Map showing the successive venues for the negotiations on the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom): Messina, Venice and Val Duchesse (Brussels).

On 26 June 1956, in Brussels, the Heads of Delegation of the Six officially open the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom. From left to right, in the Grand Salon of the Belgian Foreign Ministry: Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister and President of the Conference, Lodovico Benvenuti (Italy), Baron Jean-Charles Snoy et d’Oppuers (Belgium), Karl Friedrich Ophüls (Federal Republic of Germany), Maurice Faure (France), Johan Linthorst Homan (Netherlands) and Lambert Schaus (Luxembourg).

In January 1958, the Château de Val Duchesse, the premises of the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom from September 1956, becomes the first official seat of the two Councils established by the Rome Treaties.

In 1956, after the summer recess, the Foreign Ministers of the six Member States of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) inaugurate the work of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom at the Château de Val Duchesse in Brussels, under the presidency of Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak.

In this interview, André Dubois, former member of the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom, emphasises the role played by Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister and President of the Conference, during the negotiations at the Château de Val Duchesse.

‘One, two, three.' On 17 February 1957, referring to the negotiations held in Val Duchesse by the six Member States of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) on the Common Market and Euratom, the cartoonist, Fritz Behrendt, emphasises the role played by Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Conference, to revive European integration and lead the negotiations to a successful conclusion under the curious eye of US and Soviet observers.

In this interview, Hans-August Lücker, former adviser to Walter Hallstein, Junior Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and rapporteur on the Treaties of Rome for the Bundestag in 1957, recalls the attitude of the participants in the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations on the Common Market and Euratom who, in Val Duchesse, drew up the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom).

In March 1967, ten years after the Val Duchesse negotiations, Emanuele Gazzo, Editor-in-Chief of Agence Europe, looks back on the debates that took place during the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom.