European Union

Now the most important regional organization in the contemporary world, the European Union was created as an international organization in 1957 by six European states: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The purpose of this organization was to forge and sustain peace and security in the context of post-World [Page 530]War II Europe based on committed cooperation between leading industrial countries. This goal was to be achieved by establishing institutions that would enable and help control shared regulation over key industrial sectors.

Accordingly, the organizational structure that was created by the 1957 Treaty of Rome brought together the European Economic Communities, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Atomic Energy Community. In the next five decades, this structure went through a series of treaty revisions leading toward the Treaty of European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community.

Next to treaty revisions, the extent and depth of European integration have been defined by continuous rounds of enlargement. Each of these rounds entails accession negotiations with the candidate countries to make sure that a closely monitored process of institutional, administrative, economic, and political adaptation is properly conducted. Completion of these negotiations includes the adoption of the European Union's acquis communautaire, that is, the entire body of law, including the related provisions, regulations, and directives. After the final round of enlargement in 2007, EU membership came up to a count of 27 member-states. The exceptional step of including minority rights protection in addition to the acquis communautaire at a time when the European Union faced massive enlargement (bringing into the European Union, in 2004, 10 new member-states that were predominantly former command economies) presents an important and arguably critical juncture with previous practice: It meant changing the long-standing practice of making adoption of the acquis communautaire the exclusive condition of entry to the European Union.

Over the decades, the construction of the European Union has been a political project, albeit with differing speeds, based on the closely interwoven processes of economic and political integration. As motors of integration, these two processes are conducive to enhancing cooperation (as with the Common Foreign and Security Policy and with the Common Defence Policy), establishing regulation (as with the Common Market Policy), enabling political participation (based on citizenship and fundamental rights protection), and abolishing internal border controls (as with the Schengen Agreement).

The beginnings of European integration have often been likened to a club-like membership pattern, which is well known in international relations theory. However, this pattern has been challenged by those who saw the European Union developing into a community rather than a club, arguing that EU membership meant more than membership in a club, pointing out that ideational and normative goals were of equal importance as the functional motivation of market efficiency. In the process, a two-tiered analytical perspective on European integration emerged. This perspective came to reflect the wider theoretical debates about how to best understand and/or explain the integration process, which created the context for long-standing debates about approaches to integration theory. Characteristically and in many ways reflecting discussions in international relations theory in the 1980s and 1990s, these involved the “grand theory” debates among liberal intergovernmentalists on the one hand and neofunctionalists on the other, as well as the middle-range theory debates among rational choice and constructivist-leaning scholars. Ultimately this two-tiered theoretical perspective highlights the distinctive character of the European Union and its relevance for global studies. It is both an international organization and a non-state polity, regulated by both a complex and detailed treaty framework and a distinct model of constitutionalism beyond the state.

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