The Postwar European Integration Process and the Progressive Construction of a Supranational Legal Order

In 1941, during World War II, at a time of dissolution of so many states under the Nazi occupation and of total uncertainty for the future, a small group of intellectuals – confined to a rocky island called Ventotene, as condemned by the fascist regime for “political crimes” – looks at the big picture. Their long sight is delivered to a short document: the Ventotene Manifesto, today 80 years old. Fast- forward: on 9 May 1950, Robert Schumann, French foreign affairs minister, proposes to Germany the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), whose members would pool in a single market their coal and steel production – strategic resources in times of peace and, even more, in times of war – and make them accessible to all without discrimination. The idea – completely out of the box of classical international law and relations – comes from an intellectual and free thinker whose name is Jean Monnet. European federalists, pacifist forces, and promoters of European integration have been present on the old continent since the nineteenth century; however, the political impulse offered by the European federalist movement born out of the Ventotene Manifesto and the decisive institutional impulse following the Schumann proposal and the subsequent creation of the ECSC in 1950 produced the most conspicuous results in terms of legal and political evolution and lasting peace and continued to intertwine in the course of the following years. This chapter aims at offering some context to the analysis of an institutional phenomenon in the field of international law that is characterized by a high degree of originality and by some characteristics that we collectively refer to as supranationality, the progressive building of sovereignty above the states.