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This article traces the origins of the European economic constitution in the debate on Article 30 of the EC Treaty (general rule on the free movement of goods) between 1966 and 1969, which resulted in Directive 70/50. In this, the first archive‐based analysis of the policy origins of the Court's Dassonville (1974) decision, the article demonstrates that there was a strong continuity in the investment by a number of key actors in focusing on Article 30 to create the single market from the mid‐1960s. These civil servants and lawyers provided the backbone for the Commission's transformation of the Cassis de Dijon judgment (1979) into a powerful tool, driving back the need for legislative harmonisation and making it a cornerstone of the Single European Act of 1986. The article therefore analyses one of the key moments in the transformation of European law.

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The historiography of the origins of the European Union (EU) has two main weaknesses. It is too state-centric and fails to conceptualise the embedded nature of ideas and their role in the creation and evolution of an integrated 'core Europe' after World War II. With the opening up of the archives of national governments and supranational institutions, research on the contemporary history of the EU has steadily moved on into the 1970s. We argue, however, that it is crucial to revisit the early postwar period to develop a more sophisticated notion and historical narrative of the formation of the supranational core Europe of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of six founding member-states. Sectoral integration in coal and steel did not lead directly to horizontal integration in the customs union of the European Economic Community (EEC). It created important path dependencies concerning some structural characteristics and policy solutions, however, especially the (self-) exclusion of Britain, the functional use of economic integration with long-term political as well as economic objectives, the introduction of the supranational principle and antitrust competition legislation. Historians have predominately conceived of the formation of the ECSC as the result of interstate bargaining of 'national interests' by governments as cohesive, purposeful actors.1 Diplomatic historical accounts have been shaped by underlying 'realist' assumptions about the definition of such interests by autonomous foreign and European policy-making elites. In the case of France, such national interests included the control of Germany through integration and securing a dominant political leadership role for France, and in the case of Germany, regaining national sovereignty and achieving the integration of the newly created Federal Republic of Germany in Western Europe and the Atlantic Alliance on the basis of equality. The notion of American 'influence' in the historiography of transatlantic relations after 1945 similarly derives from the assumption of European state actors' interests in the involvement of the United States as 'ultimate arbiter'2 in Western European politics.3 In this perspective, the United States primarily had powerful political, economic and military resources to secure for itself a dominant position in the 1. As an introduction to EU historiography see W. KAISER,