A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
Craig Parsons
January 2009
In 1993, the twelve nations of the European Community (EC) began calling themselves the European
Union (EU). The new name, like the replacement of “European Economic Community” (EEC) with
the simpler “EC” six years before, symbolized a major step forward in their project of international
integration. The document sanctifying this step, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, announced
“a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.” In
particular, the treaty proclaimed that Europe’s national currencies would fuse into a single European
money—the “euro”—in 1999. “Economic and Monetary Union” (EMU) would radically revise the
political framework for Europe’s economies.
The replacement of most of Europe’s national currencies with the euro was the largest
peacetime logistical operation of all time, but it was successfully pulled off from 1999 to 2002. This
brought Europe to a remarkable point: “EMU” marked the realization of almost all of the fifty-yearold dreams of the founders of the EEC. But if in some ways the euro represented the culmination of a
immense political project, in other ways it also underscored how fuzzy that project had been all along.
Only twelve of the fifteen members initially joined the euro. (Today, sixteen of the expanded
membership of twenty-seven countries participate in the euro). It also immediately provoked debate
over whether the euro should be complemented by new steps to a more complete “economic
government,” which were then largely cut short by the complications surrounding expansion of the EU
into Eastern Europe. Thus if fifty years of integration have truly transformed the economic and
political landscape of the continent in concrete ways—with unprecedented powers delegated to a
complex new set of “supranational” institutions—the Union remains shrouded in ambiguities. The
EU’s members are still unclear on the basic institutional goals of their integration, and on who will
ultimately belong to those institutions. The stakes of these disagreements are high: having come very
1
far in integration, European leaders now regularly face questions of EU powers and legislation that
were only abstract debates several decades ago. The EU has entered the new millennium both as a
tremendous success, and as a group gripped by an identity crisis.
This essay spells out the origins and development of the major questions in European
integration today. Two themes dominate the story: one of continuity and one of change. The continuity
lies in the ambiguity built into European institutions. From its very beginnings, European integration
has been a battleground for competing visions of what Europe is to become. In this sense, today’s
identity crisis continues the normal state of affairs. The change lies most importantly in Europe’s
geopolitical setting. The end of the Cold War widened these old debates into a more far-reaching set of
questions. The revolutions of 1989 erased the geopolitical basis for the national bargains—above all
between France and Germany—upon which earlier European integration had been constructed. The
Maastricht Treaty of 1991 gave only a partial blueprint for new foundations, modifications in the
Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 and the Nice Treaty of 2000 only partly clarified the situation, and the
proposal and failure of the European Constitution from 2001-2005 left European wondering what
comes next. Long-standing institutional ambiguities and geopolitical change thus combine to pose one
of the most important questions in world politics: what Europe for the 21st century?
The essay’s first section covers integration during the Cold War period, from 1945 to 1989.
The second recalls the central geopolitical bargains behind that evolution, and shows how the
revolutions of 1989 threw those bargains into question. The third addresses how the European project
has navigated the “new Europe” since 1989. Section four looks at the EU’s current challenges and
future.
Institutions: Ambiguity and Competing Visions
Origins
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European integration began as a response to the continent’s devastation after World War II. Ideas
about establishing peace and promoting trade by integrating Europe’s nation-states had existed for
centuries, but had been dismissed as idealistic. Yet from the destruction of 1945 emerged a remarkable
conjuncture of political and economic motivations to take this path.
Political motivations existed on three levels. First, most broadly, the rise of the United States
and the Soviet Union to superpower status made Europeans very conscious of their common place in
the world. The major lines of the global distribution of power were now drawn around western
European states rather than between them. Second, many saw nationalism as the basic cause of both
World Wars, and integration as a way to decrease nationalism and so avoid future war. Third, and less
altruistically, German nationalism in particular was blamed for the wars, and European leaders were
intent on ruling out the possibility of another German resurgence. The creation of European
institutions over German ones was one way of doing so.
In economic terms, motivations to integration emphasized two ideas. One was a fascination
with the scale and efficiency of American production. Europeans were painfully conscious of their
relatively small and antiquated economies. This went hand in hand with an American-inspired
enthusiasm for free trade and competition; in addition to bigger firms and modernized industry,
European economic growth required markets larger than its small countries. These related ideas were
not simply abstractions: postwar Europeans confronted powerful competitive pressures from huge US
firms, and felt that they had to do something to meet that challenge. Integration of the continent into a
“Common Market” became an attractive solution.
These political and economic themes were taken up by a wide array of politicians, clubs and
interest groups after 1945. With the development of the Cold War around 1947 they took on new
urgency. In the face of a growing Soviet threat, they argued, western Europe needed the economic and
political strength that only integration could bring. By 1948, European integration of some sort was on
everyone’s agenda.
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Agreeing on what “integration” meant, however, was not easy. The most enthusiastic
“Europeanists,” led idealistically by figures like the Italian politician Altiero Spinelli and much more
pragmatically by French bureaucrat Jean Monnet, preached a vision of a federal Europe that would be
no less than a full-fledged supranational state. European institutions like those of the United States
would supersede national governance, making nations similar to American states. Less radical were
those who saw Europe not as a replacement for nation-states, but as a way to strengthen them through
cooperation. In this vision—later championed by French leader Charles de Gaulle—economic
cooperation and foreign policy coordination between nations would allow Europe to challenge
superpower dominance of world affairs. European institutions would form an intergovernmental
confederation, with national governments retaining their authority but engaging voluntarily in
extensive cooperation. Finally, the least ambitious version of Europeanist thinking limited integration
to the economic sphere. Europe would become a free-trade area, helping competition and
modernization but constraining governments as little as possible.
These positions were so different that their proponents could hardly be expected to find a
compromise. Yet agreement on one point allowed Europeans to move past their differences: all
eventually agreed that integration should begin with economics. For the “free-traders”— most notably
Britain, but also business interests in Germany and elsewhere—integration would end with the first
major step: a free trade area, and possibly a customs union.1 Those with some political ambitions for
Europe, on the other hand, saw political cooperation developing from economic cooperation.
Confederalists hoped that economic cooperation would strengthen national economies, and that new
economic might could be wielded in political cooperation to reestablish European influence in world
affairs. Federalists initially wanted an immediate jump to a “United States of Europe.” When most
Europeans quickly rejected such plans in the 1940s, however, federalists accepted that their hopes lay
in the possibility that economic integration would “spill over” to create strong political bonds and a
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In a free trade area, countries abolish all internal tariff barriers between them. In a customs union, countries
also adopt a common set of tariffs vis-à-vis third countries.
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European identity in the longer term. Thus a beginning in economics provided a way to rally the
competing visions of Europe together. The trick was to do this while allowing the different groups to
believe that the initial economic framework could evolve in the political direction they preferred.
It was the inventive, well-connected bureaucrat Monnet (the cosmopolitan scion of a cognac
fortune, with strong personal contacts with leaders around Europe and in the United States) who found
such a formula. In May 1950, at Monnet’s suggestion, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman
proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). A common market for these
basic commodities would be administered by an independent “High Authority,” which alone had the
right to propose ECSC directives and legislation. A Council of Ministers, representing the national
governments, would oversee the Authority. The Council would vote by majority on minor decisions,
but by unanimity on major issues. An elected consultative Assembly would provide democratic input,
and a European Court of Justice (ECJ) would arbitrate. Thus national governments retained formal
power—symbolized by the ability of any one nation to veto most decisions—but truly supranational
institutions were also created. While no coherent vision of Europe was realized, proponents of each
vision could hope theirs would be in the future.
Only the British, who still fancied themselves a global power, were not won over by this
ingenious mélange. In 1951 France, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Italy, Belgium,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the treaty creating the ECSC. It began operation in 1952
with Monnet as first President of the Authority. By 1955 “the Six” were showing hugely expanded
trade and production in coal and steel. In June 1955 they met to discuss proposals to extend ECSC to
all economic activity. The results were the two “Treaties of Rome” in 1957, creating the European
Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).2
The EEC’s institutions imitated those of the ECSC. An independent Authority (renamed the
“Commission”) would propose legislation and set the agenda. Decision-making power resided in the
Council of Ministers. The Assembly was renamed the European Parliament. The ECJ’s jurisdiction
2
Euratom was and remains a rather minor European collaboration in research on atomic energy.
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was expanded to all EEC-related issues. Power was still largely held by the governments, but the
independent Commission had important powers of initiative. Federalists could still hope that the
balance between governments and the Brussels-based Commission would shift in the future.
Thus the identity crisis of today’s EU can be traced back to its earliest origins. In order to
attract all possible supporters, the ECSC and the EEC were designed with as much ambiguity as their
immediate tasks allowed. Europe’s founding fathers agreed to disagree. Such ambiguity at the outset
set the stage for competition between alternative visions of Europe, which dominated the four decades
between ECSC and EU—and continues today.
Development: EEC to EC
The EEC’s first years were a giddy period of Euro-optimism. Surprised by its immediate economic
success, the British created a competing free-trade area in 1960, the European Free Trade Association
(EFTA).3 In response, the Six accelerated their own internal tariff reductions. In 1961, the British
recognized the EEC’s greater economic dynamism by applying for membership. The early 1960s also
saw the Six create the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to replace national agriculture programs.
This common structure of price supports essentially represented a Franco-German bargain. The French
saw trade liberalization in industrial goods as favoring strong German industries over their French
counterparts. The CAP balanced this by subsidizing French agriculture. Despite the bald-faced
national payoff behind it, however, the CAP represented a large step forward for the EEC’s
supranational institutions. The Commission administered the CAP, acquiring direct responsibility for
agriculture throughout the Community.
But optimism was not to last. Rather than bringing “widening” to new members and
“deepening” along the federal path, the 1960s were dominated by French President Charles de
3
The founding members of EFTA were Britain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Finland joined in 1961, and Iceland joined in 1970. Britain and Denmark withdrew in 1972 on joining the EEC;
Portugal did so in 1986; and Austria and Sweden withdrew on joining the EU in 1995.
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Gaulle’s attack on both ideas. De Gaulle had long opposed surrendering French sovereignty,
championing a confederal Europe of intergovernmental cooperation. The supranational EEC had been
negotiated before his return to power in France in 19584—and like the British, de Gaulle was not quite
won over by Monnet’s formula. Once in office, he decided not to tear up the EEC treaty for fear of
upsetting intra-European relations, and accepted a supranationally-guided CAP because it subsidized
French farmers. But that was all. In 1965, de Gaulle took the pretext of an overly ambitious
Commission proposal (giving itself new budgetary autonomy) to challenge the EEC institutions.
Denouncing the “illegitimate” Commission, he withdrew French representatives from Brussels, and
insisted that they would only return given recognition of a permanent national veto on EEC decisions.
The “crisis of the open chair” lasted six months, until the other members essentially agreed to de
Gaulle’s demand. This “Luxembourg Compromise” got the EEC moving again, but the confederal
vision had scored a major victory.
De Gaulle also vetoed the British application to join in 1963, and again when they reapplied in
1967. For the French leader, the British represented a “Trojan horse” for American influence in
Europe; the “Anglo-Saxons” (meaning the US and the British) could not be trusted. He saw the major
goal of European integration as the re-establishment of European influence independent from (if still
allied with) the US superpower, and Britain could not be expected to side with Europe against
America in trans-Atlantic disputes.
When de Gaulle left office in 1969, the major obstacle to further EEC development seemed to
be lifted. Yet world events undercut Europeanist ambitions before they could regroup. First came the
dissolution of the international monetary regime (the Bretton Woods system) from 1971 to 1973. This
forced European currencies to float freely, meaning intra-EEC trade could fluctuate enormously with
changes in the relative values of European currencies. Then, as Europeans tried to grapple with this
4
De Gaulle, the leader of the French Resistance to the Nazis during World War II, was briefly Prime Minister
immediately after the war. When French politicians rejected his plans for a more centralized, presidential system,
however, he withdrew from politics, only to return in 1958 as the country fell into crisis in a fight over
independence for its largest colony, Algeria. At that point the political elite agreed to allow de Gaulle to draw up
a new, presidential constitution, the Fifth Republic.
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problem by somehow linking their currencies, the first oil crisis hit in 1973. Given rising
unemployment and inflation, politicians were little inclined to pursue ambitious European plans.
Furthermore, the accession of Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973 (made possible by de Gaulle’s
resignation) introduced three adherents of the “free-trade” view of Europe. Federal ambitions moved
still further from the agenda. The era of “Euro-pessimism” had begun.5
Only when pessimism became a profound sense of crisis did integration move forward again.
Two developments in the early 1980s persuaded many that the EEC needed reform. First was another
enlargement. Greece joined in 1981. Negotiations also began with Spain and Portugal, bringing
accession in 1986. Unanimity among twelve governments would be much harder to obtain than among
the current nine, especially since the poorer, Southern inductees made the group less homogeneous.
The second impetus was economic. Poor European gains in productivity relative to America, and
especially relative to Japan, seemed to promise the virtual disappearance of European firms from key
markets like electronics and computers. The early versions of the phenomenon later called
“globalization” was also putting competitive pressure on the whole range of European manufactures,
as low-cost Third World producers entered many markets. Together with the Commission (under new
President Jacques Delors), business leaders called for reenergizing industry by “relaunching” the EEC.
Removing the remaining “non-tariff barriers” within the EEC would complete a true “Single Market.”6
Thus the Single Market plan confronted high-tech and Third-World competition in the same way that
the early EEC sought to meet the challenge of postwar American competition: by reducing barriers
within Europe in order to spur European firms to greater efficiency and scale. European firms would
become larger and more competitive than ever.
5
Nonetheless, two developments stand out in the 1970s. In 1974, the governments agreed to hold trimesterial
“European Councils” to set the political agenda for EEC. These meetings have become very important in
launching new initiatives and making major collective decisions. In 1979, they created the European Monetary
System (EMS) to dampen intra-EEC currency fluctuations.
6
Tariffs are explicit taxes on foreign trade. “Non-tariff barriers” are any sort of other standards or rules that may
block foreign producers from competing with national producers. For example, Germany long required that a
beverage could only be sold as “beer” in Germany if it had only four ingredients; this kept many other countries’
beers out of the German market, and so was effectively protectionism. Similarly, national requirements on
product safety or quality or environmental standards can impede international competition. The Single Market
plan set out to create common standards (or common recognition of several standards) on all such issues.
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Both enlargement and the complex Single Market project underscored a need to streamline
EEC’s decision-making process. Crucially, the Luxembourg Compromise’s unanimity rule would
have to give way to majority voting in the Council of Ministers, so that no one country could hold up
progress. This was the major development of the Single European Act (SEA) of 1986, which set 1992
as the target date for completing the Single Market, passing hundreds of directives to decrease
regulatory barriers to trade. Overall, the SEA took important steps in the supranational direction. In
addition to extending majority voting in the Council (implicitly abrogating the Luxembourg
Compromise), it awarded limited budgetary powers to the European Parliament. It also formalized a
loose framework for intergovernmental cooperation in foreign policy, and proclaimed the symbolic
change from “EEC” to “EC.” While its future remained ambiguous, the European Community was no
longer merely “Economic.” Whatever else happened, majority voting and the growing power of
Commission and Parliament meant the pure free-trade vision of European integration had been ruled
out.
Yet if Europe’s institutional questions were narrower in 1988 than in 1958, they were more
complex and pressing. The progress that ruled out the free-trade vision raised new questions. Would
the EC’s European Monetary System, which linked member currencies to prevent large fluctuations,
move toward a single currency? Would foreign policy— mentioned in the Single European Act, but
only as intergovernmental cooperation with no Commission role—be subjected to majority voting?
How much would social policies be harmonized? Overall, how federal would the EC become?
These questions alone set the stage for an EC identity crisis. Integration had come to the point
that leaders had to start making choices between the visions of Europe—choices which their
predecessors found easier to defer. But Europe’s identity crisis became still more serious after 1989,
when the Cold War suddenly ended and Germany was reunified.
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Geopolitics: National Bargains and the Revolutions of 1989
All the questions and debates about European integration from 1950 to 1989 were premised on certain
assumptions about European geopolitics. East-West conflict would continue to divide the continent in
half, and Germany into two countries.
Germany’s division was a constant reminder of its defeat in 1945. The Federal Republic (West
Germany) was a creation of the Western powers, and depended on them for its defense. In the
international arena, the truncated West German state was profoundly dependent on multilateral action
with its allies for respect and legitimacy. West German foreign policy choices were largely limited to
how it would act within parameters set by its Western partners.
The division of Germany also tremendously magnified French influence. No European
country was willing to follow German leadership after World War II. The British, meanwhile,
continually sought to emphasize their separation from the continent. This left France as the only real
candidate for European leadership. Only the French could aspire to speak legitimately for Europe, and
they used this leverage with skill to claim an international position disproportionate to their real
power.
These Franco-German positions underlay the core bargain behind the EC. West Germany
would be reintegrated into the international community through participation in European institutions,
and France would gain a powerful and loyal follower for its ambitions of leadership. For the French,
this also ensured that West Germany would not establish a separate, threatening role in world affairs,
and that France would have the dominant voice in EC policy making. Germany and the smaller
countries would make concessions at every stage of EC development, while the French bottom line on
most issues would be respected. This bargain set the tone of European integration for forty years.
But when the revolutions of 1989 suddenly ended the East-West divide, the geopolitical
framework for this deal evaporated. The end of the Soviet threat decreased the “circle-the-wagons”
mentality which had held western Europe together. The reunification of West and East Germany in
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1990 restored full German sovereignty, making Europe’s most powerful state still more powerful.
Could the Franco-German bargain be recast to drive integration forward in the new Europe? One
geopolitical continuity remained: if France and Germany disagreed, Europe would go nowhere.
At the beginning of the 1990s, then, Europe’s institutional ambiguities were aggravated by
new geopolitical questions. Now we bring the internal story of institutions together with the external
story of geopolitics, and survey integration since 1989.
Integration in the New Europe
The Triumph and Problems of Maastricht
The EC’s most pressing problems after 1989 concerned German reunification. With astonishing
rapidity, Europe found itself dealing with a confident power with 80 million people and 30% of the
EC’s GDP. Pundits speculated that the new Germany would turn its back on the EC. Germany, they
said, no longer depended on European institutions for legitimacy and influence.
Such fears proved unfounded. Indeed, the exact opposite took place. Rather than detaching
Germany from Europe, reunification imparted a major boost to integration. Many German leaders
were anxious to reaffirm their commitment to the EC, and Germany’s partners were eager to cement
its anchorage as well. In March 1990, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François
Mitterrand called for the opening of two intergovernmental conferences. One would negotiate a treaty
on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with the ultimate goal of creating a single European central
bank and currency. The other would discuss Political Union, attempting to reform EC institutions,
introduce common social policies, and lay the groundwork for a common foreign and security policy.
The result was the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. At British insistence, the word
“federal” was dropped from the treaty’s preamble, but as The Economist noted, “Call it what you will:
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by any other name it is federal government.”7 On EMU, all of the members except Britain agreed to
create a single currency and a European central bank by 1999. (Britain “opted out” of this goal, and
from the treaty’s “social chapter”). The European Parliament gained important powers, including a
veto on legislation in many areas. The Commission’s responsibilities were expanded to include
consumer protection, education, health, trans-European energy and transport networks, and some
aspects of social policy. European aid to its poorer members (Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland)
was doubled to decrease income disparities. Foreign policy cooperation was slightly strengthened.
Maastricht clearly pushed Europe further down the federal path. “EC” had become “EU.” But
two developments disrupted this picture by complicating Europe’s structure. First, new agreements in
foreign policy and justice (crime, immigration) were set up as “intergovernmental pillars” outside the
existing institutions. Economically-focused integration in the existing EC was labeled the “first pillar”
of the EU; foreign policy/security and justice became the second and third “pillars,” with different
(and less supranational) institutional rules. Since foreign policy and justice raise such sensitive issues
of sovereignty, the supranational institutional actors (the Commission, Parliament, and ECJ) were
given a diminished role in the newer pillars. This meant certain issue-areas might remain outside the
federal project. Second, the “opting out” clauses for Britain on EMU and social policy set a precedent
for “Europe à la carte,” or a “multi-speed Europe.” This meant different areas of integration could
have different memberships. Instead of being a coherent federation, Europe might comprise many
overlapping, issue-specific institutions. As an open admission of these loose ends, the Maastricht
treaty provided for another conference on institutional issues in 1996.
A multi-speed future also seemed to be foreshadowed by problems with EMU. When
Maastricht was signed, only two members (France and Luxembourg) met the five criteria for national
economies it set as preconditions for EMU.8 Global recession and the costs of German reunification
7
The Economist , December 14, 1991.
The criteria were: inflation rate within 1.5% of the average of the three lowest members’ rates, long-term
interest rates within 2% of the average of the three lowest members’ rates, annual budget deficit below 3% of
8
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were partly to blame, but some members seemed unlikely ever to meet the criteria. Greece and
Portugal met none in 1991, Italy and Spain only one. Even the “core” countries of Italy and Belgium
could clearly not lower their public debt in 20 years—much less by 1999—to meet the conditions.
Not only did the treaty leave unanswered questions, but other events soon complicated the
picture. In June 1992, Denmark stunned Europe by narrowly rejecting its national referendum to ratify
the treaty. One major complaint behind the Danish “no” was the EU’s so-called “democratic deficit.”
Except for the modestly-empowered European Parliament, European institutions have little direct
democratic input or control. Commission personnel do not answer directly to any elected body. Even
national-government actors in Brussels tend to be unelected representatives of elected national
representatives. To many Europeans, the “Brussels technocracy” shows little consideration for public
opinion. Maastricht, like all the proceeding steps of integration, was negotiated as a deal between
governments, without any real popular input. The Danish populace refused to sanction this elite deal.
While the Danes later voted to ratify (once they were given an EMU “opt out” clause like the
British), their challenge knocked Europe off its fast track. It influenced the French referendum on
ratification in September 1992, whose razor-thin approval (51% to 49%) further sapped European
confidence. More importantly, the combination of this political challenge with economic recession
undermined the credibility of national commitments to keep their currencies from fluctuating in the
European Monetary System (EMS). In September 1992, speculators drove the British pound and the
Italian lira out of the system. Then the entire EMS collapsed in a wave of speculation in June 1993.
While the system was patched back together, progress to a single currency seemed further away than
ever.
In sum, the Maastricht Treaty resulted from two impulses, and had two major consequences.
The first impulse came from Europe’s own internal development, and the gradual success of
federalism. Equally important was the external push from German reunification. The first major
GDP, total public debt ratio under 60% of GDP, and at least 2 years’ participation in the European Monetary
System’s limited exchange-rate bands.
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consequence was that Europe took its largest step yet to federalism, with EMU. But the second was to
raise questions about the EU’s overall coherence, its popular support, and its economic viability.
Furthermore, Maastricht did almost nothing to deal with another huge consequence of the end
of the Cold War: Eastern enlargement. In addition to ending the division of Germany, the revolutions
of 1989 produced new capitalist democracies in Eastern Europe. They all immediately aspired to join
the club of rich democracies to the west. The EU was besieged by requests for trade agreements,
which signaled that all Eastern countries would apply for full EU membership as soon as they had any
hope of success. A whole new set of questions confronted integration. Could the EU possibly unite
Western and Eastern Europe? How would it have to change to do so?
EU leaders gave no clear answers in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, in December 1994 they
formally accepted that enlargement was inevitable. In order to stabilize Eastern democracies and
markets, Western Europeans would admit their poorer neighbors into their club. Twelve countries
quickly applied.9 But how would the club change with these new members? And could its ambitious
EMU project come to fruition?
Muddling Through the 1990s
These two issues—EMU internally, and Eastern enlargement externally—dominated the EU agenda
through the 1990s. While both projects reached fruition, this does not mean the questions they raised
were clearly answered.
To everyone’s surprise, the immediate uncertainties surrounding EMU steadily decreased after
the post-Maastricht scare. Not only did Europe’s leaders resolutely maintain their commitment to
EMU despite much domestic criticism and through the EMS crises of 1992-3, they successfully led
9
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania,
Cyprus, and Malta. Turkey had also applied previously, making for 13 candidates overall.
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their nations through remarkable economic sacrifices in order to meet the EMU criteria.10 France,
Germany, and the Benelux11 all implemented painful and politically unpopular budget cuts. Spain and
Italy quickly decreased their immense budget deficits by more than half. Fudging of the EMU criteria
was necessary to allow certain countries to participate, but ambiguous wording in the treaty allowed
for this.12 By 1997, it was clear that 11 of the EU’s members (numbering 15 since Austria, Finland,
and Sweden joined in 1995) would move to a single currency in 1999. In January 1999 this took place
with little trouble: the participating countries’ exchange rates were frozen irrevocably, effectively
creating one pool of money. Euro bills and coins replaced francs, marks, lira, and the other currencies
in January 2002, making the transition complete.
This still meant that Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and Greece would remain outside the most
important step yet in federal-style integration. Greece, the poorest member at the time, was unable to
meet the EMU criteria by 1997 (even with fudging). Important domestic economic reform at the end
of the 1990s, however, allowed the Greeks to join EMU in 2001. The other three countries could have
met the EMU criteria, but chose to stay outside the single currency for the moment. It was no
coincidence that all three also remained supporters of the confederal vision of the EU, hoping to
minimize the accretion of power in the European institutions. The federal-confederal debate was still
alive, preserved by the possibility of a “multi-speed Europe.”
Slow progress towards Eastern enlargement also fed this debate. A survey of previous
enlargements helps to see why. “Widening” membership has always made “deepening” integration
more complicated. The more countries that join the EU, and the more disparate they are in wealth and
culture, the harder it becomes to integrate them into a single framework. When Britain, Denmark, and
Ireland joined in 1972, they brought in a distinctly anti-federalist vision of Europe. This helped bring
10
Though the EMS crisis of summer 1993 forced a widening of the fluctuations permitted between European
currencies (from +2.25% to +15%), speculation quickly diminished and exchange rates stabilized within the
prior margins.
11
Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
12
Countries like Belgium, with total public debt far in excess of 60% of GDP, were allowed to participate if they
were making progress in the right direction.
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on “Euro-pessimism”: the EC was tied up in institutional and budgetary conflicts for a decade. When
Greece, Spain and Portugal joined in the early 1980s, the EC stopped being a small club of very rich
nations. This time the problems—the complication of functioning with twelve members, and the need
for aid to the poorer countries—were resolved in the push to the SEA. Institutional reform was judged
necessary to keep Europe working. As noted above, Austria, Sweden, and Finland joined on January 1,
1995. Despite the fact that these countries are all richer than the EU average and culturally similar to
their neighbors, expansion to fifteen members almost undermined previous progress toward
“deepening.” Changes in the vote count required to reject most decisions in the Council of Ministers (a
“blocking minority”) were only accepted by Britain, Spain, and Italy in 1994 after a long crisis.13
But these problems paled in comparison to the difficulties of incorporating Eastern Europe.
The clearest obstacle was poverty: eight of the thirteen candidate countries were less than half as
wealthy as the existing EU average. The most direct problem created by this disparity concerned EU
subsidies. The EU Structural and Cohesion Funds transferred one-third of the EU budget to its poorer
regions (at that time, mainly Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland). Extending similar aid to the much
poorer Easterners would be enormously expensive. Any resolution would mean upsetting the deals
between current members. Richer members like Germany and Britain hoped to use this opportunity to
decrease the costly Structural Fund programs. But the poorer current members were determined fight
against any change in their income.
Other thorny problems arose in trade and competition, agriculture, and social and
environmental legislation. In order to match EU regulations, Eastern countries had to pass close to
100,000 pages of existing EU rules to eliminate subsidies, create market competition, and adopt all the
standards of the Single Market program. Even if Easterners could suppress subsidies and adopt EU13
Previous to the enlargement, a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers required 54 of 76 votes; 23 was
thus a blocking minority. France, Germany, Britain, and Italy each had 10 votes; Spain had 8; Belgium, Greece,
the Netherlands, and Portugal had 5; Denmark and Ireland 3; and Luxembourg 2. With the addition of Sweden,
Austria, and Finland, the blocking minority became 26, making certain previous blocking minorities (i.e. Britain,
Germany, and the Netherlands often allied on free-trade issues; Spain, Italy, and Greece formed the “olive belt”)
insufficient. The British, Spanish, and Italian challenge was an attempt to keep the blocking minority at 23 while
adding the new votes. An elaborate compromise ended the crisis and further complicated the rules.
16
style legislation, a long transition period would be necessary before many of their industries could
survive in direct competition with Westerners.
In agriculture, introducing more competition was not the problem. In fact, East European
agriculture was often too competitive. Prices were considerably lower than those supported by the
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP currently functions by paying farmers the difference
between the world price for each product and an artificially high target price. As with the Structural
Funds, extending the same system to the East would be expensive. Either the EU’s Western members
would have to pay more to the CAP budget, Western farmers would have to lose some of their
benefits, or the new members would not receive the same generous subsidies.
Finally, extending EU social and environmental regulations to cover the East was problematic.
While new members could in principle “opt out” of the new “social chapter” as did the British, they
could not avoid a great deal of basic harmonization with the West.14 Throughout the East, struggling
firms could ill afford the costly requirements of Western labor legislation. Massive environmental
problems could make EU environmental regulations equally difficult to apply. Yet failing to raise
Eastern standards could mean a rapid transfer of jobs from the high-cost West (already averaging more
than 10% unemployment) to the low-cost East. Indeed, this was already happening by the mid-1990s.
Besides these policy problems, enlargement raised tricky institutional issues that promised to
radically alter the EU. An EU of 27 members (if all the Eastern Europeans joined, with Malta and
Cyprus) would require rebalancing all the careful weighting of national influence in the European
institutions. In a much larger EU, how would voting in the Council of Ministers weight the
representation of large versus small states? The latter were already overrepresented relative to their
population, and adding more small states under the current system would further undercut the power
of the big states (Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain).15 Would the Commission and Parliament add
new members, even if this made them unworkably large? If not, the balance between current members
”Harmonization” is the EU term for making disparate national legislation more similar.
At the time, Luxembourg’s 2 votes in the Council of Ministers each represented less than 200,000 people;
Germany’s 10 votes each represented 8 million.
14
15
17
would have to be revised. Overall, would a wider Union mean more reliance on majority voting, even
on those “intergovernmental pillar” issues (crime, immigration, foreign policy) where governments
had retained vetoes to that point?
These questions set the agenda for the 1996 intergovernmental conference scheduled at
Maastricht. It produced the Treaty of Amsterdam, signed in May 1997. Once again, Europe’s leaders
muddled through without clear answers. The most important issue, reweighting Council voting after
enlargement, was deferred to another round of negotiations in 2000. Plans for unifying the Maastricht
Treaty’s intergovernmental “pillars” into the main structure were diluted. A few clear steps were
taken: Commission and Parliament membership were capped, and the Parliament’s powers were
extended.16 The former will help keep the institutions manageable, and the latter responded somewhat
to “democratic deficit” concerns. Additionally, a single “High Representative” for EU foreign policy
was created, to centralize the expression of EU positions. But if this all streamlined the institutions, the
Amsterdam Treaty also codified the “multi-speed Europe” informally introduced in Maastricht’s “opt
out” clauses. In the future, said the treaty, certain EU countries could pursue closer cooperation on
certain issues without all the EU members.
Negotiations began with the enlargement candidates in 1998, and their progress forced the
next round of intra-EU discussions to resolve some of these lingering questions. In December 2000 the
Treaty of Nice brought agreement on the extension of majority voting to many areas, and most
importantly on weighted voting in the Council—but not without arrangements that preserved much of
the ambiguity of the past. While the wider application of majority voting and the addition of new
qualified-majority votes in the Council will make that body look less like a ministerial club and more
like a Senate in the future (with many actors and potentially shifting coalitions), the big countries also
altered the basic voting to prevent them from being constantly outvoted by their smaller neighbors. A
qualified majority now required approximately 75% of the total of weighted votes (as opposed to
16
Parliament membership was limited to 700 seats, even though this means current members will lose some
seats after enlargement. The Commission currently includes one member for each small country, and two for
each big country; after enlargement, it will simply be one member per country.
18
about 70% currently), and the support of countries representing 62% of the total EU population. In
other words, the Nice Treaty set the foundations for a wider, superficially-more-federal EU, while
actually raising some of the obstacles to smooth collective decision-making within it.
The resolution of the enlargement negotiations similarly danced around some of the big
questions. Eventually it was agreed that ten countries—all of the applicants except the most
problematic Eastern European countries, Bulgaria and Romania, and Turkey—would join on May 1,
2004 in a “big bang” enlargement. To avoid redirecting Structural Fund spending entirely away from
earlier beneficiaries, the EU member-states agreed that any state could receive no more than 4% of its
GDP from these funds. This matched roughly what Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland had received
in the previous decade, but it also meant that the new accession countries, with much lower GDPs,
would effectively receive much less money. On agricultural policy, the Western states agreed that
Eastern farmers would eventually receive full CAP payments, but only after a lengthy transition
period. In the near term their payments would begin at 25% of Western levels and would rise slowly
thereafter. Transition periods were also negotiated on many regulatory issues to allow the new
members to adapt to EU rules. Overall, the enlargement deal avoided upsetting the main arrangements
between the Western states and gave the Eastern members less favorable conditions than they had
hoped for—leaving to the future a variety of battles over the principles of equal membership and how
much value the EU places on supporting its poorer regions.
Thus integration carried its ambiguities into the new Europe of the 21st century. Its most
surprising success—progress towards EMU—definitively installed elements of a federal system. But
the “multi-speed” nature of that project, and the simultaneous steps towards enlargement, kept
Europe’s future murky.
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The constitutional episode
After the messy bargaining over the Treaty of Nice at the end of 2000, many EU leaders agreed that a
crisis point was approaching. The EU had become steadily more complicated as it became more
powerful. Enlargement to ten more countries was about to make it even harder to manage. Old patterns
of intergovernmental bargaining over EU policies seemed unable to produce agreements. Perhaps
worst of all (for advocates of the EU), it was increasingly clear that the EU had a growing public
relations problem. From the rumblings in Denmark and elsewhere in the early 1990s over a
“democratic deficit”—the notion that the transfer of power to the EU had not been followed by equal
channels of popular representation and accountability—had developed a widespread sense across
European publics that the EU was too distant, closed, and confusing. Partly for this reason, partly
because they felt that they needed to break out of old bargaining procedures to clean up the Nice
treaty, and partly because they did not have any other major ideas about what to do with the EU, they
decided to have a novel “constitutional convention” to propose changes to the EU treaties. With luck
this would allow EU citizens to express their views of how to make the EU more transparent and
appealing, engaging the populace to deal with the “democratic deficit,” and it might lead to
innovations in EU structures that were difficult to achieve through standard national-government
negotiation.
One hundred and five delegates from the national governments, EU institutions, and elsewhere
meet in Brussels in 2001-2002. To the surprise of many, Convention President (and ex-French
President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing eventually managed to bring the delegates into quasi-consensus
on a moderately ambitious set of proposals. Some changes were cosmetic: the complicated EU treaties
would be given a grand preamble and labeled a “constitution,” though little was done to reduce the
complexities of their 300+ pages. More importantly, the voting rules in the Council of Ministers—the
most important rules of the EU—would be simplified from their complex “weighted majority” to a
“double majority” rule (requiring 50% of member-states and 60% of the population). Majority voting
20
would be extended to everything except taxation and foreign policy. Cooperation in foreign policy
would be strengthened by the creation of a European Foreign Minister and staff. An EU Charter of
Fundamental Rights that had been drawn up in the late 1990s would be given legal force. Other
changes would slightly streamline the growing European Parliament and European Commission.
If the Convention was successful (if not quite revolutionary) at its immediate drafting task, it
failed as a public relations effort. EU citizens did not avail themselves much of the elaborate Internetbased opportunities for input and paid little attention in general. Nor did this new process manage to
escape the ugly horse-trading and stalemates of national-government bargaining. The governments had
not agreed to simply accept the Convention’s proposals; after its work was done, they settled in to
negotiate how much of the Convention draft they would accept in a standard “intergovernmental
conference” (IGC—the format for all previous changes to the EU treaties). Though the governments
agreed to much of the draft constitution, they came to deadlock in December 2003 over the voting
changes to the Council of Ministers. Spain and Poland had been oddly advantaged by the voting rules
agreed in the Nice Treaty (giving them almost as many votes as the EU’s largest states despite having
roughly 2/3 the population of Britain, France, or Italy, and half that of Germany), and they refused to
accept the “double majority” system. A deal was eventually brokered in spring 2004. The “double
majority” would rise to 55% of states and 65% of population—making Council of Ministers passage
of legislation harder than ever. The constitution could move forward, but any hoped-for image of
thoughtful constitutional design was dispelled.
Now all of Europe looked toward ratification of the constitutional treaty. In some states
national procedures called just for parliamentary votes, but in others ratification required or allowed
for a popular referendum. A positive outcome in multiple referendums was far from certain. The
constitutional negotiations had done little to restore stronger popular support for the EU. During the
process, the EU members had divided sharply over the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,
weakening the apparent promise of a European Foreign Minister. More importantly, Western
European citizens were beginning to react negatively to the consequences of the “big bang”
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enlargement of 2004. They often perceived the small but increasing western movements of Polish and
other post-communist people as a deep social threat—representing low-cost competition that would
undercut the generous social regulations and welfare states of the West. In France, the most wellknown figure in the long and involved public debate that preceded the May 2005 referendum was the
“Polish plumber” whom EU rules would ostensibly allow to immigrate and outcompete better-paid
and better-regulated French plumbers.
It did not help that the most pro-EU advocates had difficulty getting excited about the
constitution. Even though the treaty contained several important innovations, it was difficult to argue
that it would make the EU substantially more democratic, transparent, fair, or effective. Moreover, as
specialists of EU law pointed out, it was just a public-relations ploy to portray this agreement as a
“constitution” in contrast to the earlier “treaties.” Arguably the EU already had a de facto constitution,
if by that word we mean a body of basic law that trumps all other law and that is especially difficult to
amend. As early as the 1960s the court of the EEC, the European Court of Justice, had established that
the EEC treaties were supreme even to national constitutions (requiring them to be changed if they
contradicted EU law). The European treaties were clearly much harder to change than normal law,
since amendment required elaborate negotiation and consensus between all the governments. Thus
Europe already had a constitution in everything but name, and this new document did not radically
alter it.
Perhaps even more important for the result of the referendums in France and the Netherlands
in May and June 2005 was that this modest, messy, misleadingly-named constitution came before the
voters in a time of economic and social malaise and unpopular national leaders. Even citizens who
might have been fairly pro-European under other conditions were tempted to use the referendum as a
protest vote about other things. With hindsight, then, the clear French “no” of 54.7% and the even
higher Dutch “no” of 61.6% several days later may not seem terribly surprising. But for European
elites it was a shock of historic proportions. While France had come close to rejecting a European
treaty before, in the narrow vote to ratify the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the repeated success of treaty
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after treaty had given the EU project an aura of inevitability. It seemed that Europe would always
move forward. Now the advocates of that movement in Brussels and national capitals fell into a deep
depression. They had played up a treaty modification as a “constitution” and invited European citizens
to participate like never before in EU institution-building—and the citizens had first expressed little
interest and then rejected the result. That this rejection occurred in France and the Netherlands, the
historic core of the EU, was an especially devastating blow. The EU could work around the Danish
rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, but nothing could be done with clear “no” votes in these
two countries. The other countries that had scheduled referenda canceled them. The constitution was
dead.
The Constitution’s reprise: fall of the Lisbon Treaty
This is effectively where the EU stands today, as an attempt since 2005 to revive the Constitutional
Treaty failed in summer 2008. For more than a year after the 2005 referendums, Europe stood in an
impasse. In particular everyone was waiting for the French presidential elections of 2007, since the
French rejection of the Constitutional Treaty seemed to mean that things could only move forward
once France changed its tune. This moment duly arrived with the election of the most self-confident
French leader since de Gaulle, Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, a self-labeled maverick and pragmatic
political “fixer,” quickly proposed to strip out the symbolic elements of the Constitutional Treaty and
repackage its institutional reforms in a toned-down deal that became known as the Lisbon Treaty
(following the EU habit of naming treaties for their place of negotiation). He and other national leaders
also agreed to avoid referendums in ratifying the new treaty, if at all possible, instead making use of
parliamentary procedures to ratify. But in one country—Ireland—a referendum was constitutionally
required. It was difficult not to see that EU elites were attempting to sneak the same Constitution
reforms past their citizens, and outrage over this kind of politics was as much a factor as any
substantive complaints in the Irish rejection (by 53%) of the Lisbon Treaty in June 2009. Though
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almost all other member-states had successfully ratified the Treaty through their parliaments, a single
rejection is sufficient to block its implementation. At the time of writing, EU leaders are now
preparing to ask the Irish people to vote again. They are banking on the argument that the Irish will
change their minds when it is clear that the functioning of the EU rides on their vote alone. Even if this
logic eventually wins the day and gets the EU out of its immediate impasse, however, the series of
rejections in referendum augur poorly for progress in European integration in the future. Overall, the
constitutional episode did not only fail to redress perceptions of a European “democratic deficit,” but
greatly worsened them.
Looking forward
Today’s EU still lies under the shadow of the failed Constitutional Treaty. This will remain true even
if the Lisbon Treaty is eventually approved. Lacking a major new substantive project and fearful of
rising unpopularity, the EU’s champions have turned their attention in two directions. One is to
smaller (if not unimportant) projects within the current framework. Most prominent among these is the
“Lisbon agenda,” a collection of proposals for still-greater liberalization of the Single Market. Though
originally intended to produce a new burst of activity like the “Single Market 1992” plan of the
1980s—and announced in 2000 with the audacious goal of giving Europe “the most competitive
economy in the world” by 2010—the Lisbon agenda has mostly fizzled. Public support for
liberalization is low, and may well be disappearing entirely with the onset of the global financial crisis
in 2008. The other major focus of attention is one that has dominated the scene for many years now:
enlargement. Again, part of the “no” votes against the Constitution clearly flowed from protests about
the consequences of the 2004 enlargement (even if the Constitution itself would have done nothing to
affect them). Many Western Europeans seem to feel that the original European project was designed to
shore up their social model and strength in the world, and that extending the EU to poorer, less
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socially-generous countries has eviscerated the framework (or will eventually). But the most recent
attention has focused on a potential enlargement that provokes even greater anxiety: that of Turkey.
Turkey originally applied to the EU in 1987, but was not taken seriously. Though it was a
longtime NATO member and had extensive trade deals with the EC already, Turkey was a poor
Muslim country in which the military retained a distinctly undemocratic role in politics. For a long
time few in Brussels believed that the Turkish application could change its status. Central and Eastern
Europe marketized, democratized, and finally joined while Turkey stood on the sidelines. But at the
turn of the millennium came a surprising chain of developments. Turkey elected a new leader, Recep
Erdogan, from a supposedly less pro-Western, more Islamist party—and he began a remarkable series
of reforms with the explicit goal of moving his country toward EU membership. Though few Western
Europeans were genuinely enthusiastic about Turkish membership, they had difficulty denying that
they would begin negotiations on accession if it could meet the criteria outlined for Eastern European
candidates (the so-called “Copenhagen criteria” of viable democracy, a functioning market economy,
respect for human rights and minorities, and willingness to accept the full body of EU legislation). In
particular, Western leaders and diplomats were anxious to avoid saying “no” explicitly to Turkey, for
fear of political developments that might follow from a clear statement that Turkey would never be
welcome in the EU. To the further surprise of most people in the EU, Turkey made steady progress on
its agenda of domestic change and in October 2005 the EU agreed to open official negotiations to
prepare its accession.
This prospect evokes all the fears that came with the 2004 enlargement and then some. If
Turkey’s relative poverty (a GDP of about 30% of the EU-25 average) and lack of generous social
regulation and welfare raises the specter of a “Turkish plumber” in economic competition,
demography and culture expand on that perception of threat. The “big bang” enlargement of 2004
brought in 10 states, but only one with more a population over 10 million (Poland, with 40 million).
Turkey has 70 million, and perhaps more importantly, it is growing rapidly in an era when both
Western and Eastern European populations are projected to shrink. By the time it might join the EU, it
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would be the largest member-state—giving it the most weight in the Council of Ministers and
Parliament. Though its 99% Muslim population has lived with a severely secular state for most of the
20th century, their religion is a source of major anxiety. Even before the events of September 11, 2001
and the opening of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” integration (or basic acceptance) of
Muslim immigrants in Europe was a salient and difficult issue. Overall, then, some EU citizens see
Turkish accession as opening doors to a burgeoning source of economic competition, demographic
takeover, social conflict, and possibly terrorism.
More broadly, Turkish accession symbolizes profound choices in what the EU project will be
about in the future. The positive rationale for membership, like the key EU thinking on Central and
Eastern Europe a decade ago, is that EU accession is the best way to consolidate democracy, human
rights, and markets in this critical state on Europe’s borders. Welcoming Turkey in will strengthen its
pro-Western forces internally. Not only will this dynamic operate in Turkey, hopefully, but its
inclusion may be a potent symbol of Western acceptance of Muslims elsewhere. If Turkey is left out
when equally poor countries in southeastern Europe are not, on the other hand, many Muslims in
Turkey and elsewhere may take this as a strong signal to turn away from the West. Thus Turkish
accession seems like a logical extension of the rationale for the 2004 enlargement: using the EU
project mostly as a set of incentives and a strong framework for the consolidation of democracy, the
rule of law, and market capitalism. On the other hand, besides the worries noted above, a Turkish
accession might signal a decisive shift away from the “European” side of the EU and toward more
passive aspirations of just “Union.” That is, it may mean giving up on the notion of building a strong
European actor in the world, and instead focusing mainly on extending a unified zone of peace and
prosperity. As Giscard d’Estaing remarked undiplomatically during the Convention, many of those
who hope that the EU will deepen into a powerful actor on the world stage see Turkish accession as
“the end of Europe.” Turkey is arguably so big and so different from current members that it will
make cohesive EU action in foreign policy (or major internal policies like social policies) hard to
imagine.
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Some point out that this decision may already have been made with the 2004 enlargement. In
shifting from a Europe of fifteen mostly rich, Western European states to one of twenty-seven (as of
the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007) with much greater heterogeneity, the character of EU
decision-making changed a great deal. Not so long ago meetings of members’ heads of state in the
European Council were clubby, intimate affairs of personal relations and quiet deal-making. Today
these meetings include over a hundred people and have taken on more of the dynamics of an assembly.
Turkish accession might just consolidate a change that has already taken place, pushing “European”
coherent centralized action off the stage in favor of a more diffuse “union”-focused arena.
To the extent that this logic prevails, the future EU might drop any pretenses of centralized
action outside of economic policies and look to leverage its incentives of membership into extending
its zone of peace and prosperity as far as possible. Since the late 1990s there have been serious
discussions in Brussels of enlargement east to Russia’s borders. If Turkey is accepted, we might next
see debate over possible membership for Morocco. The “European” aspect of the project might fall
away, growing into an organization devoted to the ever-wider spread of open markets, democracy, the
rule of law, and human rights. This scenario certainly seems to play to the strengths of the EU project
so far. It has been extraordinarily successful—fairly called the most successful effort in history—at
anchoring previously-antagonistic countries into cooperative relations, similar basic values, and
openness. It has been considerably less successful in its attempts to rally European countries into a
single voice in world affairs, or in centralizing large positive policy actions internally.
Yet it is also not hard to see why many Europeans may feel less inspired by an EU that
focuses on the extension of union—and thus why we should expect continued challenges to the
clarification of the EU project around this less “European” conception. One of the original motivations
for delegations of national sovereignty to these new institutions was to allow Europe’s small and
medium-sized states to recapture some of the influence and capacity for action that they enjoyed
before the rise of the superpowers. Turning over French or Spanish or Belgian power in order to gain a
strong voice on the world stage is easily connected to benefits for the French, Spanish, or Belgian
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people who are turning over the power. Doing the same in order to help consolidate the rule of law in
Turkey has a more distant and complicated relationship to such benefits. It seems likely, then, that to
the extent EU enlargement continues, we will see increasing attention to “multi-speed” proposals. The
old Western European core will consider deeper, more centralized policy integration that excludes the
more recent members. Depending on how successful they are, the EU may not only maintain its
institutional ambiguity but render it even more complicated.
*
*
*
*
*
*
Today’s European Union remains embroiled in its identity crisis. Many of its ambiguities have been
left behind on the road to today’s quasi-federal EU. But at the same time, the development of EU
institutions and geopolitical change confront Europeans with more questions than ever.
One clear message sent by today’s EU is that more education about it is necessary. The
distance of EU institutions from their citizens’ lives, their arcane policy-making processes, and the
technical nature of their responsibilities have created one of the least understood political systems in
modern times. This is true not just of average Europeans, but of elites as well. The stakes and rules of
the EU game are often only understood by specialists and direct participants in EU policies. It is even
more true in the United States, where ignorance of how our closest allies have transformed their
continent is near complete. If this essay has taken a small step to change this, it has attained its goal.
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