European Union

The European Union (EU) is an economic and political union of sovereign states.

Contents

  1. European Union
    1. History
    2. Members
    3. Structure
    4. Reading Notes

History

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was established in 1952 to encourage economic cooperation between Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. It included several foundational institutions, such as the Common Assembly. Note however that this assembly was consultative and not elected.

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 expanded the scope of ECSC, creating the European Economic Community (EEC) as a complex of institutions. The Common Assembly renamed itself the European Parliamentary Assembly at this time, in preparation of becoming an elected body. This institution was was dominated by French interests. De Gaulle personally had an outsized role in how the institutions developed. He obstructed membership applications, demanded veto powers for national heads of state through recurring summits, and dictated the terms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The aforementioned EEC summits were formalized as the European Council at the Paris Summit in 1974; this new institution held its first meeting in Dublin in March 1975. It was named in the Single European Act of 1987 and granted a specific and formal role in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

The Council of the European Union was also established by the Treaty of Rome. It was tasked with organizing elections for an actually elected parliament. They then deferred any action on this for two decades. Only following intervention by the ECJ did the first elections finally occur in 1979.

The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 massively reformed these institutions. The European Union officially came into being with a formal role for the European Council. (The EEC was slow to recognize a role for it; the Single European Act of 1987 was the first law to name it.) The EEC itself was transformed into the European Community, and simultaneously grew in scope but became duplicative of the new EU institutions.

The Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 again massively reformed these institutions. It elevated the European Council to a core institution and established a presidency in it. (To this point, the council was chaired by the head of state corresponding to the current president of the Council of the European Union.) The modern European Commission was established and absorbed what remained of the European Community.

Members

The founding members of the ECSC and EEC were:

The following states joined the EEC subsequently and can be considered founding members of the EU.

The following states joined the EU after its establishment:

The UK left the EU in 2020.

Structure

The executive branch of the EU includes:

The legislative branch of the EU includes:

For judicial matters, the EU has the Court of Justice. It largely deals with interpretation of constitutional and human rights laws.

Embedded within the union are the Eurosystem and the ESCB.

Politically and socially embedded into the union are a number of multinational parties and alliances, such as the Visegrád Group.

Reading Notes

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