subtleties that escape the notice of the uninitiated. Like the Monnet method, EU jargon forestalls opposition by veiling the long-term objective while at the same time quietly asserting it.
In this vein, the disappearance of the word “economic” from “European Economic Community” was highly significant: the European Community was moving beyond the economic sphere and taking on a political dimension. Europe now formed a community, encompassing anything implied in that vague but evocative word, not just the pursuit of better economic performance. Thickening the fog even further, the 1993 Treaty of Maastricht (more on that soon) officially created a European Community within the European Communities. As a European Union website states tersely, “After the Treaty of Maastricht the EEC became the European Community, reflecting the determination of the Member States to expand the Community’s powers to non-economic domains.”3
But European integration moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes taking a step backward and sometimes stalling. The establishment of the EC in 1967 came after much resistance to further integration from the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in the first half of the decade. Concerned to prevent the erosion of French sovereignty, de Gaulle opposed the inclusion of new members in the EEC, especially his cultural rival the United Kingdom. In addition, he was determined to prevent the possibility of France’s being overruled on important policy decisions. De Gaulle’s resistance sparked what is known as the “empty chair crisis,” when France boycotted all EEC meetings for seven months in 1965–1966. The boycott ended only after an agreement was reached to roll back some provisions of the Treaty of Rome, and thus to require unanimity on important issues rather than the qualified majority votes stipulated in the treaty for certain policy areas.
De Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, agreed in 1969 to consider letting new members into the EC. After long negotiations, Denmark, Ireland and the UK joined in 1973, becoming the first additions to the original six member states. This was the beginning of an enlargement process that has continued to the present day, with Greece joining in 1981; Spain and Portugal in 1986; Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995; ten new members – Cyprus, Malta, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – in 2004; Romania and Bulgaria in 2007; and Croatia in 2013. The EU currently counts twenty-eight member states, with the prospect of gaining additional members in the future.
Meanwhile, along with a widening of the EU, there has been a deepening via institutional changes that promote closer integration. After the European Communities were merged in 1967, the next significant institutional step was the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1979, which established the European Currency Unit (ECU), a reference unit valued at the weighted average of all participating European currencies. The EMS required currencies to maintain a value within a narrow band around the ECU in order to reduce exchange-rate fluctuations and lay the basis for an eventual monetary union. That year also saw the first direct elections to the European Parliament, which until then had been an appointed body made up of representatives from national parliaments. Henceforward, all members of the European Parliament would be elected to five-year terms. In 1987, the Single European Act (SEA) came into force; it set a deadline of December 31, 1992 to achieve the single market with free movement of capital, people, goods and services across borders throughout the European Community.4
The European Union was officially birthed with the ratification of the Treaty on European Union, commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty, in 1993. Here I note again the change from “community” to “union.” Few people had the time to reflect on the deeper implications of now being a “union.” The Maastricht Treaty included arrangements for a European Monetary Union (EMU), with a single currency to be in effect by 1999 and with monetary policy to be transferred from member states’ national central banks to a European Central Bank (ECB). The treaty also included measures toward the development of a common EU foreign and security policy. These were huge steps toward supranational integration at the expense of the national sovereignty of the member states in core policy areas. The more sovereigntist UK and Denmark received an opt-out on the common currency, retaining their own currencies and keeping their national powers in the realm of monetary and fiscal policy. They were not subject to the treaty’s measures related to the ECB and the European System of Central Banks.5
The Treaty of Maastricht was followed, in 1999, by the Treaty of Amsterdam, which is mainly known for increasing EU powers in the areas of “external border control and visas, asylum and immigration policy, and judicial cooperation.”6 Again, these policy areas traditionally represent core aspects of national sovereignty, as the refugee crisis overwhelming Europe in 2015 makes painfully clear.
FROM THE COMMON CURRENCY TO THE CONSTITUTION
In the early years of the new century, the EU continued its inexorable evolution toward a higher level of integration. On January 1, 2002, monetary union became a day-to-day reality for everyday people. Euro coins and notes replaced national currencies in twelve EU member states. The eurozone now comprises nineteen out of twenty-eight EU member states. We will discuss this huge leap toward supranationality in greater detail in Chapters 9 and 17.
Then, on February 1, 2003, the Treaty of Nice came into effect. Its main purpose was to reform the EU institutions to prepare for the upcoming enlargement, in 2004, from fifteen to twenty-five member states. This involved measures such as adjusting the weighting of votes in the Council of Ministers to give the more populous member states a greater voice, and redistributing the votes among the much larger number of member states; reapportioning seats in the European Parliament to accommodate the new member states; extending qualified-majority voting (as opposed to requiring unanimity of all member states) to about thirty new policy realms, affecting areas such as immigration, refugee and asylum policy, the introduction of the euro, and trade in services, so that the enlarged EU could function more easily even without unanimity in many areas; strengthening and streamlining the “enhanced cooperation” option, to allow member states the possibility of choosing more often to move forward together on common initiatives even if some member states opted out.7
These measures, especially those regarding enhanced cooperation and qualified-majority voting, all paved the way for a much larger and more deeply integrated EU, with more power centralized in Brussels. Several other steps the Nice Treaty made toward greater European integration were (1) the establishment of a way for the EU Council to step in if it believes that a member state’s actions pose a danger of a serious violation of citizens’ “fundamental rights” and to “recommend” measures the member state should take to avoid that violation; (2) the establishment of a legal basis for the EU to regulate EU-level political parties, especially regarding their recognition as parties and their funding; and (3) and (4) measures to increase cooperation at the EU level on defense and criminal justice. All of these measures represent an attempt to strike a balance between increasing the pooling of national sovereignty at the EU level and maintaining cherished prerogatives of the member states. Balance or not, by wading into areas such as fundamental rights, political parties, defense and criminal justice, the Treaty of Nice clearly anticipates a diminishment of national sovereignty in key policy arenas.
In 2002–2003, roughly at the same time as the ratification process for the Treaty of Nice, a Convention on the Future of Europe, or European Convention, was called into being. After about a year and a half of debate and negotiation, the convention produced a draft of what was formally called the “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,” though it was generally known as the European Constitution. Meant to be reminiscent of the United States Constitution, but without establishing a United States of Europe, the draft was in reality a treaty and was officially so called, but the term “treaty” in the title was played down by EU elites. The concept of a “European Constitution” better reflected their aspiration: to establish in Europeans’ hearts and minds a sense of European unity and patriotic attachment to the EU, expressed in a constitution
