EUROPEAN COAL AND STEEL COMMUNITY

(ECSC) administrative agency established by a treaty ratified in 1952, designed to integrate the coal and steel industries of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. It subsequently has come to include all members of the European Union. Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined in 1973, Greece in 1981, and Portugal and Spain in 1986. The former East Germany was admitted as part of reunified Germany in 1990. In 1994 Austria, Finland, Norway, and Sweden were accepted into the European Union (and hence into the ECSC), to become effective on Jan. 1, 1995. Headquarters are in Brussels, Belg. The first step in the formation of the ECSC was taken in May 1950, when the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed the establishment of a common market for coal and steel by those countries willing to delegate their powers over these sectors of the economy to an independent authority. The motive behind the plan (called the Schuman Plan, though it had been drawn up by Jean Monnet, then head of the French planning agency) was the belief that a new economic and political framework was needed if future Franco-German conflict was to be avoided. The first step was to be limited, but the ultimate objective was a United States of Europe. Five other countriesWest Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux countriesagreed to negotiate on the basis of this plan. By 1954 the agency had removed nearly all barriers to trade in coal, coke, steel, pig iron, and scrap iron between its members. Trade in these commodities rose dramatically in the 1950s as a consequence. A set of common rules was established to control cartels and to regulate mergers. The central institution, the High Authority, fixed prices and set production limits or quotas and was authorized to impose fines on business firms that infringed treaty rules. From the 1960s, one of the ECSC's main tasks was to supervise its members' reduction of their excess production of coal as that mineral was replaced by petroleum as an industrial fuel. This involved the closing of inefficient or uneconomic coal mines in the member countries. Similarly, in the 1970s the ECSC began to supervise the elimination of its members' excess steelmaking capacity when low-cost steel from Japan and other countries put western European steelmakers at a competitive disadvantage. Under the ECSC's aegis, an international group of steelmakers, the European Federation of Iron and Steel Industries (Eurofer), was formed in 1977 to rationalize the industry.