ABSTRACT
Community Brussels of the 1960s concerned itself remarkably little with the ongoing Cold War. From 1966 onwards, those who worked for the European Commission and other EEC institutions may well have lived cheek by jowl with those employed in the newly installed NATO headquarters on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. And as well-educated and well-informed Westerners, most Eurocrats no doubt followed with some interest the ebb and flow of East-West tension. But professionally very few of them had much to do with the Cold War. With a few minor exceptions, to be discussed below, the issues which most preoccupied the early EEC were economic or institutional in nature and were largely detached from the rivalry and tension between the Eastern and Western blocs. The documentary trail left by the Community institutions of the 1960s thus at first sight offers little of interest to the historian of the Cold War and seems rather to confirm the judgement of those analysts who have followed Alan Milward in identifying European integration as a primarily economic process the causes and dynamics of which are to be located among socio-economic factors and not the political or geo-strategic considerations favoured by some of the early accounts of the EEC’s formation.1 Despite the fact that all of its member states were inevitably involved in the conflict, the EEC of the 1960s does appear, prima facie, to have been effectively insulated from the Cold War.
