The Origins of European Integration (1945–1979)
The origins of European integration lie in the post-Second World War determination to create a new political and legal order in Europe that would make war between European states not merely unthinkable but materially impossible. The European integration project, conceived as a response to the failures of the nation-state system that had produced two world wars, developed through a distinctive method of functional integration — the pooling of sovereignty in specific economic sectors — that gradually extended into an ever-widening range of policy areas, creating a new supranational legal order that transformed the constitutional structure of Europe.
The Post-War Context
The idea of European unity had deep historical roots — from Dante’s mediaeval vision of a unified Christendom through Kant’s proposal for a perpetual peace among European republics to the interwar Pan-European movement of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi — but it acquired unprecedented urgency after the devastation of the Second World War. The Hague Congress of 1948, organised by the European Movement and attended by over 800 delegates from 20 European countries, symbolised the political awakening of European civil society. The Congress adopted a “Message to Europeans” calling for the creation of a European Assembly and the pooling of national sovereignties in a common political authority.
The first institutional expression of post-war European cooperation was the Council of Europe, established by the Treaty of London on 5 May 1949. The Council of Europe created the Committee of Ministers (representing Member State governments), the Parliamentary Assembly (composed of national parliamentarians), and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 and entering into force on 3 September 1953. The ECHR established the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights to enforce a binding catalogue of civil and political rights — the first international human rights system with individual petition and compulsory jurisdiction.
The Council of Europe, however, operated on traditional intergovernmental principles: its decisions required unanimity in the Committee of Ministers, and its institutions had no supranational authority. The transformation of Europe required a different method — one that would transfer sovereign powers to common institutions with autonomous decision-making authority.
The Schuman Declaration and the Functional Method
On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, acting on a plan drafted by Jean Monnet, the French Planning Commissioner, issued the declaration that became the founding moment of European integration. The Schuman Declaration proposed that “Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organisation open to the participation of other countries of Europe.” The pooling of coal and steel production was chosen deliberately: coal and steel were the industries that had powered the war machine of both world wars, and their joint management would make war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.”
The Schuman Declaration articulated the functional method that would define European integration. Rather than attempting the immediate creation of a federal European state — which the political conditions of 1950 made impossible — integration would proceed through the “creation of concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Economic integration in one sector would create pressures and incentives for integration in adjoining sectors, producing a “spillover” effect that would gradually transfer increasing areas of policymaking to the supranational level. This functional method — integration by stealth, proceeding through economic means to political ends — became the distinctive strategy of European construction.
The European Coal and Steel Community
The Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was signed on 18 April 1951 by six founding Member States — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands — and entered into force on 23 July 1952. The ECSC Treaty established the first supranational institutions in European history: the High Authority — an independent executive body composed of nine members (eight appointed by the Member States and the ninth elected by the first eight) who were forbidden to seek or accept instructions from national governments, with Jean Monnet as its first President.
The High Authority possessed autonomous decision-making powers: it could impose production quotas, fix prices, regulate competition, and impose fines on enterprises that violated ECSC rules. These powers were exercisable by qualified majority vote within the High Authority, without requiring unanimity among its members. The ECSC also established the Common Assembly (the precursor of the European Parliament), composed of 78 delegates from national parliaments; the Special Council of Ministers, composed of ministers from the six Member States, which had to approve certain High Authority decisions; and the Court of Justice, composed of seven judges appointed by common accord of Member State governments, with jurisdiction to review the legality of High Authority acts and to hear appeals from enterprises.
The ECSC was a limited sectoral organisation, but its institutional architecture — an independent supranational executive, a parliamentary assembly, a council of ministers, and a supreme court — established the model for the European Communities. The Court of Justice of the ECSC, under its first President, Massimo Pilotti, began the development of the Community legal order, issuing its first judgments in 1954 and 1955 on the interpretation of the Treaty and the powers of the High Authority.
The Failure of the European Defence Community
The success of the ECSC inspired an attempt to extend the supranational method to the most sensitive domain of national sovereignty: defence. The Treaty establishing the European Defence Community (EDC) was signed by the six ECSC Member States on 27 May 1952. The EDC Treaty proposed the creation of a European army under supranational command, with integrated forces, common uniforms, and common military budgets. The EDC was a direct response to American pressure for West German rearmament after the Korean War: German soldiers in a European army was politically more acceptable than a German national army.
The EDC Treaty included provisions for a European Political Community (EPC), which would have created a federal political structure with a bicameral parliament, a European executive responsible to the parliament, and a common foreign policy. The EPC treaty was drafted by the ECSC Common Assembly’s Ad Hoc Assembly under the chairmanship of Paul-Henri Spaak, and would have transformed the European Communities from a sectoral economic arrangement into a genuine federal political entity.
The EDC Treaty was ratified by four of the six Member States — Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — but was rejected by the French National Assembly on 30 August 1954, when the question was submitted as a procedural motion that killed the Treaty. The French rejection reflected multiple concerns: the loss of national sovereignty over defence, the absence of British participation, fears of German dominance within a European army, and anxiety about the erosion of French independence. The failure of the EDC was a profound setback for the integration project. It demonstrated the limits of supranationalism in sensitive areas of national sovereignty and forced the proponents of integration to return to the less ambitious method of economic functionalism.
The Messina Conference and the Treaties of Rome
After the EDC failure, the European project was relaunched through the method that succeeded: economic integration. The foreign ministers of the six Member States met in Messina, Sicily, on 1–3 June 1955 and agreed to establish the Intergovernmental Committee on European Integration under the chairmanship of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister. The Spaak Committee, working from June 1955 to April 1956, produced the Spaak Report, which recommended the creation of a common market and a European atomic energy community.
The Spaak Report articulated the rationale for comprehensive economic integration beyond the sectoral approach of the ECSC. A common market, eliminating all internal barriers to trade in goods, services, labour, and capital, would create a large unified European economy, stimulate competition and efficiency, attract investment, and increase the standard of living. The common market required not only the abolition of tariffs and quotas but also the harmonisation of laws, the coordination of economic policies, and the establishment of common institutions. The Report proposed a transition period of 12–15 years for the progressive establishment of the common market.
The Treaties of Rome were signed on 25 March 1957, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). The EEC Treaty (the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community) was the more ambitious: it provided for the creation of a common market, the progressive approximation of economic policies, the establishment of a customs union, the adoption of common commercial, agricultural, and transport policies, the coordination of economic and monetary policies, and the creation of the European Social Fund and the European Investment Bank. The Euratom Treaty established a common market for nuclear materials and technology, coordinated research programmes, and regulated safety standards.
The institutional structure of the EEC followed the ECSC model with modifications. The Commission (replacing the High Authority) was the supranational executive with the sole right to initiate legislation. The Council of Ministers was the primary legislative body, initially acting by unanimity on most matters. The European Parliamentary Assembly (renamed the European Parliament in 1962) was composed of delegates from national parliaments and had advisory and supervisory powers. The Court of Justice, unified with the ECSC Court, had jurisdiction over the interpretation and application of the Treaties.
The Customs Union and Institutional Consolidation
The EEC achieved its central objective — the customs union — ahead of schedule. All internal tariffs among the six Member States were eliminated by 1 July 1968, 18 months before the original deadline. The common external tariff — the uniform tariff applied by all Member States to imports from non-Member States — was also established by 1968. The customs union transformed the economic geography of Europe: intra-Community trade grew at an average rate of 11% per year between 1958 and 1968, and the EEC emerged as the world’s largest trading bloc.
The institutional development of the Community encountered its first major crisis in 1965–1966. The Empty Chair Crisis began in June 1965 when French President Charles de Gaulle withdrew French representatives from the Council of Ministers, protesting the Commission’s proposals for the financing of the Common Agricultural Policy and the extension of qualified majority voting to new areas. For seven months, the Council was unable to act. The crisis was resolved by the Luxembourg Compromise of January 1966, which established that where “very important interests” of a Member State were at stake, the Council would continue to seek unanimity, effectively preserving the national veto. The Luxembourg Compromise, though a political agreement rather than a legal amendment, shaped Community decision-making for the next two decades.
The First Enlargement and Institutional Development
The first enlargement of the European Communities occurred in 1973 when Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom acceded to the EC. British accession was the most politically significant: the UK, which had declined to join the original negotiations in 1955 and had formed the rival European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960, applied for membership in 1961 and 1967, both applications vetoed by President de Gaulle, who doubted British commitment to European integration. After de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, the Hague Summit of December 1969 agreed to open accession negotiations with the four applicant countries (Norway also applied but rejected membership in a 1972 referendum).
The accession treaties were signed on 22 January 1972 and came into effect on 1 January 1973. Enlargement transformed the Community from a compact six-member club into a more diverse and less cohesive organisation, with new members whose legal traditions — particularly the British common law system and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty — differed significantly from the continental civil-law tradition that had shaped Community law.
The 1970s saw important institutional developments. The Treaty of Luxembourg (22 April 1970) amended the Community’s budgetary provisions, granting the Community its “own resources” (customs duties, agricultural levies, and a share of VAT revenues) independent of national contributions and increasing the budgetary powers of the European Parliament. The Treaty of Brussels (22 July 1975) further increased the Parliament’s budgetary authority, enabling it to reject the budget in its entirety, which it did in December 1979.
The most significant institutional development was the decision to hold direct elections to the European Parliament. The Act concerning the election of the representatives of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage was signed on 20 September 1976, and the first direct elections were held on 7–10 June 1979. Direct elections transformed the European Parliament from a consultative assembly of national parliamentarians into a directly elected institution with democratic legitimacy, gradually claiming an increasing role in Community legislation that would culminate in the co-decision procedure introduced by the Treaty on European Union.
The Common Agricultural Policy
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the Community’s first and most expensive common policy, consuming over 70% of the Community budget by the 1970s. The CAP was based on three principles: a single market for agricultural products (eliminating all internal barriers to agricultural trade), Community preference (giving Community producers priority over imports), and financial solidarity (sharing the costs of agricultural support through the common budget). The CAP operated through a system of guaranteed prices: the Community set target prices for major agricultural products and intervened in the market to purchase surplus production when market prices fell below intervention thresholds.
The CAP’s legal framework was established at the Stresa Conference of July 1958 and implemented through a series of Council regulations beginning in 1962. The policy achieved its primary objective of increasing agricultural productivity and ensuring stable food supplies, but it generated serious problems: overproduction (the “butter mountains” and “wine lakes” of the 1970s and 1980s), high costs for consumers and taxpayers, environmental damage from intensive farming, and barriers to agricultural imports from developing countries. The CAP’s legal structure — a dense network of Council regulations supplemented by Commission implementing regulations — was the most detailed sectoral regulatory regime in the Community, generating extensive litigation before the European Court of Justice.
The origins of European integration thus established the foundational elements: the functional method of integration through economic interdependence; the supranational institutional structure of Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court; the legal doctrine of direct effect and supremacy articulated by the Court of Justice; and the progressive extension of integration from coal and steel to the common market, agricultural policy, regional policy, and social policy. These foundations would provide the basis for the qualitative transformation of the European Community in the decades following the Single European Act.