Treaty of Rome

On 25 March 1957, ministers from six Western European countries met on the Capitoline Hill in Rome to sign the treaty founding the European Economic Community (EEC). The signatories were Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. The treaty took effect on 1 January 1958 and committed its members to a customs union and a common market. Repeatedly amended and renamed, it remains one of the two founding treaties of today's European Union.

The road to Rome began with coal and steel. In a declaration of 9 May 1950, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman put forward an idea conceived by the civil servant Jean Monnet: to place French and West German coal and steel production, the raw materials of war industry, under a shared authority open to other countries. The same six states signed the Treaty of Paris in April 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community. Plans for a European Defence Community then collapsed when the French parliament rejected it, and Monnet turned to economic rather than political integration as the way forward.

Monnet favoured a separate community for nuclear energy, while the Benelux states and West Germany wanted a general common market, which France at first resisted for protectionist reasons. The answer was to create both. After a conference at Messina in 1955, the Belgian statesman Paul-Henri Spaak led a committee whose report, accepted in Venice in May 1956, became the basis for an intergovernmental conference at the Château of Val Duchesse later that year. Both the Spaak report and the treaty itself were drafted by Pierre Uri, a close collaborator of Monnet.

The treaty set out a gradual reduction of customs duties among the six leading to a customs union, and aimed at the free movement of goods, workers, services and capital. It provided for a Common Agricultural Policy, a common transport policy and a European Social Fund, and it established the European Commission. Because France was wary of handing over too much sovereignty, the Commission was given fewer powers than the coal and steel authority, and key decisions were left to a Council of national ministers. A second treaty, signed the same day, created the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). According to a BBC report in 2007, printing delays meant that the document the leaders signed consisted largely of blank pages.

The historian Tony Judt cautioned against overstating the treaty's importance, describing it largely as a statement of future intentions. He singled out one provision, which allowed national courts to refer cases to the European Court of Justice, as the innovation that would prove most significant in later decades. Still, the EEC soon became the most important of the European Communities.

Under Charles de Gaulle, France vetoed British membership, and only after he left office in 1969 did negotiations move ahead; Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 removed the word "Economic" from the treaty's official title, and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 renamed the Rome treaty the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Our 1960 map shows Western Europe in the years just after the treaty took effect, when the six founding members had begun building their common market.