The European Union and Regional Integration

European regional integration began in earnest with the European Coal and Steel Community, established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951 among France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, an arrangement explicitly designed by its architects, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, to make future war between France and Germany "not merely unthinkable but materially impossible" by pooling control of the two countries' coal and steel production. This foundation was broadened by the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25 March 1957 by the same six states, which created the European Economic Community and a common market for goods, and later by the Maastricht Treaty, signed in February 1992 and effective from November 1993, which formally established the European Union and laid out the criteria and timetable for a single currency.