In the Schuman Plan negotiations, France proposed incorporating anti-cartel and anti-trust clauses into the Community treaty. The anti-cartel clauses as submitted would have imposed strict bans on cartels, but Belgium, Luxembourg and West Germany resisted France's call for prohibition. The clause was therefore modified to prohibit cartels in principle but to grant exceptions where the High Authority recognized that certain conditions had been met. This change was important to West Germany, as it accorded with the West German steel industry's basic stance that cartels were needed in order for the industry to rationalize and protect itself in critical situations. Germany also objected to the anti-trust clause, which would in principle have required any plans for industrial concentration to obtain prior approval from the High Authority. This was seen as a means of preventing the re-concentration of the West German steel industry, whose large firms had been dismantled by the Allies during the postwar occupation. Ultimately this clause, too, was modified in part to improve the steel firms' competitiveness. In its revised form, it permitted concentration so long as it remaind within the scale of existing firms in the Community. The West German steel industry's aim was to rectify the de-concentration measures of the Allied occupation by promoting concentration within the industry on a par with that of France's large steel enterprises. Its aim was to achieve a competitive capacity equivalent to that of the French steel industry. The West German steel industry was also concerned to protect equal rights for all Community nations so far as the anti-cartel clause was concerned. In brief, the principle of equal rights guaranteed the re-creation of cartels through the fair and practical application of the anti-cartel clauses, viz. the existence of cartels in the French steel industry. Thus, from the perspective of the West German steel industry, the ECSC enabled it on the one hand to maintain its competitive capacity by means of peacetime industrial concentration, and, on the other, to rationalize and protect itself by means of the exceptions made, in critical situations, for cartels, particularly in pursuit of equal rights with France. The ECSC was accordingly founded as a system that in essence not only facilitated concentration but also granted cartels in exceptional situations.

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