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That idea was central to the founding document of modern European unity, the 1950 Schuman Plan, drafted by Monnet and Schuman in close consultation with Konrad Adenauer. It served as the basis for a strategy to build the house of Europe with a bricklayer's dogged, step-by-step patience. "Monnet's first novelty was to avoid grand principles," says his biographer, François Duchêne. "He asked for no authority over anyone." But Monnet was an instinctive consensus builder, a master of administration by committee and a convivial polyglot who accumulated contacts among key policy leaders in Paris, London, Bonn and Washington. With those skills he began the construction of Europe. The first brick in the building was as unromantic as it was essential: the European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC was the first of the "communities" that ultimately became the European Economic Community; in its day, in fact, it was the European Economic Community. In the Europe of the 1950s, coal and the steel smelted with it were as central to economic prosperity as telecommunications and transportation are today. Many of the points of friction that had led to past wars lay along the great seams of coal and centers of steelmaking,  2 of 5
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The man who ultimately succeeded in starting Europe down the path to true unity was neither feudal Emperor nor military megalomaniac. He was a mustachioed wine distiller from Cognac with the look and manner of a bureaucrat. Few modern Europeans would recognize his
face amid the grand pantheon of De Gaulle, Macmillan and Adenauer. Yet Jean Monnet is regarded as the father of the European Community because of his inspired idea that the Continent could be made rich and peaceful not with a single grand act of creation but by a slow and steady accumulation of rules, policies, treaties and commissions. "Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan," he wrote in a 1952 memo to French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. "It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity."