I. Embedding European integration

On many issues, other organisations had developed forms of co-operation long before the EC/EU entered the debate. By the 1950s internationalisation and globalisation had reached an extent where Western European nation states were anything but self-contained monads – if they had ever been. In many cases, the choice actors found themselves confronted with was which of the several European or international solutions they found most advantageous. In the short span between 1945 and 1948, some one hundred international organisations were newly created, while the overall number rose from 832 in 1951 to 1255 by 1960. Driven by rising cold war tensions, the main geographic focus of these organisations was the North Atlantic, turning Western Europe especially into a region densely crowded with international forums.Footnote ⁸ From their inception, the Communities were therefore embedded in a dense and complex network of links connecting the various Western European countries to one another and to their benevolent hegemon, the United States. Particularly after 1947, America facilitated the creation of the multiple structures that made Western Europe's post-war international history so distinctive, if one considers the role of NATO, the OECD, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or the Bretton Woods institutions. Non-governmental actors such as the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic organisations as well as a bouquet of bilateral relationships were additional to all these.Footnote ⁹

While this broader context is well known, it is often only seen as a rather static, structural factor facilitating European integration. The EC's embeddedness in a wide array of other organisations did however lead to various forms of interaction, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Typology of EC/EU relationship with other international organisations

The fact that the Communities were fragile latecomers in a closely networked region partially explains why they did not assume certain tasks and competences. The transport sector is a very good example for what could be called a crowding-out situation, in which one set of actors was marginalised and the other dominated the field of action.

Even though the creation of a Common Transport Policy was enshrined in the EEC Treaty, the project did not take off before the 1990s. For this reason, it is often seen as a failure of pre-Maastricht European integration. This interpretation is problematic, however. Years before the negotiations over the Rome Treaties, the UN Economic Commission for Europe's International Transport Committee (UNECE-ITC), the OEEC and the Council of Europe had started to discuss transport co-operation in Europe. As a result, 1953 had seen the creation of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) by sixteen Western European countries. The ECMT had no supranational aspirations and remained an intergovernmental, largely technical body composed of experts from the sector. When the EEC negotiations on a Common Transport Policy based on the Treaties of Rome started to get serious in the early 1960s, the ECMT time and again declared its own platform to be flexible enough to incorporate the concerns and issues under discussion. The European Commission did rather little to either integrate or successfully challenge this competitor and in the end it was to take until the 1990s before the plan for a Common Transport Policy took off.Footnote ¹⁰

Besides transport, other policy fields, such as electricity or nuclear safety, also long remained outside or on the margins of the EEC as Western European states preferred international alternatives which more closely matched their perceived needs.Footnote ¹¹ The examples are numerous with security being the best known. The 1954 debacle of the European Defence Community (EDC) project has to be seen against the backdrop of NATO: unlike the situation in the inter-war years, there was now a viable security structure. This puts the EDC saga into the proper perspective: its abortion represented a resounding defeat for the six ECSC member states, but did not lead to any fundamental security gap or threat.

As revealed by the example of NATO, other forms of European or North Atlantic co-operation often took over tasks that would have overburdened the emerging Communities during the early stages, particularly in fields that were as complex, controversial and crucial as security and monetary co-operation. Thus protected from the harshest aspects of a world dominated by the cold war and the beginnings of a new wave of globalisation, the Communities could concentrate on issues that were significant, such as coal, steel or the common market, but stood outside the full glare of public attention. Sheltered in their incubator by other European and trans-Atlantic organisations, the European Communities could first establish their institutions and slowly prepare for other tasks, which they then increasingly started to take on from the 1970s, when the post-war architecture of internationalism changed substantially.

While policy domains like transport and security remained on the margins of integration not least because of the existence of workable alternatives, there were also instances of open rivalry. The best-known example is the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), where an institutional setup that was first discussed as an umbrella organisation encompassing the EEC turned instead into a rival to the emerging Common Market. Although subsequently marginalised by the EC, even today a vestige of the original EFTA operates parallel to, and is linked to, the EU. Hence, over time, it has moved from the ideal type of competition closer to the one of crowding out.Footnote ¹² A clearer division of labour resulting from lasting coexistence characterises a policy field like development co-operation, in which the EC became one of the international players next to organisations such as the World Bank or the UN Development Programme.Footnote ¹³

Such findings also place policy domains in which the EC came to play an important role in a new light: agricultural integration, for instance, started from preconditions very similar to transport at the level of structural pressures and existing state policies when it was inserted into the EEC Treaty of 1957. As with transport, serious and detailed negotiations among the six member states only started after the Treaty had been concluded, but the Common Agricultural Policy turned into the EEC's most important pillar over the course of the next ten years. Conversely echoing the argument on transport, I contend that agriculture had no viable alternative to an EC solution of the kind that the ECMT represented for transport or NATO for security.Footnote ¹⁴ While forums such as the UNECE or the OECD also dealt with issues of agriculture, they did not come up with any proposals that challenged the EEC's pride of place.

In all these cases, the plurality of organisations ultimately led to a certain division of labour between the Communities and other international organisations. This was the result not of one big bargain, but of complex negotiations between national, transnational and international actors.

In other constellations, however, the EC/EU directly profited from developments in other international settings and energised itself through them. Today's most important EU symbol, the flag, has already been mentioned and deserves closer scrutiny here. Interestingly, it was first developed for the Council of Europe and adopted in 1955 in its present form. Some thirty years later, in 1986, all EC institutions took over this symbol.Footnote ¹⁵ While this fact is often mentioned in passing, it is quite remarkable. There are very few other modern examples in which an entity with far-reaching aspirations has simply emulated the symbolic trappings of another institution. Today, almost sixty years after its creation and almost thirty years after its adoption by the EC, the flag is more often associated with the EU than with the CoE, because of the former's greater significance and its heavier usage of the emblem. The flag's EU credentials also explain why it has become an inspiration for the banners of states like Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in both of which the EU is heavily involved. Obviously, transfer processes are variegated, and while the EU has copied practices from elsewhere, it has also served as an inspiration for others.Footnote ¹⁶

Beyond symbols and this rather straightforward and intuitively assessable case of borrowing, synergies and selective adaptation loom large in fields in which the EC/EU has acquired its role incrementally, often without a formal Treaty basis. Sticking with the example of the Community's relationship with the Council of Europe, cultural policy comes to mind. In several instances, the EC has used the experience of the CoE as a point of reference and inspiration for its own programmes, especially on issues of heritage. The very concept of a European cultural heritage as developed by the CoE was emulated by the EC and used to justify its first actions in the field of culture during the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁷ Today, the two institutions often collaborate closely, with the CoE taking the lead at the level of content.Footnote ¹⁸ Given that cultural policy has remained an ancillary field of EU integration, such synergies are crucial for the Union's activities.

Similar things could be said about other policy domains, for instance the gradual emergence of an EC environmental policy during the 1970s. The Environmental Action Programme of 1973, the point of reference for any subsequent EC legislation on the issue, borrowed heavily from UN and Council of Europe initiatives, particularly in its problem definition, but also in the measurements and priorities it proposed. This does not imply that it copied everything. The preservation of species and wildlife, for instance, played a much smaller role in the Programme than in CoE documents of the time. Again, the EC was a latecomer in a debate that was spearheaded by the UN in general and UNESCO specifically, the US government, NATO – yes, NATO! – and, at the European level, the Council of Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ Another example is the incremental evolution of a ‘European’ research policy during the 1960s and 1970s. This cannot be understood without factoring in OECD discussions, which disseminated American ideas on the link between science, technology and the state and thus set the ideational agenda for EC action in the field.Footnote ²⁰ Contrastingly, in health, the EC picked up the ball much later. Its first attempts to acquire competences in a field densely populated by the WHO, the CoE and others, proved unsuccessful to the extent that they threatened the whole endeavour. Since the late 1990s, the Union has moved towards co-operation with these other organisations, which has helped to broaden its legitimacy as an actor in this policy domain (where it now even threatens to overtake its competitors).Footnote ²¹

Beyond specific policy fields, the EC has also adopted procedures first instituted by others. The peer review mechanism, in the sense of the policies and performances of one country being assessed by others, was pioneered by the OECD during the 1960s and then adopted by a whole host of other international and regional organisations, including the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).Footnote ²²

Formal EC/EU participation in wider international organisations deserves particular attention, such as the economic discussions in GATT and the security and human rights negotiations in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), in both of which the EC sometimes managed to speak with one voice, either through its proper EC mechanisms or through the European Political Cooperation (EPC). The EPC as a foreign policy instrument of the EC member states was created in 1970 but not formally incorporated into the EC framework until much later.Footnote ²³ The EPC and the Commission, for instance, co-operated closely during the negotiations about the establishment of official EEC–China relations during the 1970s.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, the Communities managed to assert their role in the negotiations with COMECON during the same decade.Footnote ²⁵ In all these cases, the EC acquired additional actor qualities and significance through its contribution to wider international forums, either alone or in close co-operation with other institutional arrangements of its member states, such as the EPC. This field is still largely uncharted water, and more research here would build on the recent interest in historiography in unearthing the various links between East and West, in the sense of holes perforating the Iron Curtain during the cold war.Footnote ²⁶

In a similar vein, the EC/EU has also become the wider forum in which partial agreements, reached by only some of its member states, have been concluded. The Schengen Agreement of 1985 on national border controls between five of the ten EC member states at the time is a particularly interesting example: while originally forming an independent structure, it was incorporated in EU law with the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, thus adding further competences and actor qualities to the EU.Footnote ²⁷ It is very unclear whether the Eurozone, as another example of this kind, will have a similar trajectory in the future.

From this perspective, moments of ‘enlargement’ are phases preceded by intense decision-making about other European forums. In all rounds of EC/EU expansion, applicant countries (re-)negotiated their commitment to other international organisations. Long before entering the EU in 2004, for instance, Poland, the Czech Republic and other states had joined organisations like the CoE or NATO, and the indirect mid-term impact of the expansion on the EU's competences was also informed by a choice between alternative forums.Footnote ²⁸

Taken together, these examples in sectors and policy domains as diverse as culture and agriculture, the environment and trade, in addition to examples of organisational features such as peer reviewing demonstrate the need to further contextualise European integration. Very often, discussions started in a whole host of forums, in the UN, the OECD, the Council of Europe and even NATO, as well as more specialised sub-organisations or independent bodies. Time and again, the EC/EU was a latecomer and not a trailblazer, and only in certain cases did it then assume the lead. Its agenda and trajectory thus emerged not solely from negotiations among its member states but also from its interaction with other international organisations and was embedded in their respective trajectories.

The precise role of the EC/EU obviously varies from case to case. In order to carve out a space for itself, it often had to compete with rival claims, leading to the marginalisation of one set of actors or a division of labour. A lack of organisational alternatives at the international level, in contrast, sometimes led to strong EC/EU competences. In a third scenario, a different and distinct organisation was perceived as a role model, leading to selective adaptation or even partial convergence, and sometimes also to co-operation. Finally, the EC/EU time and again saw itself inserted into larger organisational frameworks such as GATT. By contributing to them, over time it could energise itself and win credibility and legitimacy. In the early years, it was particularly the fragility and weakness of the Communities that made them forge links with other frameworks. Paradoxically, the EU's increased role in recent times has not isolated but integrated it further into this world of international organisations in Europe and beyond: since the Union now carries real weight, it is an important partner in the world of internationalism, as recently revealed by the formation of ‘troikas’ of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF since 2010 to help Greece and other member states in the ongoing economic crisis.

Obviously, the typology established above does not do full justice to all empirical cases. Sometimes, several of the processes that can be distinguished analytically take place simultaneously or consecutively. Embeddedness in a larger international organisation might for instance serve as a starting point for acts of emulation or promotion. The protection of disabled people is a good recent example: after a Directive in 2000 strengthening the rights of disabled persons in the workplace the EU tried to upload its rules to the UN level.Footnote ²⁹ Co-operation and competition, and sometimes even crowding out can go hand in hand. Again, the relationship between the Council of Europe and the EC/EU offers many examples for this multiplicity of forms of interaction.Footnote ³⁰

Moreover, there is no easy answer as to why one institutional forum was chosen and not another. As the lawyers Bruno de Witte and Anne Thies have recently argued, forum choice may be determined by several factors: by path dependence, i.e. an international organisation's competence and expertise in a given field, upon which new steps are then built; by the geographical nature of the subject matter, which for instance incentivises a rather clear-cut group of states to co-operate on Rhine navigation; by the ease of decision-making, which basically refers to the voting system and the effort it takes to modify a given decision; by the effectiveness of the law-making process; by the preferences of member states; and by the legal and political constraints and considerations of the international organisation involved.Footnote ³¹ To this list, other factors such as the possibility of package deals with other policy domains in a given international organisation as well as the negotiating skills of the actors involved could be added. Obviously, more research is needed to complete and hierarchise this list of criteria.

International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and other transnational actors have made crucial contributions to these exchanges between the EC/EU and other international organisations, and have also created other forms of entanglement that only a form of analysis which is not EU-centric can fully reveal. Distinguishing between informal networks, INGOs, agencies such as international administrative unions and formal international organisations is often difficult, since some have changed their functions and character over time.Footnote ³² Still, transnational actors – be they individuals or networks – have often lubricated or blocked exchanges between international organisations,Footnote ³³ as much as they have liaised between member states and the EC/EU. Quite commonly, networks such as Jean Monnet's Action Committee for the United States of Europe, the Bilderberg Group or transnational party co-operation have impacted on European co-operation, both in the EC context and beyond. The same holds true for individuals who simultaneously or subsequently contributed to more than one international organisation. Paul-Henri Spaak, for instance, did not just play a crucial role as a national politician in Belgium but also as president of first the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe (1949–51) and subsequently of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (1952–4). He also served as Secretary-General of NATO (1957–61) and as President of the UN General Assembly (1946–7), and participated in the Bilderberg Group, thus linking all these forums and their activities.Footnote ³⁴

In general, such networks and the persons in them have played a triple role: firstly, they have time and again facilitated and sustained political co-operation and integration by sharing information and building mutual trust, both for members within one institutional setting, and also between the various European and global organisations, since most of these political networks were not EU-centric. Secondly, these networks have helped to familiarise new members with European or international politics, whether after generational shifts or rounds of enlargement. Thirdly and finally, transnational forums have contributed to defining common policy objectives. Especially in this case, they are more than the soft hinterland of official organisations, but their role in the other two scenarios should not be underestimated either.Footnote ³⁵

Transnational actors have thus established and reinforced contacts between the EC/EU and other international arenas, contributing to the various forms of interaction between institutions outlined in the typology described above. Simultaneously, their embeddedness in a wider world of internationalism has subjected them to change. Again, agriculture is a good example. Even if there was no international organisation fully rivalling the European Community's aspirations to integrate the sector during the 1950s, there was a dense network of transnational farming organisations, particularly producer pressure groups. After 1957, when the Common Agricultural Policy was being established, the Commission encouraged the sector to form a lobby group exactly tailored to the size of the EEC's six member states, since this would make negotiations with stakeholders much easier. And indeed, 1958 saw the creation of the Comité des organisations professionnelles agricoles (COPA), which consequently became quite an important player, while the International Federation of Agricultural Producers or the Confédération Européenne de l’Agriculture, with their much wider geographic span, lost in relative importance.Footnote ³⁶

Besides such forms of realignment, European integration also led to forms of co-construction between international and transnational actors. European law offers a very good example for this subtle form of interaction. All EU experts know about the central role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), whose powers far exceed those of the judicial branch of a typical international organisation and make the ECJ the principal defender of supranational constitutionality. This role, however, was by no means preordained and the Treaties of Rome gave a wide berth to any idea of creating a constitutional order, opting instead for a model based on classic international agreements. It was only from the late 1950s that the legal service of the European executive started to promote the idea of more comprehensive rights for the ECJ, with particularly Michel Gaudet, the éminence grise of the service, pushing for a federal and constitutional understanding. Gaudet wanted the ECJ to assume a constitutional role similar to the US Supreme Court. As the most recent research on the issue has demonstrated, the legal service helped to establish European law associations in various countries during the early 1960s and to set up a transnational umbrella organisation, the Fédération internationale pour le droit européen (FIDE). It was also the legal service that recommended specific topics for FIDE congresses, thus carefully preparing the ground for the fight to expand the EEC's legal competences. This was the backdrop to the first landmark decision by the ECJ, Van Gend en Loos of 1963, a legal dispute about the creation of the Common Market, which established the principle of direct effect of EEC law. A networked group of experts was now ready to support and add legitimacy to this ground-breaking decision, and without this help, Van Gend en Loos might not have turned into the ECJ success it then became.Footnote ³⁷

Put more abstractly and in the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, we see here the emergence of a ‘European field’ of political action: a formal organisation sought to structure its environment and as a consequence experts played an important role in co-constructing European integration by shaping the forms of knowledge and the ways of reasoning that legitimise European policies. They helped to frame the social and communicative strategies that define the European field. Hence, the role and autonomy of European law is not simply an effect of integration through the hand of official institutions: it also results from the active role law professors and practitioners have played to turn it into a professional field.Footnote ³⁸ In the course of integration, other scholarly communities have been approached by EU institutions in similar ways, and the Jean Monnet Chairs and Centres can be seen in this context, too.Footnote ³⁹

Taking these various examples together, transnational actors have added substantially to the realm of internationalism in which the EC/EU was embedded. Not only did they strengthen the links between the Communities and their member states, as the existing research stresses: they also actively facilitated and reinforced links between various international organisations and have been subject to realignment and co-construction. Finally, they cannot be reduced to a role of auxiliary forces, solely facilitating the exchange between international organisations, but must also be studied in their own right.

To summarise this first part: there is no general theory proposed here, predicting under which conditions and in which constellations the EC/EU did or will acquire new competences, or which other international forum might be chosen. Still, the result of negotiations was not just determined by national interests, general structural needs such as the wish to preserve peace or the role of EU bodies in the bargaining processes, but also by the availability of alternatives at the level of international and transnational organisations, together with synergies and acts of emulation. Since many transnational and international actors existed long before the European Communities were created, it is often necessary to go back to the inter-war years or even further to fully understand the trajectory of co-operation and integration in a given sector or for a specific set of actors.Footnote ⁴⁰

The multiplicity of international options in which the European Communities were embedded is even epitomised by their own character: after all, for a couple of years, three largely discrete Communities – the ECSC, the EEC and Euratom – coexisted during the 1950s and early 1960s, co-operating, competing, copying and co-constructing each other. So what has been demonstrated here for the international world beyond the EC/EU holds true to some extent even for its inner dynamics. But much more research is needed to fully understand the chronology, causal mechanisms and trajectories of these interactions.

II. Sui generis or synecdoche? Provincialising the European Communities

Embedding the history of the EC/EU in a wider landscape of international and transnational organisations begs the following question: does the EC/EU stand out in any respect? Today, after the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty and not least due to the ongoing crisis, the EU is a potent and recognised force. For the early decades however, the picture is less clear, since the competences of the European Communities remained narrowly circumscribed and focused mainly on the economy. Only by degree was it any different from other technical organisations such as the CoE, the OECD or the UNECE. It comprised fewer member countries than these other bodies and the scope of its policy fields was narrower than, for example, that of the CoE. At the same time, the balance sheet of the European Communities was rather mixed. Few of the ECSC's policies had demonstrable effects. Euratom, the project originally deemed more important than the Common Market, saw its more ambitious aims abandoned soon after its creation.Footnote ⁴¹ What, then, made the European Communities stand out?

Many scholars would argue that the EC has always been different to other regional organisations because of the supranational elements that made it a creature sui generis. Here, closer inspection is revealing. Obviously, all European institutions from the European Coal and Steel Community through the EEC to the EU have only been partly supranational. While Jean Monnet and his team hoped in 1952 that the main competences of the ECSC's High Authority would be ‘analogues à celles d’un État’,Footnote ⁴² pressure particularly from the French government made sure that they would soon know better.Footnote ⁴³ In the EC, supranational elements became even more mixed with intergovernmental components, and to this day the EU is a hybrid creature.

But were the ECSC and the European Communities the first institutions with supranational elements? That is the standard story historians usually tell us. If anything, the literature refers to the Allied Maritime Transport Council of the First World War as an inspiration for Jean Monnet as the architect of the Schuman Plan. The Council, for which Monnet worked during the war, was an ‘experiment in international administration’, but even its chronicler Arthur Salter stresses that it was based on the co-operation of ‘national departments’ and hence does not qualify fully for supranationality.Footnote ⁴⁴ The League of Nations is often mentioned too, but again, it possessed no supranational elements.Footnote ⁴⁵

By systematically embedding the European Communities in the wider landscape of transnational and international organisations, one arrives at different conclusions, however. For a long time, lawyers have argued that the European Communities’ institutional features came out of the existing toolbox of international law. Particularly international administrative unions, as allegedly non-political bodies regulating for instance shipping and tariff issues, have been seen as predecessors of the EC/EU.Footnote ⁴⁶ While the legal literature has stressed that supranational elements in these organisations remained limited, the most recent historical literature has led to new findings. By assessing the usual legal criteria defining supranationality,Footnote ⁴⁷ Guido Thiemeyer and Isabel Tölle have singled out the little-known 1804 Octroi Treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire regulating shipping on the Rhine as a framework that reveals all characteristics defining supranationality. Certainly, the Octroi Treaty was short-lived and soon replaced by the better-known Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine of 1816. Still, it demonstrates that the creation of modern nation states went hand in hand with attempts to supersede their sovereignty, and that by the nineteenth century one already finds processes of European integration with a supranational dimension.Footnote ⁴⁸

These antecedents were not referred to during the discussions of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the absolute novelty of the situation was stressed, particularly by the actors of the newly created institutions with supranational credentials. An internal document from the ECSC, probably written by Pierre Uri as one of Jean Monnet's closest collaborators, stressed for the High Authority the ‘caractère sans précédent de cette institution, première autorité supranationale’,Footnote ⁴⁹ while Walter Hallstein, the towering first president of the European Commission, described the EEC as a creature ‘sui generis, a new kind of political animal’, which he sharply delimited from all existing forms of co-operation in Europe and beyond.Footnote ⁵⁰ The solemn Joint Declaration of the Ministers signing the ECSC Treaty in 1951 even stressed that through the new ‘organisation, involving a hundred and sixty million Europeans, the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supra-national institution and thus to lay the real foundations of an organised Europe’.Footnote ⁵¹ Soon scholars from a whole host of academic disciplines seconded them, most notably lawyers and political scientists.Footnote ⁵² In this case, the search for a new past – and a new future – implied trimming the links to predecessor organisations that would have challenged the exceptional and unique character of the EC.

Against this backdrop, I contend that it was not its precise competences, its effects, or its institutional uniqueness that made the EC stand out. More important was the way it self-fashioned and surrounded itself with a great sense of expectancy. In a nutshell, ever since the days of the ECSC the Communities have stressed their self-declared will to be different from all other international and transnational organisations; to stand for a new take on Europe. Instead of dealing with petty technical issues regarding soft coal and durum wheat, the Communities claimed to represent the European solution to the most pressing problems of the time. By conflating the EC/EU with Europe, it also generously overlooked its embeddedness in wider European and North Atlantic policy structures as well as the synergies drawn from this fact.Footnote ⁵³

A couple of examples have to suffice: at the inaugural session of the ECSC's Common Assembly in September 1952 the first speaker was the Italian representative Antonio Boggiano-Pico. In a rather lengthy speech he did not go into any details of the new institution, instead stressing ‘que l’idée, la grande idée de l’Europe fedérée, est en marche’.Footnote ⁵⁴ When Time magazine featured Jean Monnet on its cover in 1962 – as a privilege reserved for the planet's top movers and shakers – it had little to do with his formal role; in fact, Monnet did not hold any noteworthy office at the time.Footnote ⁵⁵ Instead, the honour was bestowed on him for his past achievements and even more because of the grand hopes associated with his projects. In a similar vein, French intellectual Raymond Aron in 1963 called some technical agreements on the nascent Common Agricultural Policy ‘La victoire de l’idée européenne’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Obviously, this cannot be explained by his love of farming. Rather, he used these grandiloquent words because he saw the decision primarily as a symbol that the member states could agree on something; that European integration was developing into a meaningful reality. The identification of the EEC with Europe at large even resonates in Turkish sources of the 1960s, when the country negotiated an Association Agreement with the EEC. Foreign Minister Feridun Cemal Erkin noted in 1963 that the agreement represented ‘the Turkish Republic's goal to join Europe and the standard of civilisation it represents’.Footnote ⁵⁷ No comparable idea informed Turkish perceptions of NATO, the OECD or the CoE, however.

Generally, federalists aspired to use the early Communities as a springboard to a United States of Europe. Gaullists feared the very same – but also identified the Communities fully with ‘Europe’. De Gaulle himself legitimised his 1963 veto on British accession with France's interest in keeping the EC ‘une construction proprement européenne’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Paris voiced no such concern when it came to other regional or international organisations of post-war Western Europe, and thus even the Gaullists imbued the Communities with a special kind of meaning. The hoopla surrounding the Empty Chair Crisis in 1965/66 would have been quite inconceivable for organisations such as the OECD, the CoE or the CEPT, which remained as technical as their acronyms sound. Obviously, the nature and future of the EC remained highly controversial, and the concrete expectations sometimes utterly vague and often divergent. Leaving the nationalist and communist fringes aside, the political elite in member states, candidate countries like the United Kingdom, but also other parts of the world still agreed that this was the one visionary project in Western Europe – for better or for worse.Footnote ⁵⁹

Against this backdrop, the European Community became increasingly identified with two grand récits: with peace and prosperity.Footnote ⁶⁰ No doubt it contributed to both, but the details are revealing. The EC presupposed peace in Western Europe as much as generating it. By the same token, however, it resulted from and contributed to the cold war confrontation. If, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis had led to the Third World War, and if there had been any historiography left thereafter, it would have cited Western European integration as one (minor) factor explaining the dynamics of the cold war. As to prosperity, it is striking how little proper economic research we have as to the effects of the EEC, and that scholars are far from agreeing whether it facilitated or slowed down economic growth for specific member states, the EEC as a whole, or the world economy.Footnote ⁶¹ Against this backdrop, the EC came to symbolise peace and prosperity more directly than it could claim to be their main root.

This is what shall be called the synecdochic quality of the EC/EU integration process. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which something is used to refer to something larger; for instance, if one refers to twenty sails when one means twenty ships, or to ‘Coke’ for any variety of cola. What made the Communities distinct was that they were charged with added European credentials. In that sense, the Communities came to symbolise Europe, and thus a much larger and much more multi-faceted entity. They basically represented the member states’ wish to find a new overall framework of coexistence and co-operation in Western Europe – even if some of the EC's organisational features were not radically new, and some of their competences had been seconded or superseded by the role of other international organisations. In this sense, the European Communities turned into the symbolic core of all attempts of European co-operation, even if political reality remained much more fragile and patchy.

It was only by the late 1960s or early 1970s that political reality started to catch up with some of these aspirations of grandeur. It took the first enlargement round, the creation of the European Council, the incremental acquisition of new competences, as well as turbulences and tectonic changes in the trans-Atlantic world of internationalism to make it clear that the European Communities had established themselves as the foremost forum of European co-operation.Footnote ⁶² The increased significance of the EC was soon overshadowed by a discussion about the 1970s as a ‘dark age’ and the early 1980s as a period of ‘Eurosclerosis’,Footnote ⁶³ but these only underlined the synecdochic quality of EC integration. According to the Communities’ self-perception, the status quo of the acquis was simply not enough; to fully represent Europe, ever more steps were needed. Walter Hallstein's bon mot, according to which integration was like a bicycle, on which ‘You either move on or you fall off’, fully captures this idea.Footnote ⁶⁴ Commission President Gaston Thorn's 1984 ‘doom and gloom’ lecture at the European University Institute is another good example stressing the role of the EC for Europe, its title reminding as much of Shakespeare as of the decisionist logic of the infamous German lawyer Carl Schmitt. ‘European Union or Decline: To Be or Not To Be’ left little room for alternative settings next to the European Communities, and clearly argued the need for a quantum leap in the Community context.Footnote ⁶⁵

No doubt, the Communities resulted from hard-nosed negotiations between the member states.Footnote ⁶⁶ But they also became a projection screen for higher hopes and larger aspirations. While such aggrandisement is an accepted part of politics, the gap between political competences and effects on the one hand and self-fashioning on the other was particularly large for the Communities.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is already evident in the Schuman declaration of 1950. While stressing that ‘Europe will not be made all at once’, but be ‘built through concrete achievements’, it left no doubt that the planned ECSC was meant to be a first and crucial step into that direction.Footnote ⁶⁸ Building on such discursive strategies, the EC managed over time to monopolise the idea of Europe vis-à-vis organisations like the OECD or the CoE, with which it shared so much at a day-to-day level.

This development was by no means pre-ordained, particularly since the CoE had originally been the main focus of federalist hopes. By the time the Communities were created, these aspirations had already been frustrated, partially explaining why attention then shifted to the EC. Still, protocol debates of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate that it was by no means clear that a Jean Monnet or a Walter Hallstein would be treated differently from the representatives of the OEEC or the CoE.Footnote ⁶⁹ The identification of the EC with Europe only evolved incrementally. Over time, these international organisations were much less associated with far-reaching goals, even if their preambles are often as visionary as the EEC Treaty, and even if they tried to stress their contribution to peace and prosperity as much as the Communities.Footnote ⁷⁰ Much more than these other forums, the EC/EU came to be identified with a provisional, stopgap and ultimately synecdochic quality, which even permeated its legal documents. One legal scholar has identified their tendency to ‘lag ahead’ of themselves, in the sense of pointing up their own inchoateness which would have to be remedied by further integration steps in the future.Footnote ⁷¹

The set of actors pushing for such a synecdochic view on the Communities varied over time, and cannot be summarised neatly. Apparently, the European Commission, situated at the Communities’ synecdochic heart, has often spearheaded this approach, most obviously during the years of the Hallstein (1958–67) and Delors Commissions (1985–95). Claiming a special status for the Communities implied an ever more important role for the Commission itself. Similar things can be said about the European Parliament: the protracted fight for this very name for an institution originally called the ‘Common Assembly’ epitomises its far-reaching aspirations and sense of expectancy. National politicians, be they federalists or nationalists, who projected sweeping ambitions on the Communities must also be mentioned. Finally, the press also contributed to this process. Even if they are often criticised for not devoting enough attention to European integration, European and American media outlets of the 1950s and 1960s were full of reports about events in the Communities. Aron's articles in the Figaro, in which he regularly commented on developments in Brussels; the international attention paid to Hallstein's demise at the hands of de Gaulle – as an event on which the GDR's Neues Deutschland reported as well as the Times of India;Footnote ⁷² or Monnet's face on the cover of Time magazine are prime examples of the enormous space and importance that the press devoted to European integration.

It took decades for the EC/EU to acquire what characterises it today: that supporters and critics alike perceive it as the main, if not the only, political representative of Europe. Obviously, this does not imply that the original aspirations of the ‘founding fathers’ have been realised. Today's EU is much less federal than for instance Monnet would have liked it to be, and processes of deepening and widening have always been accompanied by ‘failures’ and ‘defeats’ – when seen from an EU perspective. Even the frame of reference has somewhat changed: while the EU is still meant to represent ‘Europe’, this link refers less to Franco-German reconciliation or the cold war containment of the Eastern bloc than to the challenge of globalisation. Synecdoches are malleable, and these changes at the level of content make the continuity at the level of the synecdochic quality of the EC/EU's integration process even more striking. It is against this backdrop that political actors, the media, and citizens more and more identify the EU with Europe at large.