Peace, Prosperity, and Progress: Early Legitimating Narratives, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

The foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 and, in 1957, of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) was by no means uncontroversial. The eventual institutional solutions negotiated were highly contingent, and in no way the only possible outcome (e.g. Gillingham 1991, see Gilbert 2008). In the early years of the European Communities, the challenge was hence to justify them in their existence, as well as in the particular form they were given. According to the standard narrative in the literature, this was done with reasonable success as far as public opinion was concerned; the first few decades of integration, it says, were marked by a popular ‘permissive consensus’, which enabled elites to go about establishing the integration project undisturbed. This, the story goes, lasted until the late 1980s or early 1990s, when it was replaced by a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Most academic accounts either refer explicitly to this permissive consensus or take it for granted. Yet the public opinion data on which Lindberg and Scheingold built their seminal permissive-consensus thesis gave ‘no clues at as to what it [was] about the system that [was] attractive or why’ (1970:39).

Resolved to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests, to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundations of a broader and deeper community among people long divided by bloody conflicts and to lay the bases of institutions capable of guiding their common destiny. (Treaty Constituting the European Coal and Steel Community, Preamble)