From Coal and Steel — The Birth of the ECSC

Ideals are often born in grand words, and in grand words they fade away. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of European integration and Churchill’s speech on a United States of Europe both moved people’s hearts, yet that alone could not erase a single border. A proud nation handing over the source of its power to win wars — to yesterday’s enemy, of all people — is, ordinarily, unthinkable. And yet, in the spring of 1950, one French foreign minister quietly proposed precisely that ‘unthinkable thing’. From coal and steel, rather than weapons, he sought to build a mechanism for peace. The true starting point of the EU lay in this down-to-earth step.

The Strategist Behind the Scenes, Jean Monnet

The one holding the key to the story stood not in the spotlight but behind the scenes: Jean Monnet. Born into a family that traded in cognac and having moved through the world of international business from a young age, he was not a politician elected to office. Yet through the two great wars, he witnessed Europe’s chronic affliction with his own eyes. So long as nations gripped their sovereignty and competed, war would surely return. The only way, he thought, was to build up concrete mechanisms of shared interest one by one, binding the nations together in a form from which there could be no turning back.

The originality of Monnet’s idea lay in his not trying to unify Europe politically all at once. To build a grand federation in a single stroke would only rouse each nation’s wariness and crush it. So he chose to begin from a single concrete industry. What he selected was coal and steel. At the time, these two were the foundation of the munitions industry, the very power to wage war. Put the other way around, if these were taken out of the hands of the state and placed under joint management, the hands that gripped the instruments of war could be bound. Monnet refined this vision and entrusted it to a politician he trusted: the French foreign minister Robert Schuman.

9 May 1950, the Declaration That Astonished the World

On 9 May 1950, Schuman read out a statement in Paris. The production of coal and steel of France and West Germany would be placed under a single common authority, open to other European nations including the two — this proposal, later called the Schuman Declaration, astonished the world. Two nations that only a few years earlier had fought with all their might were now to manage the source of war’s power jointly. The declaration is said to have stated, in effect, that such a binding would make war between France and Germany ‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’, and its great significance lay in seeking to realize peace not as an ideal but as a system.

Many calculations were woven into this proposal. For France, it would serve as a safety device to keep a recovering Germany’s industrial power from becoming a threat once again. For West Germany, it became a precious foothold to return to international society as a defeated nation and to recover an equal standing. And for Europe as a whole, it was a first step toward building its own unity amid the Cold War standoff of the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Schuman Declaration is positioned as the starting point of the postwar Franco-German cooperative order, and is also said to have become an occasion for West Germany’s incorporation into the Western bloc. Here, ideal and real interest meshed beautifully.

The Six Nations’ Step from Which There Was No Turning Back

The Schuman Declaration did not remain mere words. In less than a year, concrete negotiations advanced, and on 18 April 1951, the six nations of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are said to have signed a treaty establishing the community. Named the Treaty of Paris after the place of its signing, this agreement entered into force on 23 July 1952, and the European Coal and Steel Community — the ECSC for short — formally gave its first cry. This was the first concrete form of the supranational community that would lead to the later EU.

This roster of six nations became the core of the European integration that followed, and would often be spoken of as the founding members. France and West Germany, the long-standing enemies, sat at the center, surrounded by the three Benelux countries and Italy. Nations that had once faced each other on the battlefield now gathered at the same table of the same authority to confer over the management of coal and steel — this very scene was the clearest proof that a mechanism for never going to war again had begun to move in reality. The first president of the community’s High Authority is said to have been Jean Monnet, the very originator of the vision. The strategist behind the scenes at last stood on the side that operated his ideal in the spotlight.

As for the effect on peace that the ECSC brought, there is a view that sharing the foundation of munitions made Franco-German reconciliation irreversible, while there is also a view that other factors — the balance of power under the Cold War, American involvement, and the like — were also large, and assessments are divided. Still, what is certain is the fact that the reverse idea of having enemies share coal and steel, the most visceral instruments of war, actually moved nations. Here, at last, the ideal became a system. And the six nations gathered in the community, encouraged by this success, began to turn their eyes toward the next ambition. Could they make one not only of coal and steel but of the market itself — the story of integration now advances to its next stage.