A Pan-European Economic Space with the European Community at Its Core: The EC’s Goals, Actions and Achievements in Pan-European Fora in the 1970s

As East–West détente flourished in the early 1970s, discussions on pan-European economic trade and cooperation revived. Yet an ‘EC question’ soon arose as socialist countries saw the European Community as an expanding protectionist entity that hampered pan-European trade and insisted on denying it recognition, let least a role in it. This article argues that, facing this predicament, the EC endeavoured to assert itself in the continent through a careful action aimed at becoming embedded in pan-European economic cooperation and shaping its features. It explores the EC’s tactics to gain its own place and weight in the two major fora of East–West discussions on the matter in the 1970s – the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – and shows its contribution to defining the agenda and proposals on trade and economic cooperation. In investigating the EC’s manoeuvres and the people instrumental in these efforts, the article reveals the EC’s collaboration with the UNECE Secretariat, sheds new light to the socialist states’ evolving policy towards the Community and provides an unprecedented study into UNECE’s life in the 1970s and its connection with the Helsinki process. By weaving these aspects together, this article characterises the EC as one of the key makers of pan-European cooperation decades before the European Union came to dominate it.