A guide to EU

The European Coal and Steel Community was formed by the Treaty of Paris in 1952, emerging from the economic ruins of Europe after the Second World War. The Treaty of Rome then established the European Community (EC) in 1958, built on the belief that there should never be a major war in Europe again. The overriding aims of this new community were to promote economic progress and co-operation in Europe and to guarantee a peaceful continent for years to come.

The United Kingdom joined the Community in 1973 under the premiership of Edward Heath. A referendum, the first of its kind in the UK, was held in 1975, and confirmed the UK’s membership by a significant majority.

Community policy now covers a large number of areas. It covers market regulation, social policy, the environment, regional policy and many other areas. Since 1992 the EC has been known as the European Union (EU) and, through its Common Foreign and Security Policy, it has now started to move into defence, a controversial area as the furore over the proposed Rapid Reaction Force shows.

The Treaty of Nice and enlargement

The Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) was negotiated in the Intergovernmental Conference of 1992 and developed into a compromise between those who wished to deepen co-operation in a federal direction and those wished to operate the European Union on an intergovernmental basis. It was therefore decided that the Treaty on European Union should be reviewed and evaluated at an intergovernmental conference in 1996.

Before the Intergovernmental Conference, it was decided that the negotiations should have two overriding objectives: to prepare the EU for new member states and to move the Union closer to its citizens. The intergovernmental conference was concluded at the summit meeting in Amsterdam on 17 June 1997 and resulted in a new Treaty, the Treaty of Amsterdam. The new treaty meant that EU co-operation was revised in a number of fields, and the co-decision procedure was introduced, which gave the European Parliament considerably more power in the European legislative process. The Treaty also gave the Parliament power to dismiss the European Commission, which it used with dramatic effect in 1999.

At this point however, member states did not resolve all the institutional issues but postponed them instead to a new intergovernmental conference initiated in February 2000. This resulted in the Treaty of Nice, which is currently waiting to be ratified by member states.

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