President of The Commission of The European Economic Community
In 1957, Hallstein was unanimously elected the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community (now the European Commission) in Brussels, and at the beginning of January 1958 he took up the post. He was officially appointed on 7 January 1958. He was to be re-elected in 1960, 1962, and 1964, and remain until 1967.
In 1961 he was awarded the Charlemagne prize (Karlspreis) by the City of Aachen for his efforts in the cause of European federation.
In 1962, when the United Kingdom and Ireland were applying to join the European Economic Community, he startled an Irish journalist by saying that he had not thought it necessary even to open, let alone read Ireland's application. He then memorably summed up Ireland's dilemma "If the UK goes in, you go also; if not you too will stay out. Britain can possibly come in without Ireland but Ireland cannot come in without Britain." The French veto on the United Kingdom indeed made it effectively impossible for Ireland to join until the removal of the French veto made it possible for both to join in 1972.
As a proponent of a federal Europe with a strong Commission and Parliament, he was opposed to de Gaulle's vision of an Europe des États (Europe of States) with more power retained by national governments, and in September 1967 he was forced to resign as president of the Commission.
Read more about this topic: Walter Hallstein
Famous quotes containing the words president of the, president of, president, commission, european, economic and/or community:
“The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, “galaxy” is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939)
“England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)