From the European Health Community to the European Health Union: The Project of the Supranational Health and Research Organization of the European Countries and its Historical Destiny

The paper examines the little-known pages of the legal regulation of international integration in Europe: the project of the creation in the middle of the 20th century of the European Health Community (EHC) and its relationship to the current project for the establishment of the European Health Union. The introduction examines the reasons for the ineffective response of the modern European Union (EU) to the global coronavirus pandemic, mainly due to the lack of European institutions, in contrast to the economy and a number of other spheres of public life, supranational powers in the field of health.

The first section analyzes the main provisions of the draft EHC presented by the French Government in 1952 and became the subject of an international "preparatory conference" with the participation of 16 European countries at the end of the same year. The author gives special attention to the legal consolidation in the EHC draft founding treaty of "sanitary activities" (prevention and counteraction of various types of diseases); "cultural provisions" dedicated to the collection of information, the development of scientific research and education in the field of health; provisions on the creation of a common therapeutic and research infrastructure of the EHC; the political and legal nature of the EHC as a supranational organization with restrictions in its favor of the sovereign rights of the participating states.

The second section describes and evaluates the domestic, foreign, and economic factors that prevented the creation of the EHC.

The final section examines the impact of the EHC on the law-making and law-enforcement activities of the modern EU, and compares the legal model of the EHC with the model of the European Health Union, which was established in the end of 2020. There are also proposals for using the experience of European integration in the field of healthcare for the development of integration processes in a similar field between Russia and other former Soviet republics, including the creation of common medical and research centers under the auspices of the Union State of Russia and Belarus and (or) the Eurasian Economic Union, equipped with mega-science facilities (synchrotrons, etc.), other advanced infrastructure of scientific theoretical and scientific applied nature.

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