On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, offered to pool the coal and steel resources of France with those of its European neighbours. The proposal was directed principally at Western Germany. After a year of negotiations six western European states agreed to form the European Coal and Steel Community, an organization rightly seen as the beginning of the European Union. However significant at the time and subsequently, this creation resulted from a series of political bargains familiar to any practitioner of traditional politics. France was determined to limit the competitive advantages of German heavy industry to prevent future dominance by the Ruhr industrialists whose unsavoury past was also remembered. Jean Monnet, the head of the French delegation at the talks held in Paris, insisted on the ‘deconcentration’ of the steel and coal industries. Steel companies would be compelled to dispose of the colleries which they owned. To do this, however, Monnet had to invoke the help of the American high commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy and his expert advisers. In terms of its origins the Coal and Steel Community can be considered the product of a bargain struck between the Federal Republic and America, not France and Western Germany. That the safeguards against vertical combinations and a single sales agency for coal proved unnecessary (and unenforceable) may partly explain the success of the first venture in European integration.