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Summary Political Structures and Processes of the European Union
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CLASS 2: A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATIONWhat history of European integration?
History of European integration corresponds with European history of 20th C. & beyond. In some views,
it started in the first half of the 20th C. because it is impossible to understand what happened in the
second part when you are ignoring the first one.
Much of how the European Union works institutionally, has its deep origins in the very beginning so
early seeds, treaties & bargaining between European capitals are key.
Ultimately about ‘high politics’ amongst European capitals: security cooperation <-> economic
integration.
Uniting the continent, step by step
The European Union started in 1952 with 6 member states: France, the Federal Republic of Germany
(two Germanies at that time), Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Luxembourg.
The macro view of the story of European integration is one of expanding an economic and political
model from the original founding six member states to what became 28 member states (6 → 9 → 10
→ 12 → 15 → 25 → 27 → 28 → 27).
Recently, the number of member states got reduced for the first time to 27 (UK left). Next to this,
there were other signs of partial disintegration:
- French ‘empty chair’ crisis in 1965-1966 (debate already started from the beginning)
- Brexit 2016 referendum → 2020 UK withdrawal
- ‘Rule of law’ debate → concerns about Polexit etc.
Some founding fathers
“What will happen after WWII with many destroyed countries?” → some people put forward ideas on
reconceptualizing European politics as we had known it in the previous decades/centuries
1. Konrad Adenauer: He was the mayor of Cologne. He became the first post-war German
chancellor. He pursued a course of orientating West-Germany towards it western partners
(France and the US).
2. Robert Schuman: He was a French foreign minister and is often credited as the single most
important political founding founder of the European project. In 1950 he wrote in a famous
declaration: “make war between France and Germany impossible”.
➔ The beginning of European integration had a lot to do with Franco-German reconciliation after
WWII as Schuman grew up in Alsace-Loraine region. This is a part of what is now France and
has been contested territory between France and Germany. Adenauer grew up in Cologne so
he also looked very westwards.
3. George Marshall: He first had come to Europe as a military assistant during WWI. Later, he was
one of the key generals in the US military establishment and the chief of staff of president
Roosevelt. After he retired, he became secretary of state.
4. Jean Monnet: He was a top level French civil servant who put forward the big ideas of European
integration. What he learned from WWI was that it makes countries stronger if they integrate
their efforts. After WWI ended, he gets sent to the League of Nations in which he articulated
the same ideas but then finds out that “if all states retain national vetoes, there is a risk that
the institutional architecture of cooperation can go into gridlock and collapse”.
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, 5. Paul-Henri Spaak: He was a Belgian prime and foreign minister. His key contribution came
during the period he was foreign minister.
(and many others: Winston Churchill, Alcide De Gasperi…)
➔ They were all already advanced in their careers and they all went through the early decades of
the 20th C. They experienced the destruction of two major world wars, so they felt an urge to
find ways of preventing this from happening. Key point: the story of constructing the European
project starts with a whole generation of individuals who are deeply scarred by wartime
experience and influenced in their thinking by what the wars had shown. “To do things
differently means to do things more together as nations and states.”
Economic integration and security cooperation
Paradox: The economic integration of the European continent was an American idea as they helped
the European countries to work together and in which they succeed. <-> The security part of the story
starts without the Americans, but with European nations being insecure and pulling the Americans
back in.
1947: Major speech delivered by Marshall shortly after he had become US secretary of state. The key
argument was: “Europe has been destroyed by war and the US are ready to support the economic
reconstruction, but on one precondition, namely that Europeans work together and draw up economic
reconstruction plans together.”
1948: European Recovery Programme (Marshall Plan)
Parallel part of the story relating to European cooperation in the field of security. After WWII, all
European nations asked themselves how they are going to reposition themselves in the real world.
France and the UK that allied many decades ago, commit themselves to one another again in 1947 by
the Dunkirk treaty. In 1948, the Benelux countries joined that treaty by the Brussels treaty and formed
the West European Union.
Key idea: European nations lock themselves for their security, because Germany could get powerful
again in the future. Above that, the Soviet Union had expanded and had send its armies into Germany.
These armies did not return, whereas the Western armies did. The Europeans in the West were
demanding the Americans to stay involved and not abandon them. This is how the NATO treaty in 1949
got created.
European Recovery Program/Marshall Plan
George Kennan’s 1946 ‘Long Telegram’: He was a diplomat that got sentenced from the US Embassy
in Moscow. He warned the political leaders in Washington that Europe is ravaged and that it is the
responsibility of the US to do something about it, because if the US does nothing, the Russians will. So
the European Recovery Program was there as an effort to outbid Soviet competition. At the time, the
US was having its own internal debates (isolation vs. engagement). Kennan’s Long Telegram advocated
for continued US engagement in Europe. He made clear that if the relationship between the US and
the SU is to become worse, Europe will be the main theatre where this competition will play out.
Europe is the theatre where the Cold War will take place. The first reaction from Washington is to have
a serious internal debate, but one year later George Marshall became the secretary of state and picks
up Kennan’s line about the importance of the European Recovery Program. This was also the basis for
what became the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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,Addressing the post-war reconstruction conundrum
In the European Recovery Program, you see US financial/material assistance going to European
countries, enabling their post-war reconstruction. The one precondition Marshall added was that
Europeans should work together to make the most efficient use of that American assistance. The US
did not only do this because of idealist thoughts, but also because of the competition with Moscow.
Moscow was weary about Washington’s intentions and the various European countries where Soviet
forces were in place did not sign up to Marshall assistance. Marshall assistance became limited to the
Western part of the European continent and gradually you see the Iron Curtain of the Cold War being
drawn up which started with the competition of economic and political influence in Europe. Economic
assistance starts flowing in and gets accompanied by (un)subtle political messaging.
In the countries receiving the Marshall assistance, the same message is being put forward, namely
“cooperation works better for getting the economy back on track and economic cooperation is also
part of the endeavour of maintaining free societies instead of falling pray to the dark shadow of
communism in the east”. Specifically in France and West-Germany, the US message of cooperation
was very strong: “we can start over again and our assistance will help”. What started as a plan for
economic reconstruction gained speed and set something in motion which no one would have dared
to expect, namely the reconciliation of France and Germany and a new mode of making European
politics function based on cooperation instead of competition.
On Coal and Steel…
The Marshall plan works and economic reconstruction is a success story which leads to new thinking.
Monnet advises the French government and the French foreign minister Schuman to put forward this
bold proposal to lock in what the Marshall plan had put in motion and integrate the key materials of
industrial development (coal and steel), also the same materials essential for maintaining war time
economies. Because if you integrate the management of coal and steel industries in a European
framework you make military conflict between France and Germany materially impossible. The
European Coal and Steel Community building on the Treaty of Paris becomes the prototype
organization of the EU today because it goes beyond the Marshall plan (not temporary), and building
on Monnet’s ideas, it institutionalizes that idea of European cooperation that was already part of the
Marshall plan.
“The pooling of coal and steel production will change the destinies of those regions which have long
been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant
victims.” (Robert Schuman, 1950)
European Coal and Steel Community Institutions (codified in 1951 Treaty of Paris)
The community was a success story as it brought practical advantages and consolidated the idea that
Europeans could pursue closer cooperation with neighbour countries. Its institutional architecture
served as the prototype for the EU today. It had four institutions:
1. High Authority → supranational powers
2. Council of Ministers → harmonization role
3. Common Assembly → advisory role
4. Court of Justice → legal arbitration
The institutional architecture of the EU today is essentially the same, even if there are more European
institutions today, only the High Authority got renamed into the European Commission and the
Common Assembly into the European Parliament.
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, From the Spaak Report (1956)…
It is a diplomatic conference with the main topic being cooperation. Delegations tasked Belgian Paul-
Henri Spaak to come up with a report on how to take this experiment one step further. Spaak
advocated the idea of extending the Coal and Steel Community to other dimensions of economic
management, in particular the creation of a common market for continuing to fuel the European
economic reconstruction.
… to the Treaty of Rome (1957)
The Spaak report provided the input for the Treaty of Rome which is technically speaking the
foundational treaty of the European Union as we know it today. The six founding states of the Coal and
Steel Community embark on this journey of trying to reorganize their economies as a single common
market: to make economic exchange and commerce easier and to leverage trade networks as a
mechanism for creating more goodwill amongst the populations of those states. Monnet said
maximum trade will fuel economic growth and in turn will have a pacifying effect on European politics.
Common Market principles of the Treaty of Rome
Replacing the Coal and Steel Community, the Treaty of Rome introduced the European Economic
Community with an identical institutional framework:
- Commission
- Council of Ministers
- Assembly
- Court of Justice
The most important objective of the EEC was a common market with the following principles:
- Internal tariff removal → free trade area (removal of tariffs amongst EEC states)
- Common external tariff → trade policy (introduction of tariffs & policy towards wider world)
- Competition rules → levelling the playing field
- Promotion of free movement → goods, persons, services, capital
These were all aspirations at the time. We can now take this for granted, but in the 1950’s this was all
very revolutionary because the world as it existed in Europe was a world where you had hard national
borders with custom control and tariffs making economic intercourse across these national borders
much more challenging. The creation of the common market was thus an aspirational and
revolutionary idea, but it was contested from the very beginning because everything “hinched” on the
idea of putting a European Commission in charge of coming up with rules on how this integrated
common market would work. The national governments no longer had full control over how economic
policy would look like which crated a first big clash on how European integration could be reconciled
with the idea of national sovereignty. Charles de Gaulle (French president) was reticent about this idea
that you would have a supranational institution that override the policy preferences of the national
capitals. He therefore sent his foreign minister and ambassador to Brussels with strict instructions to
disagree with everything that could limit the national freedom of the French government.
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