The European Union grew out of the coal and steel pact because the pact supplied its working parts. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded on 23 July 1952, had a high authority independent of its member governments, a court, an assembly and a council of ministers. Those four became the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament and the council where EU governments still meet.
Its makers meant it as a start. The BBC’s account is that the community’s planners always saw it as the first step towards ever closer integration.
Why coal and steel
The plan came from France. Robert Schuman, the foreign minister, unveiled it in May 1950, though the BBC calls his adviser Jean Monnet the real force behind it. It put French and German coal and steel under one supranational high authority, so that the Ruhr, the Saar and Lorraine would work together rather than compete.
Coal and steel were what weapons were made of. Taking them out of national hands, the planners hoped, would make another world war impossible. Schuman’s own phrase was that war would become materially impossible.
There were plainer motives too. French steel depended on coke from the Ruhr, which the Allies had occupied since 1945, and that arrangement could not last once West Germany became a republic in 1949. Konrad Adenauer, its chancellor, wanted his country out of pariah status as the Cold War deepened.
Six in, Britain out
France and West Germany were joined by Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The six pledged a single market in coal and steel, without tariffs or quotas, and a single labour market.
Britain refused. Herbert Morrison, the deputy prime minister, is credited with the put-down that the Durham miners would not wear it. The Labour government had just nationalised coal. Britain joined the European mainstream only in 1973.
The pact worked on its own terms. Between 1952 and 1960 iron and steel output in the member states rose by 75%, and industrial production by 58%. When Belgium overproduced coal, the community cut its capacity by 30% and paid for miners to retrain.
From six-nation pact to union
The same six went further. The 1957 Treaty of Rome turned the ECSC’s members into the European Economic Community, which began in 1958. A sister body, Euratom, did for nuclear power what the ECSC had done for coal and steel.
The high authority itself became part of the European Commission in 1967. Summits, treaties and name changes followed, up to the European Union of passport-free Schengen travel and a shared currency.
The ECSC formally ended in 2002, by which time the EU had long absorbed its powers. The BBC noted that it outlasted the last Durham coal pit by almost a decade.
