European Economic Community
The European Economic Community (EEC) was an organization established by the
Treaty of Rome (25 March 1957) between the ECSC countries:
Belgium,
France,
Italy,
Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, and
West Germany, known informally as the Common Market (the Six). The EEC was the most significant of the three treaty organizations that were consolidated in 1967 to form the European Community (EC; known since the ratification 1993 of the Maastricht treaty as the European Union, EU). The EEC's immediate aim was economic union of its member nations, with the eventual goal of political union. It worked for the free movement of goods, service, labor and capital, the abolition of trusts and cartels, and the development of joint and reciprocal policies on labor, social welfare, agriculture, transport, and foreign trade.
See Customs Union.
In 1956, the
United Kingdom proposed that the Common Market be incorporated into a wide European free-trade area. After the proposal was vetoed by President
Charles de Gaulle and France in November 1958, the UK together with Sweden engineered the formation (1960) of the
European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and was joined by other European nations that did not belong to the Common Market (the Seven). Beginning in 1973, with British,
Irish, and
Danish accession to the EEC, the EFTA and the EEC negotiated a series of agreements that would ensure uniformity between the two organisations in many areas of economic policy, and by 1995, all but four EFTA members had joined the European Union.
One of the first important accomplishments of the EEC was the establishment (1962) of common price levels for agricultural products. In 1968, internal tariffs (tariffs on trade between member nations) were removed on certain products.