January 1958: European economic community

Sixty years ago, on 1 January 1958, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany jointly formed the European Economic Community (EEC) with the goal of economic integration and free trade within a customs union. Although the immediate goals were explicitly economic, the aspirations were always far higher: In the first two sentences of the founding document, the Treaty of Rome, the member states declared their determination "to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe" and "to ensure the economic and social progress of their countries by common action to eliminate the barriers which divide Europe." Sixty years ago, these goals seemed to be quite unrealistic: Europe was divided not only by national prejudices and economic inequalities but, most fundamentally, by the Iron Curtain, which ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with Moscow controlling the nations to the east of it.