The EEC Treaty gave the body the power to set a common agricultural policy for the member states, as well as to establish a common transport policy, a customs union, and a common policy to govern external trade.
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The architects of the EEC were mindful that greater economic union would necessitate a more free and mobile labor force that could seek employment and take up residence across national boundaries. The treaty created four basic rights: the right of citizens to move between states; the right to establish residence in another state; the right to work in another state; and the right to move capital between countries.
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Until very recently, most Americans, and possibly an equal number of Europeans, viewed the European Economic Community and its successor, the European Union, as little more than a common market that could give its member states the advantages that come with a larger unified internal trade zone. Its early architects and visionaries even promoted the idea publicly in order to gain acceptance for the Union. Privately, however, they were clear, from the very beginning, that they had a far more ambitious agenda in mind. Jean Monnet, the founding father of the Union, declared early on that “we are not forming coalitions between states, but union among people.”
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Monnet and others believed that the only long-term solution that could guarantee a peaceful and prosperous Europe was the surrendering of more national sovereignty to a broader political union. They realized, however, that sporting an overt political agenda would backfire and create resistance by the member states—all of whom were anxious to increase their economic clout by joining together in common cause in the commercial arena. For the most part, national leaders saw the union as a way to further national objectives, strengthen their own domestic agendas, and secure their national sovereignty. In a world dominated at the time by two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, the six member nations reasoned that only by pooling their economic resources could they hope to compete. It was the fear of being swallowed up that pushed the member states along to greater levels of economic integration.
But big-picture players like Monnet, Robert Schumann, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and, later, Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, saw the Union in far more visionary terms. Their strategy was to move incrementally with technical and economic measures designed to increasingly bring member states together in a seamless, interdependent, commercial web of relationships. Each small step of economic integration would result in a slight, sometimes imperceptible erosion of their national sovereignty. None of the steps alone, they figured, would be enough to arouse the ire of member states and threaten the furtherance of the Union. The upshot of this piecemeal strategy would be that “one day the national governments would awaken to find themselves enmeshed in a ‘spreading web of international activities and agencies,’ from which they would find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.”
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To a large measure, the strategy paid off. Economic pressures in the post-World War II era propelled European countries toward union. The United States provided the main stimulus. The Bretton Woods Agreement, which also set up the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, was an attempt to create a global commercial market to foster U.S. economic development. Anxious to impose a global set of rules that would encourage free trade, the U.S. established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947.
The U.S. was particularly concerned with the dire straights of war-torn Europe. With the Soviet Union already occupying Central and Eastern Europe, and with powerful Communist political parties in France and Italy, the U.S. worried that much of Europe might fall to the Soviets. To ensure against a Communist takeover, the U.S. embarked on a two-prong program to secure Western Europe in the post-war era. It established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, whose mission was to create and deploy an integrated American and European military force that could defend Western Europe from Soviet aggression. The U.S. also launched an economic recovery initiative to resurrect the economies of Western Europe, in the belief that it would be the best means of slowing the advance of Communist political parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere, and lowering the threat of Soviet influence.
The Marshall Plan, named after its architect, Secretary of State George Marshall, provided more than $25 billion of economic development assistance to Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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But the funds came with conditions. To continue receiving aid, European nations would need to prepare the ground for “the formation of a single large market within which quantitative restriction on the movements of goods, monetary barriers to the flow of payments and, eventually, all tariffs are permanently swept away.”
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European countries were also favorably disposed to creating a common market, but for different reasons. Worried that they would be squeezed by the superpowers and risk becoming a satellite to one or the other, they saw the pooling of their economic resources and talents as a way to gain sufficient advantage to claim a measure of economic independence.
Both parties served to gain from the creation of a European common market. A strong Western European economy would hold off the Communist menace and create a market for U.S. investment abroad. A European common market would give European nations the security and freedom they needed to revive their ailing national economies and assure their continued existence. And underlying these more strategic economic considerations was the belief that by joining together, the nations of Europe might at long last put an end to centuries of warfare among themselves.
The European Economic Community expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, adding the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, Greece, and Portugal to its ranks. While the economic devastation of World War II provided an impetus to create a European community, the oil shock of 1973 added new urgency to efforts aimed at integration. The global recession that followed on the heels of the spike in oil prices imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) threatened to undermine the carefully designed social welfare regimes put in place in Western European nations. The Thatcher-Reagan economic revolution of the 1980s, with its emphasis on deregulation of government-owned businesses and the further liberalization of global trade, put additional pressure on member nations of the European community. Greater integration was the only viable means for member countries to stay afloat in troubled times.
The Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 brought the member states a giant step closer to union, while subtly eroding the national sovereignty of the individual countries. Among its many sweeping provisions was the extension of new powers to the European Parliament. For the first time, the parliament was to be consulted before the adoption of new legislation by the European community. The parliament was also given the power of veto on the admittance of new states and on agreements made with states outside the community. Equally important, qualified majority voting was introduced in many areas where unanimous votes of member states were previously required. Finally, the community established the idea of “Exclusive Community Competence,” which prohibited member states from acting alone in a number of critical areas that had previously been the prerogative of national governments, including matters related to economic and monetary union, social cohesion, research and technology development, and environmental policies.
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The SEA effectively weakened the power exercised by the council, which was made up of the heads of the member states. Why would member governments willingly surrender their sovereignty and cede more power to the Union? Because the SEA was presented as a purely technical treaty designed to further economic and fiscal integration, member states all found something to bolster their vision of the role of the community. The arch-confederalists, who favored economic but not political union, hoped that a more integrated market would strengthen their national economies and shore up their political regimes. Those who supported a more federal political union hoped that closer economic integration would make the individual member states more interdependent and reliant on the Union, eventually drawing more political power away from their respective states and toward Brussels.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 forced the community to revise its mission once again. Recall that the Cold War and the division of Europe into two competing blocs after World War II played a key role in the initial formation of the European community. It was to be an economic and political bulwark against Russian aggression. Now that the Cold War was over, Europe had to turn its attention to the prospects of a reunited Germany and an integrated Europe that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the Russian border. Again, external events pushed the member states even closer to union.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 transformed the European Economic Community into the European Union. The sweeping provisions of the treaty made clear, once and for all, that the Union was to be far more than a common economic market. The newly constituted European Union was to be built upon three pillars.
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Member nations agreed to the introduction of a single EU-wide currency—the euro—by January 1, 1999. Member states agreed to extend intergovernmental cooperation to include a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Finally, the members agreed to establish regulations governing Justice and Home Affairs ( JHA), including the granting of common rights to all European citizens, furthering police cooperation among the states, and harmonizing immigration and asylum policies across the Union.
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The states also agreed to broaden EU membership and began entertaining applications from Central, Eastern, and Mediterranean European states. (Austria, Sweden, and Finland joined the Union in 1995, and ten Central, Southern, and Eastern European countries—the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia—officially joined in May 2004.)
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The treaty created new bodies. The Committee of the Regions gave the regions of Europe an official voice, for the first time, in European community affairs. Recognition of the regions served to further weaken nation-state sovereignty. Now, 222 regions from Catalonia to Lombardy were to be officially represented in Brussels, giving them direct access to one another, the member states, and the EU governing machinery, without having to be represented exclusively by their nation-states.
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The Cohesion Fund was established to assist states whose economic development lagged behind the rest of the Union’s members.
The Maastricht agreement also introduced the concept of Europe-wide citizenship and gave the European Parliament additional powers.
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The Maastricht Treaty was clarified and strengthened with the passage of the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. This treaty reinforced the Union’s commitment to human rights and required applicant countries to uphold the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights as conditions for acceptance into the community. The Amsterdam agreement gave the EU the legislative power to act against discrimination based on sex, race, religion, ethnic background, disabilities, or age, anywhere within the Union. The Union was also given the power to act on employment issues affecting its member states. The Union was even granted some power to enact broad standards governing public health policy, although the organization and delivery of health care remained the responsibility of the member states.
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At a follow-up conference in Nice in December 2000, Union members agreed on further reforms of the council—narrowing the range of issues on which individual member states could impose their veto power. Votes of the big countries on the council were tripled in weight, while those in the smaller nations were merely doubled. Passage of council proposals would henceforth require 73.29 percent of the weighted votes, a two-thirds majority among the member states and a majority of 62 percent of the Union’s total population.
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At Nice, as at earlier summits, both those who championed a more federal union and those who preferred to retain as much power as possible at the state level could argue, with some justification, that their interests were partially met. At every juncture of the Union’s existence, the public perception has been one of maintaining a delicate balancing act that would retain nation-state sovereignty while further empowering the community. Whether the individual countries really believe this to be the case is doubtful. It is true that each step forward to a closer union of the peoples of Europe has been met with a half-step back to preserve nation-state powers. Still, the cumulative effect has been a slow, irreversible trek toward the vision first laid out by the Union’s early architect, Jean Monnet.
Lest there be any doubt on this score, the EU’s draft constitution, which is currently being considered for ratification by its member states, makes clear that a new transnational political institution is being born that, in its every particular, is designed to function like a state. It is possible that a number of member nations might vote against ratification of the constitution, forcing a crisis and a re-evaluation of a Europe-wide governing body. Although, if public opinion polls are in any way a bellwether, the constitution is likely to be ratified by the member states. According to a Eurobarometer poll conducted in February 2004, a sizable 77 percent of the people in the member states support an EU Constitution. Opposition to the EU Constitution is only 15 percent overall, while somewhat higher in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and the U.K. Still, even in these countries, opposition is still low, ranging from 23 percent to 30 percent of the population. Equally important, 62 percent of those polled said they favored national concessions to ensure that the constitution is adopted, and in only one country, Slovenia, did a majority say they would rather not make concessions.
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