trade negotiations are conducted, and treaties signed, by the bloc as a whole.”4
Beyond this, most of the EU member states are united by a common currency. Nineteen of the twenty-eight member states share the euro. Most of the other nine member states aspire to have it in the future, but they do not yet meet the qualifications for the eurozone. These are mostly countries that were communist satellites of the Soviet Union, with planned economies. They are still developing as free markets and are expected to join the eurozone when they qualify. The only countries in the EU that qualify for the euro but freely choose (for now) not to join are the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.
THE EU INSTITUTIONS
The EU, as we have seen, differs from international organizations such as the OAS and from free-trade areas such as NAFTA mainly in that the member states of the EU have relinquished substantial aspects of their sovereign powers to the EU institutions. In this respect, the EU is not just an economic entity but also a profoundly political one. It is better described not as an international organization, but as a supranational or at least a transnational organization, with “managing” institutions to which the member states have transferred considerable powers. The principal five EU institutions are the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Court of Justice.
The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU. It administers EU law and policy and enforces its implementation in the member states. It also possesses formidable legislative power, known as the “right of initiative.” Under the EU treaties only the Commission can initiate legislation, other than under certain exceptional conditions.
The Council of the European Union is an institution in which the governments of the member states are represented by cabinet-level ministers, so it is also known as the Council of Ministers. The Council meets in multiple configurations, depending on the issue area. For example, the foreign ministers of EU member states meet once per month as the Foreign Affairs Council; environment ministers meet as the Environmental Affairs Council; economic and finance ministers meet as the ECOFIN Council; and so on. All in all, the Council of Ministers has ten configurations. Thus, while it is referred to in the singular, it is not really one council, but ten councils – a phenomenon that only the impenetrably complex EU could pull off. And although it is made up of ministerial-level officials of the executive branches of the member states, it primarily serves a quasi-legislative function within the European Union. In conjunction with the European Parliament, it reviews, amends and passes EU legislation as drafted by the Commission.
The European Parliament (EP) is a supranational legislature made up of 751 members who are elected by voters in their respective member states. The members of the European Parliament (MEPs) generally belong to a national political party in their respective member states. These parties join forces in EU-wide “political groups.” For example, the center-right political group, the European People’s Party, is made up of national Christian Democratic and Conservative parties from the member states. The center-left political group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, is composed of Social Democratic and Socialist parties from the member states. There are similar political groups of Green parties, liberal parties, Euroskeptic conservative parties, and others. The European Parliament does not draft legislation; that is the sole prerogative of the European Commission. The EP does not have the power to levy taxes. Neither does the EP have MEPs belonging to a governing coalition and other MEPs representing the opposition, as in the parliaments of the member states, because there is no elected EU government and thus no opposition. So what does the European Parliament do? It amends legislation, along with the Council of Ministers, and its approval of legislation, along with the Council’s, is necessary in most policy areas in order for it to become law. Importantly for the United States, the EP’s assent is needed too for most international agreements that the EU wants to enter into. The EP also helps shape EU policies in areas such as foreign affairs and human rights, by writing reports, issuing declarations and resolutions, and carefully scrutinizing other EU actors’ words and actions on those issues.
The European Council, not to be confused with the Council of the European Union described above nor with the Council of Europe (an organization that is separate and distinct from the European Union), is made up of the presidents and prime ministers of the EU member states. Headed by a president who is appointed by the member states and not a part of any member-state government, the European Council is the top decision-making body in the EU. It meets at least four times per year and sets EU policy at the highest level.
The European Council is the only EU institution that was established in practice rather than in a treaty.5 Its beginning can be traced back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the ensuing global energy crisis. In October 1973 a coalition of Arab states invaded territories that had been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, thus igniting the Yom Kippur War. In quick succession came the war itself, Soviet threats of intervention, an American-brokered ceasefire, and the reduction of oil deliveries to the West by Arab oil-exporting nations, precipitating a global energy crisis. All of this happened with nary a peep from Europe. Acutely unsettled by their own insignificance, the leaders of the European Economic Community member states decided to meet more often so that Europe “could speak with one voice on important global issues.”6 Approximately a year later, in 1974, the new French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, succeeded in establishing the European Council as a regular meeting of heads of state and government to decide authoritatively on the most important matters of foreign policy and European integration. Since then, the European Council has become the most important embodiment of what Luuk van Middelaar, an EU analyst and philosopher, calls the “in-between sphere.”7 In the European Council, leaders of EU member states do not represent just their own governments nor the EU itself, but become actors “in between” the two.
A final very important EU institution is the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Actually consisting of three distinct courts, the CJEU resembles the U.S. judiciary in that it functions like an independent branch of government, with the highest of its courts, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), analogous to the U.S. Supreme Court. It provides the final interpretation of the treaties and can declare EU legislation or actions in line with the treaties, thus clearing the way for their entry into effect, or out of line with the treaties, thus rendering them null and void. The judiciary has been a true motor of European integration, in having declared EU law to supersede the national law of the member states, and in having introduced the doctrine of direct effect, meaning that citizens of EU member states – since they are directly affected by EU legislation – can, as individuals, dispute the validity of a national law of their member state if they can show that it impinges on their rights under EU legislation. This was a game-changing step in the development of the EU into an organization whose decisions take precedence over member-state policy and law.8
THE EU’S MEMBER STATES
The EU has undergone a series of enlargements ever since the European Coal and Steel Community was established in 1952 with six founding members: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Now it is easier to name the European countries that are not members of the EU. In Western Europe, the only nonmembers are Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, along with microstates such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra. In Central and Eastern Europe, west of the former Soviet Union, the only nonmembers are Albania and some of the countries that emerged out of Yugoslavia: Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro. These countries all desire to join, a desire that is shared by the EU but will not be realized for several years, perhaps decades. The former Yugoslav republic of Croatia is the newest member state, having joined on July 1, 2013. All of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union (which constituted the Warsaw Pact) are now EU members. Even three of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union itself are now in the EU, namely the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. EU membership is a distant possibility for other former Soviet republics – Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus; and perhaps even a possibility for
