The European Health Community or “White Pool” (1952–1954): An Inter-governmentalist Rediscovery of a Functionalist Project

If recent empirical developments show that healthcare has become a European problem, academics still view it as a field in which governments seek to retain their sovereignty as a matter of principle, thus postulating the state’s opposition to the integration of healthcare. By reviving a historical project of integration of healthcare and by analyzing it through the lenses of inter-governmentalism ? a process considerably more sophisticated than it first looks ? this paper stresses that on the contrary, government preferences are contextualized and therefore not immutable, in this field as in others.