The College of Commissioners in historical perspective

The chart below lists the Presidents of the European Commission since the institution’s creation in 1958. First established as the Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC), it absorbed two other executive bodies – the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the Commission of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) – to become a single administration, under the Merger Treaty, in July 1967.
The horizontal blue bars show the evolution in the number of Member States and of Commissioners. In the early years, the largest Member States (France, Germany, and Italy, then the United Kingdom and Spain) were granted two Commissioners each, until this system was abandoned in 2005 in favour of a single Commissioner per Member State