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The treaty instituting the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was signed in Paris on April 18, 1951, after an exhausting negotiation. Even after the treaty was signed, the wrangling continued. The decision over where to base the High Authority was particularly fierce. Liège, Strasbourg, Saarbrücken, and Turin were all mooted as possible locations. Luxembourg, 80 percent of whose economic production was derived from its coal and steel industries, was the compromise agreed upon, more through weariness than conviction, by the Six’s foreign ministers at a summit in Paris on July 23, 1952. It was during this meeting that Konrad Adenauer was overheard by journalists to mutter “poor Europe, poor Europe” as he stalked out of the talks for a reviving cup of coffee.³³ The meeting has been described as a “classic example of national confrontation” that “lacked any sign of European spirit.”³⁴

The preamble to the ECSC treaty expressed lofty sentiments, in striking contrast to the jockeying for national advantage that characterized negotiations both before and after the ratification of the treaty. The “High Contracting Parties” recognized that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity and through the establishment of common bases for economic development” and hence resolved to “substitute for age-old rivalries the merging of their essential interests.” Their intention was to create “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 a direction to a destiny henceforth shared.”

The economic philosophy of the new organization recalled the proposals made by the economic subcommittee of the Congress of Europe. The ECSC was intended to ensure the twin goals of economic liberalism and social solidarity. On the one hand, the ECSC was an effort to prevent protectionist cartels in the coal and steel industries; on the other hand, it was a planning body charged with softening the social costs of modernizing the industries.

The treaty defined the ECSC’s tasks, among other things, as ensuring a steady supply of coal and steel to the market, guaranteeing equality of access to the sources of production for all consumers, monitoring prices, providing a climate that would encourage companies to expand and improve production, and promoting “improved working conditions and an improved standard of living for the workers in each of the industries for which it is responsible.” More generally, it was to “promote the orderly expansion and modernization of production, and the improvement in quality, with no protection against competing industries that is not justified by improper action on their part or in their favor.” Article 4 of the treaty specifically banned import and export duties, quantitative restrictions, discriminatory deals, state subsidies, and market-sharing deals between companies. Article 69 introduced supranational rights for citizens of the member states by permitting the free movement of workers with “recognized skills in a coalmining or steelmaking occupation”: some three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand workers were thus empowered to sell their labor across the community “without being held up by the red tape generally governing the immigration of labor.”³⁵

The most distinctive institution of the new Community was the High Authority. Consisting of nine members, it was “responsible for initiating and framing most of the measures needed to administer the common market.”³⁶ Eight of these nine members were nominated by governments (France and Germany each choosing two, the other four countries nominating one each); the ninth member was selected by the eight nominees. All members served six-year terms and elected a president and two vice presidents from among their own number. The first president was naturally Jean Monnet; his two deputies were both Christian Democrats: Franz Etzel of Germany and the Belgian economist Albert Coppé, who became one of Monnet’s most steadfast supporters.³⁷ The treaty bound the nine members of the Authority to “exercise their functions in complete independence, in the general interest of the Community. In the fulfillment of their duties, they shall neither solicit nor accept instructions from any government or any organization. They will abstain from all conduct incompatible with the supranational character of their functions.”

Monnet regarded the OEEC as a synonym for intergovernmental futility.³⁸ The High Authority that emerged from the ECSC treaty was, by contrast with the OEEC Secretariat, a body with far-reaching independent powers. It could impose fines upon firms that defied its decisions or recommendations; it could facilitate investment by floating loans on the capital markets and then relending the money for investment purposes; it could soften the social costs of industrial modernization by financing vocational retraining, resettlement programs, and “tide over” allowances to workers; during times of “manifest crisis,” it was free to set production quotas in order to prop up demand. In addition to these wide-ranging powers, the High Authority held a broad antitrust brief and was charged with protecting the common market from anticompetitive mergers, pricing policies, or wage reductions. A Consultative Committee of fifty leading producers, trade unionists, and consumers dispensed advice to the High Authority whenever it asked for it.

There were three principal checks on the High Authority’s powers. The Authority’s actions and decisions were second-guessed in many areas by the Council of Ministers, which was given the task of harmonizing “the action of the High Authority and that of the governments, which are responsible for the general economic policies of their countries.” The Council’s approval was necessary for a broad range of policy actions by the High Authority, especially labor issues, transport, and the sale of coal and steel products. The Council was given a limited power to set the High Authority’s agenda and exercised a tight control over its budget. The Council, at which the national governments were usually represented by their economics or industry ministers, thus became a powerful de facto legislature able to block (though not amend) the High Authority’s initiatives. The existence of a strong Council of Ministers was the precondition for Dutch and Belgian approval. The Dutch government was adamant that the High Authority’s mandate should derive from the powers delegated to it by the national governments, and that governments therefore should have the right and the power to monitor and amend its actions.³⁹

The second political check on the High Authority was the Assembly, which consisted of seventy-eight “representatives of the peoples of the States” drawn from national parliaments. The Assembly’s powers were “supervisory.” It had no legislative function. The Assembly was able to demand oral or written replies from members of the High Authority and possessed the power, under article 24 of the treaty, to censure the High Authority’s annual report. In the event of such a motion of censure being passed by a two-thirds majority of votes cast, the High Authority was obliged to resign en bloc. The Assembly was also able to intervene in the budget process. The budget was funded by a levy not exceeding 1 percent on the “average value” of production within the Community, although only under Monnet’s presidency (1952–1955) did it come close to raising and spending such a portion of the industries’ income.

The third checking institution was the Court of Justice. The Court was originally composed of seven judges appointed by the governments of the member states for a period of six years. The treaty was explicit in stating that the judges should be people “whose independence is beyond doubt.” The Court’s powers were very precisely detailed in article 33 of the treaty:

The Court shall have jurisdiction in actions brought by a Member State or by the Council to have decisions or recommendations of the High Authority declared void on grounds of lack of legal competence, major violations of procedure, violations of this Treaty or of any rule of law relating to its application, or abuse of power.

The Court, in other words, was to be a watchdog over the High Authority. Within the Community, its word was law. But its power was unidirectional: firms, citizens, and the High Authority itself could not have recourse to the Court to have national law or administrative directives declared invalid. Despite this caveat, the Court was soon busy and settled several important complaints against the High Authority within the first few years of the ECSC’s life.⁴⁰

The novelty of the ECSC treaty was indisputable. Instead of national governments making decisions in the short-term interest of their domestic industries, with little or no thought for the knock-on effects over their borders, the six member states had delegated executive powers to an independent authority. The states were merely reserving to themselves a circumscribed right of veto over the High Authority’s decisions and the right to ask for judicial review of the Authority’s actions. The egoism of nation-states was to be substituted, in the economic sphere at least, with enlightened planning in a specially created institutional forum. It was this commitment to internationalist principle, not the actual experience of the Community in its first few years of existence, that guaranteed the ECSC the laudatory reception it enjoyed in the halls of academe, especially in the United States.⁴¹

The truth is more prosaic. If one looks at the activities of the ECSC between February 1953 (when the common market in coal was instituted) and February 1958 (the end of the five-year “transitional period” during which all market-deforming practices were supposed to be eliminated), one sees that the Community played a useful, though limited, role in enabling the six member states to wrestle with the social and economic problems presented by two industries of great importance. The High Authority, which Monnet presided over until 1955 when he resigned and was replaced by the senior French politician René Mayer, propped up high-cost Belgian coal until 1958 by imposing an equalizing levy on the sales of cheaper German and Dutch coal (but still took the blame when the mines eventually had to be rationalized) and made notable attempts to inject a degree of competition into the market for coal purchasing, a politically sensitive issue. It also negotiated a generous loan from the American government and floated other loans on the American capital markets. These loans were then used for investment purposes, although ECSC investment was only a fraction of private investment in the same period. Overall, steel production rose by over 40 percent during the transitional period, and trade in steel products and scrap increased greatly. These last successes, however, owed more to the general rapid expansion of the European economy in these years than to the activities of the ECSC.

On the other hand, the market for coal and steel products was still anything but free in 1958. The High Authority rapidly discovered that it could not establish a common market by decree. Italy’s domestic market in steel was still highly protected (Italy having won a five-year exemption in a protocol to the original treaty), and governments possessed an array of devices—currency devaluation, sales taxes, rebates, and subsidies of all kinds—that enabled them to advantage domestic producers.⁴² Governments defended national champions tenaciously. The French national coal import agency, for instance, which restricted permits to a handful of dealers purchasing large quantities of coal and coke, was defended tooth and nail by the French government before the Court of Justice and, in 1958, still had its powers intact. Freedom of movement rights were established, after exhausting negotiations, only in December 1954, and the national parliaments took until the summer of 1957 to ratify the accords reached (small-population Luxembourg was the worst foot dragger). An association agreement with Great Britain was signed on December 21, 1954, but it only amounted to a forum for the exchange of information and was not, as Monnet had originally hoped, the outcome of a process bringing the “reduction, and if possible abolition, of reciprocal protection mechanisms.”⁴³ Only in September 1957 were skilled workers freed to move.⁴⁴ The worsening situation of the coal industry posed severe social problems that the High Authority had neither the financial resources nor the will to handle on its own.⁴⁵ Overall, as the transitional period wore on, the High Authority became more and more reluctant to take initiatives without the prior approval of the Council of Ministers.