The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first step in the process of European integration. Its founders had lofty aspirations that integration in the coal and steel would spill into a larger endeavor, and early scholarly analyses suggested that coal and steel integration was spurring more fundamental political change. Looking over the fifty-year history of the ECSC, we find that the problem of the ECSC was created to deal with never materialized, and that the tools fo the ECSC were barely used until the 1980s. intervention in the 1980s did not spur deeper political change, even though the conditions which Ernst Haas expected to contribute to deep political change finally existed. Since the ECSC did not in fact do what it was created to do (build a common market in coal and steel), and was not central in the development of the European Coal and Steel industry, the question then becomes how did the ECSC as an institution matter in the process of European integration?

Last modified

• 01/01/2019

Creator

• Karen Alter
• David Steinberg

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2SJ2X

Alternate Identifier

• 07-001

Keyword

• buffet
• steel
• European coal

Date created

• 2007

Resource type

• Research Paper

Rights statement

• In Copyright