There is a tendency among non-historians to force ‘practitioners’ of the discipline to justify why the study of a particular episode of the past is so important and to articulate the lessons to be learned from the experience. The fate of international constitutions and treaties is particularly prone to demands of this kind. After all, ‘constitutional borrowing’ has long been a common feature of international law and politics. From the American Constitution to the recent attempts to redefine the former republics of the old Soviet empire, the experience of the past has regularly been drafted to resolve the problems of the present. Historians, however, tend to avoid such exercises. They prefer to downplay the importance of ‘significant’ documents and to emphasise instead the dynamics that made the arrangements work, or not. They choose to eschew the universality of insight and to accentuate the peculiarities of the circumstances in which they were born. Although, by remaining aloof, historians may preserve disciplinary purity, they forfeit thereby the opportunity to shape current debate. Moreover, the past will be used and abused with or without their participation or cooperation. This article, therefore, will address one such constitution from the past. But it does not aspire to preserve its historical integrity; rather to awaken interest in it in the first place. The fact is that Europe's first constitution has played no role in the most recent discussions on the Community's future. Indeed, from almost the moment of its demise, it was virtually expunged from public memory.

The European Political Community (EPC) was the name given to an attempt by European parliamentarians of the six member states of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to write a democratic constitution that would govern the affairs of the existing communities (i.e. the ECSC and the newly signed European Defence Community (EDC)) and any future communities that might be agreed. It would also regulate the foreign relations of the member states in the areas covered by these communities and would have powers to develop towards a common market. The EPC, therefore, was a vehicle for carrying considerable ambitions. Yet, until recently, it has been relatively neglected by historians of European integration and has usually been lightly skipped over, or ignored altogether, in the memoirs of the ‘Founding Fathers’.