Tales of a band of conspirators

A mix of oral history and archival research offers insights into the Commission’s early years, writes Martin Westlake.

Fifteen years is a blink of the historical eye but, in terms of the history of European integration, a long time. This book* merges the oral testimony of 120 former Commission officials with archive-based research.

The result is a history of the first period of the life of a revolutionary new institution, the European Commission, from the new institution’s first meetings through to the eve of the first enlargement. Complementing this original mix is an interesting selection of contemporary photographs.

The idea of the book came in 2002 from David O’Sullivan, then the Commission’s secretary-general and, to their credit, it was consistently championed by Romano Prodi, president of the Commission, and his successor, José Manuel Barroso. The latter’s introductory text is a lyrical paean, both to the work of Michel Dumoulin and his team (the study is, without exaggeration, a stupendous achievement), but also to the Commission and the people who worked for it (Barroso writes graphically of "the almost carnal link between the Commission and European integration").

The study was produced by a consortium of eight universities and a research centre from the six founding member states of the EU plus the Union’s historical archives in Florence. It was overseen by seven professors holding Jean Monnet university chairs in history. They had to contend with some basic methodological challenges before settling for a form of "negotiated interpretation", whereby choice insights and quotations from "a cast of characters of whom La Bruyere would have been proud", as Dumoulin tactfully puts it, breathe life into archival material. Dumoulin, a professor at Louvain-la-Neuve’s Université Catholique argues that this method provides a wealth of information that would otherwise have been lost: "The lunchtime conversations between officials, the meetings…on a Saturday morning in Paris, the Friday evening train from Brussels to Paris and any other number of other details convey the mysterious alchemy at work..." Conscious of his team’s advantage of hindsight, he describes the result as "a dialectical exchange between the past and the present".

Who were those first foot soldiers, and what motivated them? Dumoulin hints that, following, in the 1950s, the process of decolonisation in the West and the XXth Congress of the USSR’s Communist Party in the East and, in the early 1960s, the uncertain progress of the Vatican Council II, Europe’s hybrid brand of incremental federalism became the "uplifting cause which could mobilise people’s energy and altruism". In their own words, those first devotees saw themselves as "manual labourers", "missionaries" and "a band of conspirators". Nobody better personified their zealous brilliance than Emile Noël, the Commission’s first and longest-serving secretary-general and the archetypal éminence grise.

Implementing the treaties was not just a technical matter. It entailed creating and nurturing a culture different from traditional diplomacy. The EEC Treaty was effectively a framework treaty whose blank spaces (concepts such as economic union) would be filled in by the College of Commissioners and a growing number of officials whose consistent efforts were as Noël put it, "specifically aimed at asserting [the Commission’s] identity by working towards integration" not as an end in itself but as "a means of progressing from nation-based societies to a new form of society".

The eye-witness accounts well convey the atmospherics of the time. The construction went ahead against constant opposition from some or all of the member states and without any blueprint - like erecting a tent in a windy spot and without instructions ("inventing things as they went along", as one old hand puts it). The twin principles of primacy and direct effect were far from unanimously accepted and Noël was swift to understand the importance of a sympathetic (at times, some would say, complicit) European Court of Justice. The first Commission president Walter Hallstein and his troops were strongly aware that the Founding Fathers had created, as Dumoulin puts it, "an institution whose powers were such that they could bring the Community much greater supranationality than was immediately apparent". The key was judicious use of the Commission’s exclusive right of initiative to inch the process forward. Though a price, ultimately, was paid in France and the Netherlands in 2005, the incremental method, implemented by gifted and devoted officials in command of their dossiers and overseen by charismatic leaders, proved a brilliant success.

Given its weight and length, this book will not be in many Christmas stockings, but it should be on the shelf of every library with a European integration section and it will surely be on many mandarins’ shelves. For those who baulk at the price, it is available, for free, on the internet (http://bookshop.europa.eu/eubookshop).

It is, quite simply, a gem.

* The European Commission 1958-72: History and Memories. Edited by Michel Dumoulin. Published by the European Commission’s secretariat-general, 652 pages, available in German, French, English, Italian and Dutch. €30 without value added tax.

• Martin Westlake, now director of consultative work at the European Economic and Social Committee, worked for the Commission in 1987-2003.

A mix of oral history and archival research offers insights into the Commission’s early years, writes Martin Westlake.