The European Union began in 1950 with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) at the instigation of Jean Monnet, a 66 year old visionary French bureaucrat. The ECSC became the Common Market in 1958, and the European Union in 1993.
A "European Coal and Steel Community" seems strange now, but at the time steel was essential to war making, and the French steel industry was dependent upon supplies of coke from Germany. Monnet's idea was to put all coal and steel facilities in France and Germany under a single, High Authority that was above and beyond the control of the French and German governments. In this way he hoped to prevent world war three in Europe.
The plan was cooked up in great secrecy by Monnet acting in consultation with the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, and the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Monnet recorded in his memoirs “we were determined, in fact, to mount the whole operation outside diplomatic channels”, that the French Prime Minister, Georges Bidault, was only informed about it by accident, and that the French Cabinet only read of it in the newspapers. “Exactly what Schuman said to his colleagues is a Cabinet secret, but I have reason to believe that it was even more elliptical and less audible than usual.”
This Schuman Plan plan was announced to the world in Paris on 9th May 1950 at a press conference attended by some 200 journalists (see Schuman Declaration on the Europa web site). It made clear its motivation:
World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.
It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority...
The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace. [emphasis added]
In his memoirs Monnet recounts that many details as to how the High Authority was to function had not been worked out. But because the plan was known to have been devised by Monnet, and he had previously produced a comprehensive plan for the modernisation of the French economy, people assumed that the Schuman Plan was fully worked out.
Robert Schuman, who was in a hurry to catch his train to London [where there was to be a conference on the future of Europe on May 10th], so skillfully evaded the newspapermen's detailed questions about the future of the plan that one of them exclaimed:
‘In other words, it's a leap in the dark?’
‘That's right,’ said Schuman soberly: ‘a leap in the dark.’
Monnet was 66, Schuman 64 and Adenauer 74. They had all been deeply scarred by two world wars. They saw their prime task to be the prevention of a third war in Europe at any cost. Monnet was quite clear what the plan entailed. In his initial drafts, he had written:
This proposal has an essential political objective: to make a breach in the ramparts of national sovereignty which will be narrow enough to secure consent, but deep enough to open the way towards the unity that is essential to peace.
Europe must be organised on a federal basis. A Franco-German union is an essential element of it...
Already The Times recoiled at the word ‘federation’, and the Daily Express wrote: ‘It would be the end of Britain's independence.’
Monnet wrote that the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, made a counter proposal on August 8th 1950 that “the High Authority would be no more than a committee of representatives from the coal and steel industries...and there was also to be a Council of Europe Committee with the right of veto.” To repulse this, Monnet wrote a letter in English to Macmillan:
The Schuman proposals are revolutionary or they are nothing... Co-operation between nations, while essential, cannot meet our problem. What must be sought is a fusion of the interests of the European peoples...
The Schuman proposals provide a basis for the building of a new Europe through the concrete achievement of a supranational regime within a limited but controlling area of economic effort...
The indispensible first principle of these proposals is the abnegation of sovereignty in a limited but decisive field...
Not for Monnet the sophistical evasions of modern British europhiles who are wont to say that Britain is merely ‘pooling her sovereignty’ with the other Member States of the EU. For Monnet, it was ‘the abnegation of sovereignty in a limited field’. The difference today is that the field is no longer limited, as the EU acquires ever greater powers over ever widening fields of competence.
If you want to know why sovereignty is not the same as power, and why sovereignty cannot be pooled, please read Sense on Sovereignty (PDF download), a paper by Noel Malcolm published in 1991 by the Centre for Policy Studies, a British think tank.