On 9 May 1950 Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister 1948–52, made his surprise

announcement proposing the pooling of coal and steel production. Following protracted
negotiations, the Treaty of Paris was signed by ‘the Six’ on 19 March 1951, which established
the supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

This created a common market for coal, steel, coke, iron ore and scrap between France,
Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy. Britain declined to participate in the
talks from the outset.

The fact that coal and steel were the first economic sectors to be incorporated into an integrated
organisation is acknowledgement of their central importance to nation states’ economic and
military power. Coal and steel had provided both the military capacity for invasion as well as
being a motive for German and French territorial acquisition.

Germany had big reserves of coking coal (used in steel production), whereas France, not being
well endowed geologically with coal, depended on German coal supplies.

Steel was the major element in states’ post-wareconomic reconstruction (needed for railways,
buildings, ships, vehicles, machinery). After the war, Norway and the Netherlands started their
own steel industries for the first time. The demand for steel was high and there was a shortage of
raw material inputs.

Therefore, as Frances Lynch shows, the Monnet Plan for the modernisation of the French
economy was originally based on ‘the traditional view that French political and economic
strength lay in German weakness’ (Lynch, 1984, p. 242).

The best guarantee of French security, peace and avoiding a fourth German invasion was not the
reassurance of the protection of France by her allies via guarantees in treaties, but by limiting
German capacity for steel production and expanding French steel and heavy industry through
access both to German coking coal resources and German markets.

French foreign policy towards Germany clearly reflected these French national economic
interests enshrined in the Monnet Plan – the permanent dismemberment of the German state, the
Ruhr being made an International Zone separate from Germany; and the dismantling,
deconcentration and decartelisation of the German steel industry.

In 1946 France had 0.5 million machine tools, many of which were 20 years old, whereas
Germany had 1.5 million, which were more modern. The success of the Monnet Plan, intended
to rectify such relative technological weakness, depended on three conditions being met. The
first, according to Frances Lynch, was France getting priority access to the Ruhr’s resources of
coal and coke, that is, priority over Germany for the Ruhr’s coal. The second was that French
industry must recover and reconstruct before Germany’s economy revived, as German industry
had lower production costs. Finally, the Monnet Plan aimed to replace German goods in both
Germany and her export markets with French goods (Lynch, 1984, pp. 233, 235, 239).

Following the 1948 London Conference, Robert Schuman recognised the urgent need for a
radical change in French policy towards Germany. The only alternative (to their 1944–48 policy
of weakening and dismembering Germany) was a more positive policy of co-operation or
association.

Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State 1949–53, recognised that only France could integrate
Europe (by 1949 it was clear that Britain would not) and he made a personal appeal to Schuman
to take the initiative to reconcile West Germany to Western Europe.
(Milward, 1984, pp. 391–92).

Jean Monnet subsequently became the first President of the High Authority of the ECSC.
Whether he was, as he is invariably seen in retrospect, ‘the founding father of Europe’, Monnet
certainly rescued the modernisation and re-equipment plan and so safeguarded French national
economic interests and preserved security, through starting a Franco-German alliance, which has
now endured for more than 50 years.

Frances Lynch (1984, p. 242) argues that to disguise the highly political nature of the Schuman
Plan the ECSC was created under a smokescreen of idealistic European rhetoric. Statements by
Schuman that it was ‘the first concrete foundation of European federation’ were music to
American ears and satisfied the US Congress that Marshall Aid was creating a European
framework to contain Germany. Dissimulation concealed this second French attempt to reshape
Europe’s economic and political environment to suit the needs of the French domestic economy,
safeguarding French reconstruction plans by creating a common market in coal and steel, so
providing equal access for France to the Ruhr’s resources.

What did the ECSC actually do? Schuman’s original announcement on 9 May 1950 proposed
that ‘the entire French and German production of coal and steel be placed under a joint High
Authority within an organization open to the participation of other European nations’.

The Treaty of Paris 1951 was a complex commercial treaty establishing the ECSC as a regulated
market-sharing arrangement under supranational control. It was designed to balance the six
states’ particular vested interests in coal and steel and to facilitate achievement of national
objectives in these two sectors. The common external tariff of the ECSC’s Customs Union was
fixed lower than that of France but higher than the Benelux and a five-year transition period was
allowed before full operation of the agreement.

Italy was allowed nevertheless to retain its fixed tariff to protect its small, high-cost steel industry
within the Common Market. Scrap was included in the agreement as this constituted the prime
raw material for Italian electric arc process steel making. Italy also got access to French North
African iron ore resources (Milward, 1984, p. 414).

France, negotiating from a strong bargaining position in 1949–51, obtained equal access to the
Ruhr’s resources within the Common Market and the end of dual-pricing and discriminatory
freight rates.

Overall German imports of steel doubled between 1953 and 1956 because of the booming
German economy and the ECSC agreement.

The ECSC created a single common market from six national markets, in coal, steel, coke and
scrap metal, but also safeguarded specific national interests, as in Italy’s case, assisted Belgium
grappling with its ailing coal sector and facilitated, through international agreement, French
national economic objectives.

The essential elements of the Monnet Plan were indeed rescued by the Schuman Plan, as Lynch
and Milward’s research demonstrates, the ECSC providing equal access to Ruhr coal and
guaranteed markets for French steel in Germany Moreover, the supranational High Authority
meant the collective day-to-day control and regulation of steel and coal markets throughout the
Common Market and therefore within West Germany itself.

The Treaty of Paris 1951, created the first integrated organisation offering the prospects of
permanent compliance – with a supranational High Authority policing the Treaty and a Court of
Justice to settle disputes. This was Monnet’s ingenious solution to the problem of coexisting and
conducting business securely with Germany.

In Germany, Konrad Adenauer, Federal Chancellor 1949–63, had as his main objective the
removal of these irksome constraints and to obtain full sovereignty for his fledgling state.
Adenauer’s strategy for achieving this was full co-operation and close collaboration with the
three Western powers. For Adenauer, therefore, political considerations were of upmost
importance in negotiating the Treaty of Paris 1951. Adenauer was keen to co-operate with
France on equal terms and he insisted on equal terms of entry for the FRG into the ECSC.

So the FRG made political gains from the Treaty of Paris by winning recognition as an equal
partner having equal status and by the removal of most of the limitations and controls over steel
and coal. Whereas for France the prime motive for the ECSC was economic, for Germany the
motives were political. Accepting the Schuman Plan and signing the Treaty of Paris was the only
way to commence their national rehabilitation as an independent sovereign state.

Britain excluded herself from the talks leading to the ECSC as they were unwilling to sign, prior
to the start of negotiations, a communiqué: with the other governments agreeing in advance to
the ‘pooling of coal and steel production’ and accepting the transfer of national control to a High
Authority.

In iron and steel, which the government was preparing to nationalise in 1949–50, UK crude steel
output (16m tonnes) was approximately half that of the whole of Western Europe.

For Schuman and Monnet the supranational aspect was vital to French national interests and so
non-negotiable. They feared that the UK would work to undermine this essential element of the
Plan if it was open for discussion.

On 1 June 1950 the French government gave Britain a 24-hour ultimatum to accept the terms or
the talks would proceed without them. Interestingly, when the talks started, without Britain, the
objective had altered. Instead of referring to ‘pooling coal and steel production’ as in the 9 May
1950 announcement, the French working paper on the scheme of 27 June 1950 emphasised the
High Authority’s role as ‘to contribute to a policy of economic expansion, of full employment,
and of a rising standard of living for the workers … it should ensure that the needs of the
member countries would be satisfied and exports would be developed without discrimination’.
This would be achieved under the best possible economic conditions through the establishment
of a broad single market.

This appeared both more moderate and attractive as a communal objective. Nevertheless, the
British Foreign Office viewed the Schuman process not simply as economic integration but as a
move towards the political federation of Europe – Schuman had referred to the ‘starting point for
a United Europe’.

A closer UK–ECSC link would have encouraged ‘the Six’ and the Americans to increase the
pressure on Britain to join the scheme for a European army. The UK’s long delayed association
agreement with the ECSC was only formalised in December 1954 after the EDC scheme had
been dead and buried for four months.

However, unlike France in 1950, the UK’s vested economic interests and national recovery were
not dependent on commercial links with Germany and, unlike France, the UK did not see the
main threat to its national security as a resurgent West Germany. The French-integrated solution
of a Franco-German association under a supranational High Authority when presented as the first
move towards a United Europe was guaranteed to appeal to Americans and repel the British.

How did the ECSC operate? ---

In August 1952, after ratification by the six parliaments, the ECSC started to function and in
1953 the Common Market commenced operations. Between 1952 and 1962 iron ore production
increased from 62m to 92m tonnes, new patterns of trade developed and there was a greater
harmonisation of working conditions. Early opposition to the scheme by industrialists, most
notably in France but also in Belgium and the Ruhr, soon dissipated as did exaggerated fears of
the competitive strength of other producers.

This 1958 crisis in the ECSC coincided with the start of the EEC and Euratom that marked a
decline in political influence of the ECSC, whose institutions were eventually absorbed by these
new communities in 1967. However, overall, the ECSC successfully functioned through the
1950s and 1960s when demand and production were expanding, guaranteeing equal French
access both to Ruhr coal and German markets.

The political impact of the ECSC was also significant. The institutions operated well and rules on
competition were agreed easily, to the surprise and relief of the nine-man High Authority.
Europeans from states which had spent years at war with each other proved quite capable of
working and co-operating together, obeying common rules and paying a common tax.

As Monnet himself commented: ‘The Schuman proposals are revolutionary or they are
nothing . . . The indispensable first principle of these proposals is the abnegation of sovereignty
in a limited but decisive field . . . Any plan which does not involve this indispensable first
principle can make no useful contribution to the solution of the grave problems that face us . . .
What must be sought is a fusion of the interests of the European peoples . . .’

The significance of the declaration lay in the desire of France to forfeit an amount of national
sovereignty through the creation of new supranational structures in an effort to create peace and
as such it is generally regarded as the key action in the construction of Europe.

The functionalist approach was based on the principle of a gradual transfer of sovereignty from
nation states in specific policy areas that Monnet thought would be acceptable to the member
states.

The great hope of functionalists was that peace could be achieved through the furtherance of
integration in specific sectors of the economy, such as agriculture or coal, with these sectors
governed by supranational institutions. Although methods of decision-making would be
determined by member states outside the specific sector of the economy, functionalists
nonetheless considered that the success of integration in one sector would create ‘spillover’
pressures that would result in a demand for more integration in other areas (Haas, 1968: 283).

Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands responded positively to the Schuman
Declaration, not least because it provided a useful mechanism to accelerate the process of
industrial modernisation.
‘It was a way of giving more freedom of manoeuvre to the German coal and steel industry; it
allayed French anxiety over their security; and it had the full and enthusiastic support of the
American government’ (Paterson, 1994: 143).

Britain, by contrast, while aware of the benefits offered by the Schuman Plan in forging closer
Franco-German cooperation, felt no compulsion to get involved in a process that centred on the
decisions of a new higher authority being binding on the participating member states.

The Schuman Declaration was not merely concerned with the coordination of coal and steel
production. It stressed that ‘the pooling of coal and steel production will immediately ensure the
establishment of common bases for economic development as a first step in the federation of
Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the
manufacture of arms, to which they themselves were the constant victims’.

The diversity and ‘relative’ strength of Britain’s trade – after 1945 it produced approximately
two-thirds of the steel of what would become ‘the Six’ – meant that it did not consider its
influence on world events would be enhanced by joining forces with other countries. Such a
viewpoint contrasted the position of many of the governments of the six who, faced with a
combination of domestic economic difficulties, the threat of Soviet communism and a decline in
Europe’s influence in the world economy, regarded participation in a new organisation to be the
only means to overcome these challenges. It is a point that Alan Milward has made in arguing
that European integration took place as a result of the demands of the nation states (Milward,
1992).

Both Italy and Germany, for instance, considered European integration to be a central means by
which they could re-establish themselves, while for other nations, such as France, it reduced their
fear of a revived Germany.

Britain’s policy of favouring loose association rather than integration with Europe was shaped by
a refusal to accept Schuman’s condition that all member states had to agree to the principle of
supranational cooperation prior to engaging in the talks that were to work out the details of the
Schuman Plan. As a result the British government rejected the Schuman Plan on the grounds that
its supranationalism would impact on national sovereignty.

Despite the fact that the Treaty focused only on a specific sector of the economy, the preamble
demonstrated the desire of the founding fathers to move beyond coal and steel to create a wider
Community by means of functional integration and political spillover.

Once “a practical community of interests” had been created, mentalities would change, other
steps would become possible, a new dynamic would begin to operate and finally, step by step,
lead to a federal destination’ (Duchêne, 1996: 55).
Thus, at the heart of the ECSC lay a sector-by-sector approach to European integration. In this
context, the founding member states ‘resolved to substitute for age-old rivalries the merging of
their essential interests; to create, by establishing an economic community, the basis for a
broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the
foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared’.

This, combined with the supranational institutional structure of the ECSC, ensured that it was
distinguishable from other efforts to promote European cooperation, such as the Council of
Europe.