The ‘Community Method’ at Sixty

Abstract

On 9 May 1950, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, speaking under the gilded ceiling in the Salon de l’horloge in his Ministry, solemnly invited Germany and other European countries to join France in creating an independent authority that would regulate the markets for coal and steel. If this short address is today regarded as the start of European integration, this is not only because it signalled the beginning of Franco-German reconciliation, but also because it laid down the key elements of an original institutional setting that later came to be known as the ‘Community method’. The basic elements of the model are well-known: the transfer of legislative powers to the European level, the creation of a ‘supranational’ executive — the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community, later replaced by the European Commission — the possibility of voting in order to adopt binding legislation, and the vesting of enforcement powers in a European Court of Justice.