A meeting at The Hague last week, Premiers of the three Benelux nations looked back on eleven years’ experience of union, and found it good.

Back in 1946, in a historic meeting at The Hague, the leaders of Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg committed their nations to a far-reaching experiment in cooperation and trust among Europe’s sovereign states—an economic union that obliterated economic borders to let goods, capital and labor flow as freely as…

Netherlands’ Foreign Minister Johan Beyen backed by Benelux countries proposed a further integration of European unity but the French and Germans wanted to go slow.

After years of high hope, fine talk and hard work, about all that is left of the great postwar dream of European unity is a diminishing gleam in the eyes of thousands of “good Europeans” and one big tangible fact: the Schuman Coal-Steel Community, which pools the coal and steel…

There is friction in the Benelux countries (biggest international trade on the Continent). Representatives of the three friendly countries met to reconcile their growing differences.

In the vacuum of exile during World War II, the governments of Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg spent much of their time working out plans for the happy day of liberation. Their most ambitious scheme was for economic union: interstate free trade, a common tariff and excise, a free exchange…

Because The Netherlands’ economy is geared more closely to Britain’s than to those of her continental allies, the Benelux countries still had no coordinated monetary policy.

Everybody was talking integration. In Paris, ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman had urgently warned Western Europe that it must take steps to integrate its separate economies (TIME, Nov. 7). Barely had Hoffman returned to the U.S., when Secretary of State Dean Acheson took off for Paris. For two days this week he…