In 1945 Western Europe counted the cost of yet another Continental conflict: the third within seventy years involving France and Germany. Yet in 1958 France and Germany formed the core of a new supranational ‘community’. Between these two dates intra-state relations had been transformed. It represented a development to which many in 1945 would have aspired, but which few would have dared hope to see realised so quickly. This evolution marked the beginning of what is commonly referred to as ‘the process of European integration’.

It is worth pausing at the double connotation of the word ‘integration’ since the expression is used to imply both a set of institutional steps (all involving the surrender of sovereignty) and the enmeshing of economies and societies that is supposed to flow from the measures adopted. To be more precise, the word ‘integration’ is applied to the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), founded by France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries in 1952, and to the European Economic Community (EEC) and Euratom, both founded by the same six states in 1958. The term excludes a great deal, as indeed is its intention. Nonetheless, we must realise that it sidelines many other institutional changes on the grounds that they are ‘inter-governmental’, and do not involve sovereignty surrender. It also marginalises other sources, institutional or otherwise, of Europe's growing ‘interdependence’.

The ‘process of integration’ is given pride of place in the memoirs of those most closely identified with it. This is because they were convinced of the historical importance of their achievements, but also because they were eager to win a propaganda war against the existing intergovernmental alternatives which they saw as weak, impotent and incapable of sustaining further development. The institutions and workings of the new supranational communities were pushed further into the limelight by the writings of a generation of political scientists, attracted by the novelty of their provisions and the dynamic inherent in their operations. These attitudes have subsequently been back-projected onto the past in a series of histories which concentrate on the struggle for supranational, even federal, institutions but which virtually exclude developments elsewhere. However, the EEC came onto the scene relatively late in the day and although the ECSC had been created earlier, it was limited in its economic impact.