On 25 March 1957, in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the representatives of Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community. On the same day they also signed the Euratom Treaty. The depositary is the Italian government.

For Belgium, Paul-Henri Spaak and Jean-Charles Snoy et d’Oppuers signed; for the FRG, Konrad Adenauer and Walter Hallstein; for France, Christian Pineau and Maurice Faure; for Italy, Antonio Segni and Gaetano Martino; for Luxembourg, Joseph Bech and Lambert Schaus; for the Netherlands, Joseph Luns and Hans Linthorst Homan.

The preamble speaks of an ever closer union among the European peoples. Article 1 establishes the EEC. Article 2 calls for a common market and the approximation of economic policies. Article 3 lists the customs union, the common tariff, free movement of persons, services and capital, agricultural policy, transport, competition, the European Social Fund and the European Investment Bank.

The institutions are the Assembly, the Council, the Commission and the Court of Justice, with a consultative Economic and Social Committee. The text follows the ECSC of 1951, the failure of the European Defence Community, the Messina conference of 1955, the Spaak report and the Val Duchesse intergovernmental conference.

The six parliaments ratified between May and December. The treaties entered into force on 1 January 1958. They provided no duration and no withdrawal procedure: the Six wanted an irreversible process.

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 dropped the word “economic” from the title. The Lisbon Treaty of 2009 renamed it the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It remains, with the EU Treaty, one of the Union’s two basic texts.

The CVCE documentation centre at the University of Luxembourg keeps the text published by the Publishing Services of the European Communities: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community and connected documents.

Image: Zinneke, signature page of the EEC Treaty, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: Treaty of Rome. Treaty text: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (Rome, 25 March 1957).