On May 9 1950, at 6:00pm, Robert Schuman proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community. He spoke to a few journalists at the Salon de l’Horloge in the French Foreign Ministry building Quai d’Orsay, Paris; since the press had been informed last-minute, no photographer initially covered the declaration and nor were any radio or television reporters present. He was forced to record his declaration a second time for posterity.

From here, news of the Schuman Declaration—or, as it was nicknamed, the ‘Schuman bombshell’—spread around western Europe. It would, as was intended by Schuman and his collaborator Jean Monnet, create a shock wave which would effectively kick-start the European integration process.

Robert Schuman sits in the Salon de l'Horloge, 1950 © European Communities 1950-1959

The Treaty of Paris, the formal agreement based on this declaration, was signed just under a year later on 18 April 1951. It brought together six countries—Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands—to organise the free movement of coal and steel and to free up access to sources of production. This was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the origin of European Union institutions as we know them today.

Why a coal and steel community? Its purpose was ostensibly to supervise the market, monitor compliance with competition rules and ensure price transparency. Indeed, it would do this for the forty years it was in effect (from 2002, when the treaty expired, rules on the coal and steel sectors were integrated in the treaties establishing the European Community, the Treaty of Rome).

Yet the creation of the ECSC was also dominated by both the lessons of the past and an eye towards the future. The significance of the cooperation of European countries just six years after the end of the Second World War was not lost on its founders; as the Schuman Declaration asserted, “solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”. In the same vein, the institutions of the ECSC kept an eye beyond the coal and steel industries. Ultimately, the Treaty of Paris laid the ground work for the deepening of European economic integration as well as for the establishment of further Community’s institutions with the advent of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and thus is widely regarded as the first step towards European integration.