The Theory and Reality of the European Coal and Steel Community

European integration began in 1950 with the Schuman Plan, which launched the ECSC. The Schuman Plan was designed to alleviate concerns that Germany’s dominance in coal and steel could be used to harm European reconstruction efforts or to build another war machine. Jean Monnet, the Plan’s chief architect, also wanted to shore up the French planning process for reconstruction by Europeanizing the technocratic planning approach. Most supporters of the ECSC project expected integration to expand beyond Coal and Steel, and hoped that it would serve as a first step toward deeper European integration. European integration theory began with the ECSC as well. Inspired by Monnet’s vision that technical functional integration could lead to political transformation, Ernst Haas created a neofunctionalist theory that specified the mechanisms through which integration would be politically transformative. With governance transferred to the European level, Haas expected the stakeholders associated with the sector to come to see their fate as linked to the ECSC’s success. He predicted that firms, unions, and workers benefiting from ECSC policies would support the ECSC. Success would breed success. As other industries observed the benefits of supranational coordination, they would demand integration in their sectors, leading to the realization of Haas’s hope of moving ‘politics beyond the nationstate’(1958, 1964). After the EEC was launched in 1958, theoretical and practical interest in the ECSC declined. Integrating European economies was a more ambitious goal, and it was clear early on that agriculture—not coal and steel—would be the first large policy nut that had to be cracked for the European project to succeed. Thus by 1958, practically and politically speaking, the success of the coal and steel project was no longer a bellwether for the larger integration efforts. A number of studies of the ECSC were published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, (Haas 1958; Diebold 1959; Scheingold 1965), but then scholarly focus shifted