Messina Conference

(From left to right) Johan Beyen (NL), Gaetano Martino (I), Joseph Bech (L), Antoine Pinay (F), Walter Hallstein (D), Paul-Henri Spaak (B) at the Messina Conference (Photo: European Commission)
In 1955 the foreign ministers from Italy, France, Germany and Benelux met in this Sicilian town for an intergovernmental conference to prepare what became the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
Federalists have since used the phrase “a new Messina conference” to express the wish that a political Union in Europe should be reborn from scratch through a constitution. The Convention on the Future of Europe is realising this wish.