The treaty has been amended on several occasions since 1957. TheMaastricht Treaty of 1992 removed the word "economic" from the Treaty of Rome's official title, and in 2009, theTreaty of Lisbon renamed it the "Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union".
In 1951, theTreaty of Paris was signed, creating theEuropean Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The Treaty of Paris was an international treaty based on international law, designed to help reconstruct the economies of the European continent, prevent war in Europe and ensure a lasting peace.
The original idea was conceived byJean Monnet, a senior French civil servant and it was announced byRobert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in a declaration on 9 May 1950. The aim was to pool Franco-West German coal and steel production, because the two raw materials were the basis of the industry (including war industry) and power of the two countries. The proposed plan was that Franco-West German coal and steel production would be placed under a commonHigh Authority within the framework of an organisation that would be open for participation to other European countries. The underlying political objective of the European Coal and Steel Community was to strengthen Franco-German cooperation and banish the possibility of war.
France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands began negotiating the treaty. The Treaty Establishing the ECSC was signed in Paris on 18 April 1951, and entered into force on 24 July 1952. The Treaty expired on 23 July 2002, after fifty years, as was foreseen. The common market opened on 10 February 1953 for coal, iron ore and scrap, and on 1 May 1953 for steel.
Partly in the aim of creating aUnited States of Europe, two further Communities were proposed, again by the French. AEuropean Defence Community (EDC) and aEuropean Political Community (EPC). While the treaty for the latter was being drawn up by theCommon Assembly, the ECSC parliamentary chamber, the EDC was rejected by theFrench Parliament.PresidentJean Monnet, a leading figure behind the Communities, resigned from the High Authority in protest and began work on alternative Communities, based on economic integration rather than political integration.[1]
As a result of the energy crises, the Common Assembly proposed extending the powers of the ECSC to cover other sources of energy. However, Monnet desired a separate Community to covernuclear power, andLouis Armand was put in charge of a study into the prospects of nuclear energy use in Europe. The report concluded that further nuclear development was needed, in order to fill the deficit left by the exhaustion of coal deposits and to reduce dependence on oil producers. The Benelux states and West Germany were also keen on creating a generalcommon market; however, this was opposed by France owing to itsprotectionist policy, and Monnet thought it too large and difficult a task. In the end, Monnet proposed creating both as separate Communities to attempt to satisfy all interests.[2] As a result of theMessina Conference of 1955,Paul-Henri Spaak was appointed as chairman of a preparatory committee, theSpaak Committee, charged with the preparation of areport on the creation of a common European market. Both the Spaak report and the Treaty of Rome were drafted byPierre Uri, a close collaborator of Monnet.
The outcome of the conference was that the new Communities would share the Common Assembly (now the Parliamentary Assembly) with the ECSC, as they would theEuropean Court of Justice. However, they would not share the ECSC's Council or High Authority. The two new High Authorities would be calledCommissions, from a reduction in their powers. France was reluctant to agree to more supranational powers; hence, the new Commissions would have only basic powers, and important decisions would have to be approved by the Council (of national Ministers), which now adopted majority voting.[4]Euratom fostered co-operation in the nuclear field, at the time a very popular area, and theEuropean Economic Community was to create a fullcustoms union between members.[5][6]
In 1965, France's president Charles de Gaulle decided to recall French representatives from dealing with the Council of Ministers, greatly crippling the EEC's operations. This was known as the "Empty Chair Crisis."[7] To resolve this, the members agreed to the Luxembourg Compromise, in which veto power was given to members of the EC on decisions.[8] The countries of the European Community held a meeting in The Hague in 1969. At this summit, they collectively ordered an increase to the European Parliament's budget while also committing towards a shift away from national economic policy to greater international policy. Following this agreement, two newEuropean Structural Investment Funds were created, which were theEuropean Regional Development Fund and theEuropean Social Fund. These focused on the reallocation of investment funds towards the development of the economies of the member states.[9]
The conference led to the signing on 25 March 1957, of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community and theEuratom Treaty at the Palazzo dei Conservatori onCapitoline Hill inRome. 25 March 1957 was also the Catholic feast day of theAnnunciation of Mary.
In March 2007, theBBC'sToday radio programme reported that delays in printing the treaty meant that the document signed by the European leaders as the Treaty of Rome consisted of blank pages between itsfrontispiece and page for the signatures.[10][11][12]
One of the events in preparation of the 60th anniversary: projection on theColosseum by theJEF[13]Poster celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, on theBerlaymont building
In 2017, Rome was the centre of multiple official[14][15][16] and popular celebrations.[17][18] Street demonstrations were largely in favour of European unity and integration, according to several news sources.[19][20][21][22]
It is important not to overstate the importance of the Rome Treaty. It represented for the most part a declaration of future good intentions...Most of the text constituted a framework for instituting procedures designed to establish and enforce future regulations. The only truly significant innovation – the setting up under Article 177 of a European Court of Justice to which national courts would submit cases for final adjudication – would prove immensely important in later decades but passed largely unnoticed at the time.[23]
Since the end ofWorld War II,sovereignEuropean countries have entered into treaties and thereby co-operated and harmonised policies (orpooled sovereignty) in an increasing number of areas, in theEuropean integration project or theconstruction of Europe (French:la construction européenne). The following timeline outlines the legal inception of theEuropean Union (EU)—the principal framework for this unification. The EU inherited many of its present responsibilities from theEuropean Communities (EC), which were founded in the 1950s in the spirit of theSchuman Declaration.
Legend: S: signing F: entry into force T: termination E: expiry de facto supersession Rel. w/ EC/EU framework: de facto inside outside
^abcdeAlthough not EU treatiesper se, these treaties affected thedevelopment of the EU defence arm, a main part of the CFSP. The Franco-British alliance established by the Dunkirk Treaty wasde facto superseded by WU. The CFSP pillar was bolstered by some of the security structures that had been established within the remit of the 1955Modified Brussels Treaty (MBT). The Brussels Treaty wasterminated in 2011, consequently dissolving the WEU, as themutual defence clause that the Lisbon Treaty provided for EU was considered to render the WEU superfluous. The EU thusde facto superseded the WEU.
^Between the EU's founding in 1993 and consolidation in 2009, the union consisted ofthree pillars, the first of which were the European Communities. The other two pillars consisted of additional areas of cooperation that had been added to the EU's remit.
^Raymond F. Mikesell,The Lessons of Benelux and the European Coal and Steel Community for the European Economic Community, The American Economic Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Seventieth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1958), pp. 428–441
