Reviewed by Doc Snafu on December 14, 2025.
Document Source: Obersleutnant Walter Hallstein – Biography of a European (1901–1982), by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Elvert, University of Cologne (reprint)
Walter Hallstein was born on November 17, 1901, in Mainz (Germany) as the son of a senior government building official (Regierungsbaurat). He grew up in a Protestant-influenced middle-class environment in which, alongside a pronounced interest in culture and the arts, a strong sense of duty and civic responsibility constituted central values. Until 1920, he attended a humanistic secondary school (Humanistisches Gymnasium) in Mainz, where, in addition to languages and mathematics, his primary interest lay in history.
From 1920 to 1923, he studied law and political science in Bonn, Munich, and Berlin. In 1925, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the legal aspects of the Treaty of Versailles. In the same year, he was appointed as an assistant to
After several years working as a research associate at the Institute for Foreign and International Private Law of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Hallstein completed his habilitation in 1929 with a study on company law. As early as the following year, he was appointed to the chair of private and corporate law at the Rostock University, where he remained until 1941.
The eleven years of activity in Rostock were to prove formative for Hallstein’s subsequent professional career. There he was able to apply and expand his knowledge at the intersection of economics, law, and politics, sharpen his intellectual faculties, and develop into a legal scholar and university teacher of international standing. He placed high demands on his students. Toward National Socialism he adopted a critical stance and even maintained contacts with declared opponents of the system. This nonconformism did not harm him: in 1941, Hallstein received a call to the chair of commercial, labor, and economic law, comparative law, and international private law at the Frankfurt University in Main.
In 1942, he was drafted as a reserve officer into an artillery regiment and deployed in Northern France. As a first lieutenant (Oberleutnant) and regimental adjutant, he experienced the Allied invasion of 1944 in the Fortress of Cherbourg, where his unit was forced to surrender to the Allied troops after twenty days of resistance. Hallstein himself was taken into American captivity and transferred to Camp Como (Mississippi). There he remained faithful to his profession as a university teacher and organized a camp university.
After his release from captivity at the end of 1945, he returned to his chair at the Frankfurt Frankfurt, where he was elected rector the following year. Around the same time, he received an offer from Ludwig Erhard, then Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs, to move to Bavaria as State Secretary and Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs. Hallstein, however, followed a call in 1948 to Georgetown University in Washington DC, which invited him as one of the first German academics after the Second World War to spend a year as a visiting professor. The experiences gained during this period strengthened Hallstein in his conviction that an essential prerequisite for the integration of the newly founded German Federal Republic into the free world was its embedding in international organizations. Accordingly, he promoted the establishment of a German UNESCO Commission, assumed its presidency, and headed the German delegation preparing the accession.
Konrad Adenauer entrusted him with the leadership of the German government delegation responsible for the drafting of the Coal & Steel Treaty. Of particular importance for the further course of the European integration process were the contacts that Hallstein established during this period with Jean Monnet. In his German negotiating partner, Monnet found a colleague who was distinguished by his expertise, but even more so by his fundamental political outlook, and who perhaps more than others had developed a sense for the “general interest” of the European project.
At the same time, Hallstein became ever more closely involved in shaping the foreign policy of the German Federal Republic. In August 1950, Adenauer appointed him State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery, from where, one year later, in the course of establishing a West German Foreign Ministry, he moved to the Federal Foreign Office as State Secretary.
In addition to building up the ministry, Hallstein was entrusted during these years with a large number of difficult missions, including, alongside the preparation of the ECSC, those relating to the European Defence Community (EDC) and reparations to Israel. Further focal points of his activity in the Foreign Office concerned the drafting of the “Hallstein Doctrine”, a strategic concept for West German foreign policy, as well as the improvement of bilateral relations with France. At the center of his work as State Secretary in the Federal Foreign Office, however, stood European policy. The considerations developed in the Federal Chancellery, the Federal Foreign Office, and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs under the impact of the EDC crisis and with regard to shaping the future of European integration show that Hallstein held the conceptual leadership role within a relatively small group of decision-makers.
EDC project, he became embroiled in a fierce dispute with the explicitly Europe-critical Minister of Economic Affairs, Ludwig Erhard. This conflict reached its climax on March 30, 1955, three days after the ratification of the Paris Agreements by the French Parliament and three days before Paul-Henri Spaak letter to the foreign ministers of the ECSC states, which is usually regarded as the trigger of the ‘European Relaunch’ (Relance Européenne). On that day, Hallstein submitted a strictly confidential memorandum in which he set out his views on the future of the European integration process.
The point of departure was the failure of the EDC project, which he assessed as a Soviet Victory of great strategic significance, since a defence community with joint armed forces, a common budget, and a common armaments policy would have substantially advanced the political integration of the Community. From this, Hallstein concluded that political integration had to be realized as quickly as possible, within two to five years. Beyond that point, he considered the danger of a renewed disintegration of Europe to be real, since public support for the idea of integration would then be likely to decline, and national interests would once again come to dominate European policy. This, in turn, would have made it considerably easier for the Soviet Union to expand its own influence west of the Iron Curtain.
In view of the narrow time frame, he deemed it necessary to pursue the path that, under the given circumstances, appeared best suited to achieving the objective. This, in his view, lay in the continuation and expansion of the ECSC process. He intended to extend sectoral integration to the fields of transport as well as conventional and nuclear energy production. In addition, he sought a democratization of Community structures through the establishment of a European Parliament as a genuine legislative body.
However, only Jean Monnet sought to overcome the stagnation of the integration process following the EDC debacle by means of expanded sectoral integration, while in the Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxemburg) states consideration was given to a new, horizontal approach to integration, which would ultimately merge the national economies of the participating states into a common internal market. In the further course of the summer of 1955, Hallstein recognized the advantages of the horizontal integration approach and subsequently became one of its most committed advocates, particularly during the negotiations on the Treaties of Rome.
Hallstein’s commitment to Europe, his skillful conduct on the diplomatic stage, and his engaging yet irreproachable personality constituted the prerequisites for his appointment as President of the first EEC Commission. In this capacity, he demonstrated that he had fully internalized the concept of the Treaties of Rome and was determined to bring them to life. As President of the Commission, however, his primary concern was the establishment of an autonomous European policy, for which he regarded European institutions as just as indispensable as the role of law as the foundation of the European Communities.
In order not to allow the still young and weak Commission—which, in Hallstein’s thinking, bore a European responsibility extending far beyond day-to-day political squabbles—to fall behind the nation-states from the outset, he considered it necessary to pursue an ambitious program and to adopt a self-confident posture vis-à-vis the governments of the member states.
This program, understood as a blueprint for the future of the Communities, could in Hallstein’s political thinking only have a federalist objective, as already suggested in the Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950. Hallstein had already engaged with questions of federalism during his studies, and they were furthermore well known to him through his work in federal German politics. In his interpretation, the Treaties of Rome, by their internal logic, allowed no conclusion other than the construction of federal structures for the European Community Area.
However, he underestimated the resistance of French President Charles de Gaulle to a federal shaping of the political structures of the Community Area. The differing positions of the convinced European federalist Hallstein and the equally convinced confederalist de Gaulle regarding the future configuration of the EEC culminated in the Empty Chair Crisis of 1965, in which the French Government, by withdrawing its representatives from the European institutions, rendered the EEC effectively incapable of action.
Hallstein was later accused of having misjudged the French position and of having blocked a way out of the crisis by adhering too rigidly to his own views. An analysis of the difficult negotiations conducted in the first months of 1965 between the French government on the one hand and the governments of the five other EEC member states as well as the Commission on the other, however, shows that the President of the Commission was fully aware of the problem in all its complexity.
What Hallstein had underestimated, however, was the determination of Charles de Gaulle, the French President, to prevent a deepening of the institutional structures, even at the risk of accepting the overall failure of the integration project. When de Gaulle openly demanded the dissolution of the Hallstein Commission, it became clear that the other governments were not prepared at any price to support the course of his Commission. In 1967, Walter Hallstein was therefore forced to resign from his office as President of the Commission.
His departure from European politics did not put an end to his commitment to Europe. From 1968 to 1974, he served as President of the European Movement, and from 1969 to 1972 he was a member of the German Bundestag for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. After withdrawing from active politics, he confined himself to journalistic and advisory activities. Walter Hallstein died on 29 March 1982 in Stuttgart, at the age of 81.
