To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, ‘the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe’. The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states’ resolution ‘to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’. Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the ‘core Europe’ of the ECSC as a collective ‘supranational’ break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.

Scholars generally agree that ‘independent’ institutions such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and European Central Bank have created a space and role for themselves that has no equivalent in national political settings. However, we still lack a better understanding of the importance of this independent branch in the EU polity. This article contends that the central relevance of independence is connected to the historically rooted connection between ‘independence’ and ‘international government’ – a relationship the history of which can be traced back to the League of Nations’ foundational period as the inaugural scene for the nexus between power and knowledge in international politics. Ultimately, this article questions the extent to which this specific grammar of international government has been constitutive of the EC polity in terms of valued modes of legitimacy and types of authority.

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, this article traces the long lineage of the notion of European electricity network. Since the 1930s engineers and policy makers conceived of a geographical conception for rationalising and optimising electricity supply: a European one. This article purports that three vectors undergirded threads of continuity: institutional, intellectual and physical (technological networks). These vectors, and the actors involved in them, created strong path dependencies that kept the idea of a European system firmly on the agenda. Today's international electricity market of the European Union should be seen as an extension of this legacy.

Since their foundation, the European Communities were characterised by a specific recipe for the labour market, centred on the promotion of labour mobility and a marked focus on vocational training and social dialogue. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources, this article retraces the roots of that recipe in the reformist thinking of the interwar years, with a special point of reference in the International Labour Office. Identified within that body since the 1920s, the recipe evolved through the experiences of the great crisis and post-war demobilisation. It was then adapted to the needs of European economic integration.

The European Coal and Steel Community was marked by institutional innovations. They have masked strong continuities in administrative and business communities and their governance practices, however, which persisted after 1945. Based on fresh research in national and international organisation archives, this article explores the origins before, during and after the First World War of two key elements of these practices, their evolution over time and their influence on post-war Western European governance of the steel sector: the struggle for executive autonomy and close transnational industry cooperation. Both practices clashed in the ECSC, became amalgamated and had lasting impact on the present-day European Union and its democratic deficit.

The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood. Existing scholarship emphasises short-term considerations in explaining why the French Socialist and German Social Democratic Parties supported a European Common Market in 1956–7. This article offers a new perspective by placing these parties’ decisions within a longer context of socialist views on free trade, tariffs and regional economic organisation. Based on fresh archival materials, this article explores how socialist proposals for securing an economic peace after the First World War continued to influence socialist policies on European economic integration in the 1950s.

Infrastructures in the transport and communication sectors were high on the agenda of supranational European integration after 1945. Nevertheless, European cooperation continued on well-trodden paths. New European organisations were established with an institutional design that built on established governance structures from the interwar period or even earlier. This article seeks to explore continuities in the governance of cross-border infrastructures from the interwar to the post-war period. It argues that transnational expert communities and cultures of standardisation emerged, which the infrastructure experts were keen to protect and persist. The article compares transport and communication to isolate common patterns and differences.

This article sets out why and how plans to build Europe on mail, both commercially (rates) and symbolically (stamps), were discussed from the end of the 1920s and have failed up to today. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication Administrations (CEPT) was created during the intense phase of European integration in the 1950s. In the 1980s it was a key resource for the European Commission for building a Single Market in the telecommunication sector. As this article argues, however, the CEPT did not emerge from the multiple plans for postal integration. Rather, it was a new envelope hiding governance practices inherited from the nineteenth century.

This article challenges the idea that the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 was a break with ideologies of the past. It traces the political economy of the declaration from the interwar to the post-war period. It reconstructs the conceptions of economics and politics that underlay the proposal, tracing them back to the once influential corporatist and communitarian ‘third way’ ideology. It then shows that the original intent of the declaration was nevertheless crushed by a powerful dynamic of institutionalisation of transnational parliamentarianism. Thus, the article demonstrates the effects of long-lasting cleavages on the institutionalisation of European organisations.

The above published article by Kim Christiaens contains an error produced during production. We apologise to the author and readers for this error.

The original version of this article was published with the incorrect author name. The author's name should have appeared as “Luc-André Brunet”.

We apologise to the authors and readers for this error and reproduce the entire corrected paper on the following pages.