The French Road to European Community: From the ECSC to the EEC (1945-1957)

Abstract

France has made three major attempts at building supranational European institutions during the early years of integration—the ECSC (1951), the EDC/EPC (1954), and the EEC/EURATOM (1957). Among them, the ECSC and the EEC/EURATOM have been successful, while the EDC/EPC initiative was aborted. This paper asks when and how the French supranational initiative could have survived during the years leading to the Treaty of Rome. Based on a historical survey of French European policy from the ECSC to the EEC, this paper argues that a European supranational initiative could have survived, had it been combined with specific political or economic interest. French European initiatives could have led to European institution building when domestic political support was sufficient to ratify the proposal. External factors affected both the interest calculation and the domestic political cost.