The Treaty of Rome

MAR 25 1957 · 12:00

Foreign ministers of the Six sign the Treaties of Rome establishing the EEC and Euratom at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 25 March 1957. Place: Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Capitoline Hill, Rome Figures: Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister (and principal architect, via the Spaak Report) · Konrad Adenauer, West German Chancellor · Christian Pineau, French Foreign Minister · Antonio Segni, Italian Prime Minister · Joseph Bech, Luxembourg Prime Minister · Joseph Luns, Dutch Foreign Minister From Coal and Steel to Common Market The European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 pools the two industries most directly implicated in the war just past, under a High Authority that is the first supranational executive in European history. The proposed European Defence Community fails when the French National Assembly rejects it on 30 August 1954. The Messina Conference of June 1955 picks up the surviving thread: an inter-governmental committee under Paul-Henri Spaak produces a report (April 1956) proposing a common market and a separate atomic-energy community. The Spaak Report becomes the negotiating text. Suez (see [[suez-crisis-1956]]) the following autumn concentrates French and German minds on the value of pooling. Two treaties are signed in Rome on 25 March 1957 by the six Coal and Steel Community states: the European Economic Community treaty and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) treaty. The signing room is the same hall where Michelangelo's bronze plaque of Marcus Aurelius once stood and where the popes had received foreign ambassadors. The choice of venue is deliberate; the choice of date (Annunciation) is not coincidental either. Adenauer takes the night train from Bonn rather than fly; the Ge Sovereignty Above the State The EEC treaty creates a customs union (in force by July 1968), a common agricultural policy (codified 1962), free movement of labor and capital (progressive through the 1960s), and four institutions (Commission, Council, Assembly, Court of Justice) with powers that, in their respective domains, override national law. The European Court of Justice will establish the doctrine of direct effect in Van Gend en Loos (1963) and of primacy of EEC law in Costa v. ENEL (1964). Pooled sovereignty, the first significant attempt at it since 1648, is operational within seven years of signature. The Community expands from six to nine (1973: UK, Ireland, Denmark), twelve (1981, 1986: Greece, Spain, Portugal), fifteen (1995: Austria, Finland, Sweden), and after the 1989 reset to twenty-seven by 2013. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) makes it the European Union and adds monetary union; the euro circulates from 2002. Brexit (2020) is the first reversal. The Westphalian state, in this experiment, has consented in eleven languages and seventy years to be partially superseded by a supranational legal order. The experiment is unfinished; in 2026 it is the only one of its scale anywhere in the world. Video: Official European Commission archive footage of the signing of the Treaties of Rome at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 25 March 1957, establishing the EEC and Euratom.