Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) / OECD

Origins and founding

The OEEC emerged from the Conference on European Economic Cooperation (CEEC). It came into being when the Convention for European Economic Co-operation was signed on 16 April 1948, and its first tasks were allocating Marshall Plan aid and planning and carrying out the European Recovery Programme. Its members were 18 Western European countries. Washington held the funds, but the European participants allocated aid claims and liberalised intra-European trade; the OEEC was not a United States agency.

From Marshall aid to European cooperation

The OEEC created the first European multilateral payment system on 16 October 1948. After Marshall aid ended in 1952 it shifted toward economic cooperation more broadly, and bodies such as the European Payments Union, the European Monetary Agreement Organisation, the European Productivity Agency and the European Nuclear Energy Agency were linked to it. When the 1957 Rome Treaties created the EEC and Euratom, the OEEC's coordinating role was challenged, and in 1958 the European Nuclear Energy Agency was set up. Its Secretaries-General were Robert Marjolin (1948–1955) and René Sergent (1955–1960).

A Western European body and the Eastern response

Participation was initially offered to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe too, but the USSR refused the aid and blocked Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania and Poland from receiving it. Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland remained interested in Marshall aid despite the requirements for convertible currencies and market economies, but in July 1947 Stalin ordered these communist governments to pull out of the Paris Conference on the European Recovery Programme. The Soviet alternative became the Molotov Plan and then Comecon, founded in 1949 by the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The OEEC and Comecon were the institutional responses that divided Europe into two camps in the same period.

Membership and expansion

Western Germany was at first represented by its western occupation zones (Bizonia) and the French occupation zone, and Trieste was also a member for a period. Spain held associate status like the United States and Canada, signing an Association Agreement on 10 January 1958 and becoming a full OEEC member on 20 July 1959. '18 members' was the founding figure, not a fixed membership count.

From the OEEC to the OECD

Following talks at the Hotel Majestic in Paris from January 1960, the OECD Convention was signed at the Château de la Muette in Paris on 14 December 1960, and the OECD came into being on 30 September 1961. The United States and Canada joined as full members, and Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and West Germany were founding members. The OEEC's end date, however, differs between sources: the EUI archival record gives 1 September 1961, other accounts say September 1961, and the OECD's own coming into being is dated 30 September 1961.