Evolving From Community to Union

Abstract

The title and the text of this chapter seek to emphasise the dynamic and changing nature of first the Community and then, later, the Union and to highlight the fact that the processes of integration within Europe have not yet reached a conclusion or final stage of evolution. A basic knowledge of the history of the EC and the EU offers a number of benefits to the student:

• it gives a context to contemporary events, demonstrating that the current debates on the integration process have a long pedigree, and that ideas such as monetary union or political union are not simply novelties dreamt up by Jacques Delors in the late 1980s;

• it puts the EU firmly in the context of other developments within and outside Europe, recognising the significance for the European Union of events such as the unification of Germany, the end of the Cold War, the break up of the Soviet Union, the emergence of new democracies in Eastern and East Central Europe, as well as the economic context of the global trading order under the ‘new GATT’;

• it highlights the ebbs and flows of the European Community and Union, which have coincided quite closely with the low and high points of the European economy since the Second World War;

• finally, the stop-start progress of political and economic integration emphasises the unparalleled contribution made by the Court at crucial points (Wincott, 1995a). Yet although the Court has been characterised as the ‘engine of integration’, when the events discussed in this chapter are reviewed subsequently in the context of developments in the EC legal system which form the main focus of this book and its companion volume, it will be seen that the work of the Court of Justice has not always run parallel to the political and economic evolution of the Treaties. In particular, sometimes there has been a fit and sometimes a misfit between political context and legal action; more often there appears to be a lag of some years between the point when work begins towards a new goal in the sphere of politics and correspondingly significant progress in the construction of the EU legal frame-work.