The European Common Market Proposal

In the short span of a year, from the Messina Conference held on June 1 and 2, 1955, by the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, to the series of meetings begun in Brussels on June 26, 1956, among the same governments, the idea of economic unification of these six countries has made a striking advance toward its realization. The heads of the delegations to the Intergovernmental Committee established by the Messina Conference produced a report in which they jointly and unanimously proposed to start drafting a treaty (or two treaties) to establish a “common market” and an atomic community (Euratom) along the lines of their report. The governments are not yet formally committed to accept all the recommendations of this report; but they agreed at the Venice Conference on May 29, 1956, to take it as a basis for the negotiation of the treaty. This document is therefore to be regarded as much more than another expert opinion on the desirability or the feasibility of economic integration. It outlines the detailed objectives to be reached and contains a relatively precise timetable hammered out through months of arduous discussions which took the better part of the summer and of the fall of 1955 in the Belgian capital. Euratom and the “common market” are of course closely interrelated political issues. Technically, however, they are quite distinct and only the common market is examined in this paper.