On 9 May 1950 Foreign Minister Robert Schuman interrupted the regularly scheduled broadcasts of French radio to make a historic announcement: In order to end the decades-long struggle over coal and steel, France was ready to become partners with its recent enemy, and other nations, in a new West European heavy industry community organized in such a way as to make war politically unthinkable and economically impossible. Little more than a month later negotiations for the coal–steel pool began. Joined by the three Benelux countries and Italy in addition to France and Germany, they would end eleven months later with the initialing of the Treaty of Paris by the foreign ministers of “The Six” on 18 April 1951. The document was the product of difficult and not always satisfactory compromises. Another fifteen months transpired before the new organization was installed in its Luxemburg headquarters, a delay due to the ratification process and the phase-out of occupation controls. By the time the new authority was able to commence operations, however, the senior civil servants involved in the coal–steel talks as well as representatives of national producers had arrived at understandings of their own that substantially modified the agreements arrived at during the official negotiations. The European Coal and Steel Community that came into being on 10 August 1952 was a profoundly different organization from the one first proposed on 9 May 1950.

The changes had both internal and external causes, the most important of which was the foreignness of Monnet's original notion. It had much in common with the thinking of American New Dealers like the progressive businessmen, lawyers, economists, and management specialists belonging to the Committee for Economic Development.