The Political Background to European Integration

Abstract

Political motives dominated European integration from the start. An overriding motive was the determination to prevent another war between Germany and France. Three wars had taken place within a century, at ever decreasing intervals. The firm intention to render further wars impossible inspired six European countries — France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries—to single out the two sectors of national economies then indispensable for waging war, the coal and steel sectors, and to subordinate them in a European Coal and Steel Community to a High Authority, which was intended to be supranational. As French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann, after whom the project was named, put it in May 1950: ‘The common production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not only unthinkable, but materially impossible.’¹