To call for unified action to tame, discipline and make safe a particular sector of business activity was hardly out of keeping with Europe’s history. Indeed, the origin of European integration was the realization that Europe’s coal and steel industries were sources of conflict and instability. Out of that logic had emerged the European Coal and Steel Community as the first step toward the “European rescue of the nation-state.”49 Likewise, the Common Agricultural Policy had been devised in the 1960s to contain the spillover costs of national farm support policies. It was only in the 1980s that
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