European Integration

Origins of the European Union

Today, the EU is a divided-power system, embodying a complex division of power between supranational authorities and the member states. It embraces regional integration in numerous policy areas. It also represents a comparative law laboratory, combining elements of common law, civil law, Dutch law, and Scandinavian legal systems. A European Constitution is now open for debate and approval by national political processes. Nevertheless, the EU is neither a state nor an international organization. It constitutes instead a “new legal order,” a sui generis regional political and legal system.

Scholars often trace the origins of European integration to the declaration by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, on May 9, 1950, of a plan for supranational management of the French and German coal and steel industries. The plan was encapsulated in the Treaty of Paris (1951) establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) for a period of 50 years. In 1957, two different Treaties of Rome created the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC). In 1992, the Treaty of Maastricht established the EU, based on the ECSC, EEC (now called the European Community, EC), and EAEC as supplemented by intergovernmental policies and forms of cooperation. Expressed in the frequently used metaphor of a temple, it combined supranational pillars and intergovernmental pillars. The Treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2001) amended the Maastricht Treaty but retained its basic structure. In 2002, the EC absorbed the ECSC.

The founding countries of the European Communities were the original six member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland joined in 1973, Greece in 1979, Spain and Portugal in 1986, and Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995. The Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004 and Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Several other countries, including Turkey, have also applied for membership.

The 1950 Schuman Declaration adopted the idea of spillover, according to which integration in one domain would create demands, which would spill over into others. A federalist political objective accompanied this focus on sector-by-sector cooperation. This theory of European integration, neofunctionalism, has always been contested by other theories. These include federalism, the conception of the EU as a divided-power system, and functionalism, the focus on cooperation of specific, usually technical tasks without regard for specific institutional consequences. Confederation or “intergovernmentalism” emphasizes a Europe of nation-states. The theory of policy networks looks across national boundaries to knit together experts in national governments, private organizations, and supranational institutions. Finally, sites of governance consider both the EU and member states part of a wider set of decision-making authorities, not necessarily linked to a specific territory and including international public and private organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and international standardization bodies. Scholars use these different theories to understand, explain, and justify the evolution of European integration.

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