Signed in 1957 by the heads of government of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, West Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, the treaty was the result of eleven years of attempts to reconstruct the European continent after World War II. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) laid the ground for the EEC by opening the markets for those products between several countries in continental Europe. The Treaty of Rome adopted many of the institutional structures of the ECSC but set out to have far greater reach. It tried to combine federalist and intergovernmental ideas. The idea of a United States of Europe had been posed by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946 and was driven forward by Jean Monnet during the 1950s. However, the Treaty of Rome, which set up the intergovernmental Council of Ministers, stopped far short of creating Monnet's vision of a federal Europe. Until the treaty was amended in the 1980s, it was fundamentally an economic institution. Nevertheless, the supranational model of European integration on which it was based created the foundation for the development of the European Union in the 1990s.