Political Integration of Europe

Report Outline
Opposing Concepts of European Union
Postwar Trend Toward European Unity
European Union and Atlantic Alliance

Opposing Concepts of European Union

Great britain's entry into the Common Market—assuming it is finally accomplished despite doubts and questions recently raised at the meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers in London—will substantially advance the economic integration of Western Europe. It may also bring nearer the more distant goal of European political integration. There has been considerable uncertainty as to whether the British were as interested in political as in economic integration. But Prime Minister Macmillan told Chancellor Adenauer, in a letter made public at the end of August, that his government had been “watching with sympathetic interest the efforts of the Six [Common Market countries] to move towards greater political union.” He assured the West German leader that once Britain had become a member of the Common Market, “we shall wish to join wholeheartedly in this task.”

Six-Nation Parley On European Political Unity

The foreign ministers of the countries already in the Common Market are to meet in Brussels early in October for further discussion of plans for forming a political union. The same six countries set the process of European integration in motion on April 18, 1951, by signing a treaty in Paris setting up the European Coal and Steel Community. Separate treaties signed at Rome on March 25, 1957, established the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the European Economic Community (Common Market). Now, with their economies booming as a result of lowered trade barriers, the Six are seeking to move toward realization of the centuries-old dream of European political unification.

A principal goal of the Paris and Rome treaties was to lay the economic groundwork for political integration. Signatories of the E.C.S.C. treaty resolved “to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the bases of institutions capable of giving direction to their future common destiny.” Similarly, the preamble of the Common Market treaty called for establishment of “an ever closer union among the European peoples.”