European Coal and Steel Community

The European Coal and Steel Community was established by the Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 April 1951 and entering into force in 1952, among six founding members, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, to place their coal and steel industries under a shared supranational authority. The community grew directly out of the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman and drafted with the planner Jean Monnet, which argued that pooling French and West German coal and steel production, the raw materials of war, would make renewed conflict between the two nations not merely unthinkable but materially impossible. Governed by a High Authority with genuinely supranational powers over its member states' coal and steel sectors, an arrangement unprecedented among sovereign European nations at the time, the community is widely regarded by historians as the founding institution of the modern European integration project. Its founding six members went on to establish the European Economic Community in 1957 using the same institutional model, and the Coal and Steel Community's own founding treaty expired in 2002, with its remaining functions and assets folded into the European Union that had grown from its original design.