, and a Court of Justice to make sure the rules were followed. Among the fathers of this idea we remember, besides Schuman and Monnet, three Christian Democrat leaders who were convinced of European unity: the Italian Alcide De Gasperi, the German Adenauer and Schuman himself, who all spoke the language of reconciliation.

An open door

The Treaty of Rome was not meant to be a closed club. The text said that any European state could ask to join. The United Kingdom tried as early as the 1960s, but was blocked by the veto of de Gaulle's France; it joined only in 1973, together with Ireland and Denmark. The Community went on growing in the following decades, until it became the great common home of today.