The roots of what we now call the European Union go back to two treaties signed between just six countries – Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany – back in 1957, when the continent was still reeling from the effects of World War II. The Treaties of Rome brought together the countries’ steel, coal, and atomic energy interests under the oversight of shared independent bodies, and cut back on the outdated bureaucracy that created friction in trade between the six countries, establishing what was initially called the European Economic Community, a.k.a. the EEC (via Britannica).
As Britannica notes, the surprisingly rapid establishment of the EEC among countries that had just recently been at war with each other came about with the intention of minimizing the chance of any future war between France and West Germany – that such conflict would be unthinkable today is testament to the clarity of the founding members’ original vision.
However, per History, the EEC was also established as a result of the sense that Western Europe was struggling to compete with the superpowers on either side of it: to the west, the United States, whose intervention in the continent had been decisive to the defeat of Nazi Germany, but in the wake of war represented an enormous, fast-growing economy that had no trouble outcompeting the smaller, fractured European countries in world trade. To the east, the Soviet Union was industrializing rapidly under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
