Name: ______Date: ______
After centuries of fighting…Europe begins to unify
Ingredients: Schuman Declaration
· When? May 9, 1950 (today known as “Europe Day” in the EU)
· Who? French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman
· Why?
Step 1: The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
· Founding Document? Treaty of Paris (1951)
· Who? France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Italy (U.K. invited but declined to join)
· Why?
Step 2: The European Economic Community (EEC)
· Founding Document? Treaty of Rome (1957)
· Who? France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Italy
· Also Known As: “The Common Market”
· Four Freedoms: Freedom of movement of goods, service, people and capital
· Why?
Step 3: European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
· Founding Document? Stockholm Convention (1960)
· Who? (italics represent member states no longer involved in the EFTA)
o Original Members: U.K., Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal
o Additional Membership: Iceland (1970), Finland (1986), and Liechtenstein (1993)
· Why?
Step 4: European Community (EC)
· Founding Document? Merger Treaty (1967) – evolution of the EEC
· Who?
o Original Members: France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Italy
o Additional Membership: Ireland (1972), Denmark (1972), Britain (1973), Greece (1981), Spain (1986), Portugal (1986), East Germany (1990)
o Failed Membership: Norway (1972, popular vote)
Step 4: European Union (EU)
· Founding Document? Maastricht Treaty (signed 1992, ratified 1993), Amsterdam Treaty (1999), Treaty of Nice (2001), European Constitution (pending)
· Who?
o Original Members: France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal
o Additional Membership:
§ 1995: Austria, Sweden, Finland
§ 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia
§ 2007: Bulgaria, Romania
o Candidate countries: Croatia, Macedonia, Turkey
o Failed Membership: Norway (1995, popular vote)
· Copenhagen Criteria for entry into the EU:
o A secular, democratic government
o A competitive market economy (free trade)
§ Adopt the Euro when economy is ready (except: Denmark and UK)
o Corresponding freedoms and institutions (and for all people)
o Geographic or cultural attachment to Europe
o Agreement to bide by the goals of the EU
o Agreement by current members to allow entry once process complete
The Quiet Miracle
By MICHAEL ELLIOT (TIME: Europe, 3/15/2007)
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that watching Edmund Kean, the great tragedian of the London stage 200 years ago, was like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." That's how we like our great moments in history to be, surrounded by drama, attended by heroes. By those standards, the process that led to the signing of the Treaty of Rome 50 years ago was almost ineffably mundane — a series of long meetings of forgotten bureaucrats in rooms foul with tobacco smoke. No blood was shed, few memorable speeches made; the heroes were those who could cajole a compromise into being over a hurried coffee, or draft a clause with exactly the right kind of nice phrase that would win broad support.
Yet the founding of the European Economic Community in 1957 was a momentous event. Today's Europe is the largest expanse of peace and widely shared prosperity in the world. It is perfectly true that the E.E.C. — as it was called in 1957, the European Union as it is now — is not solely responsible for that happy outcome. After the carnage of World War II, it was as much American minds and muscle as European ones that determined that Europe needed new institutions binding nations together if it was to avoid the catastrophes of war. Indeed, NATO and the Marshall Plan, both hatched in Washington, predated the E.E.C.'s precursor, the European Coal and Steel Community.
Yet for all that, the decision in 1957 by six nations to pool sovereignty in multinational institutions marked a decisive break with the past. As it became apparent that the E.E.C. worked — that common markets provided the sort of stability in which economies can grow — so its appeal spread. Soon, everyone with a claim to be European wanted to join. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the time was ripe for a dramatic expansion of the E.U. to the east, and gradually, that happened. The E.U. now has 27 members, including three former Soviet republics.
The E.U. has spawned admirers — how could it not? — but not imitators. No other multinational grouping — not Mercosur in Latin America, not asean in Southeast Asia — has anything like the powerful institutions of the Union. Europe's history and geography, it turns out, are unique. Its nations are small enough and close enough to understand each other and have shared values; but at the same time, all of Europe lived through such horrors in the 20th century that its nations' postwar leaders needed little convincing of the virtues of cooperation. In Europe, nationalism has a bad name; in much of the rest of the world, where the memory of colonialism is still fresh, it is a source of pride and identity. Though Americans were midwives to the E.U.'s birth — Dean Acheson, the postwar U.S. Secretary of State, thought that Britain had made a historic error by failing to join the coal and steel community — they have often since been bemused by Europe's lack of nationalistic assertiveness. As Roger Cohen wrote in the International Herald Tribune recently, "The quiet glory of the postnational, postmodern entity is not the glory of the young, vigorous, flag-waving America."
True, that judgment would have been harder to make in the early 1990s. Then, Jacques Delors was the President of the European Commission, the single currency was being planned, and François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl were shaping European policy. It seemed certain that political union would follow the economic variety and the E.U. become a second democratic Atlantic superpower. But that dream was curdled by European dithering in the Balkan wars and by the concomitant realization that European electorates had no stomach for displays of superpowerdom as they have been conventionally measured: that is to say, in killing capability. In 2005, voters in France and the Netherlands — two founding members — rejected a draft European constitution, without which political union is impossible. Javier Solana, the E.U.'s estimable foreign affairs czar, may bustle around the Middle East as he has been doing of late, but nobody pretends that when he does so he carries the weight of the U.S. Secretary of State.
But perhaps the old measures of power and influence are not adequate to our time. After all, the horrors of Iraq are loud testimony to the limitations of hard power, applied by men bearing arms. The nations and people of the E.U. are generous when it comes to aiding the poor and disadvantaged; sensible in forming policies that address pressing environmental challenges. And perhaps above all — as the next four pages show — the institutions that give shape to Europe's growing unity have made life better for those who live there. That seems a timid, small success. But for anyone old enough to remember the European misery out of which the Treaty of Rome took shape, it is a stunning miracle.
What’s so great about an ever closer union anyway?
1 | No Kidding, Peace
It was the Americans — with the Marshall Plan, and then NATO — who laid the groundwork, but the E.U. has helped to give Western Europe its most peaceful 60 years since records were first kept. Here's the big picture: France and Germany had fought a war in each of the three generations before the Treaty of Rome. Twice Europe's wars had sucked in the rest of the world. By locking together economies, societies and political structures, the E.U. has made such horrors unimaginable. For that alone, give thanks.
2 | The French Countryside
There has to be something to be said for the Common Agricultural Policy, and indeed there is. The timeless contours of la France profonde — at least south of the wheat and beet belt — are a testimony to the long subsidy of French farming. The cap may offend free-trade purists, but on a summer morning somewhere in the Dordogne there's something to be said for impurity.
3 | Easier Travel
The Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö; the Channel Tunnel; high-speed rail links snaking out from France — all have done their bit to knit the Continent closer together than ever before. But perhaps above all it is the growth of budget airlines — stimulated by regulations that came into force in 1997, allowing an airline from one member state to operate a route in another — that has made easy travel around Europe available to all.
4 | Ireland's Revival
E.U. structural funds aren't the only reason that the Emerald Tiger roars, and Ireland isn't the only place where money from Brussels has helped build a modern infrastructure. But there's something about the scale of the transformation of Ireland's economy since membership in 1973 that boggles the mind.
5 | That Burgundy Passport
Remember the days when your passport got scrutinized by some suspicious official on even the most straightforward trip from Innsbruck to Bolzano? Some of us do. But since the signing of the Schengen Agreement in Luxembourg in 1985, the free movement of people has become more than an aspiration — and an attribute of modern Europe, remarkably, that has survived the struggle against terrorism of the last decade.
6 | GSM
You may not know that it stands for Global System for Mobile communications, but the E.U.'s decision in 1987 to adopt a common standard for digital mobile telephony gave both the telecoms and handset manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia the security of knowing that there was a huge single market for their products. The consequence: a whole new appreciation for the virtues of the opposable thumb.
7 | Work Where You Want
It took years for the Treaty of Rome's dream of a single labor market to come to fruition, but now — cue joke about Polish plumbers — the right to live, work, and indeed retire, in another Union country is established, and such freedoms will gradually be extended to citizens from the 12 countries that joined since 2004. This means working to the same rules, too; though national legislatures had taken the lead, the Treaty itself enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work for men and women, while the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights proclaims workers' entitlements on issues from labor mobility and collective bargaining to equal opportunities.
8 | Good News for Galicia
And Wales, Sardinia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. For regions on the periphery of their nations, with proud cultures and traditions of their own, the E.U. has been a godsend. The Committee of the Regions provides a political voice while the E.U.'s regional policy has channeled funds for projects aimed to tackle economic and social disparities within member countries. The consequence? Not a Europe homogeneously harmonized, but one that is more diverse than ever before.
9 | Cern
Since 1954 the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the outskirts of Geneva has been in the forefront of advanced particle physics, figuring out what stuff we're made of. Bonus: Tim Berners-Lee was on the staff there when he developed a new way for scientists to share information over the Internet — the World Wide Web.
10 | The Euro
The single currency — introduced on Jan. 1, 2002, and now used by 315 million people in 13 countries — did more than eliminate those tiresome collections of small coins that we used to bring back from vacation. By making prices transparent, the euro made the single European market a reality.
11 | Airbus
Sure, we know, the jewel of European industrial collaboration looks pretty scratched these days as the aerospace company's management weaknesses are exposed. And yes, "launch aid" for new planes is a taxpayer subsidy by any other name. But the weirdly cobbled together planes — wings made in Britain, tail fins in Germany — have at least ensured that there's some competition in the global commercial aviation market, and forced Boeing of the U.S. to raise its own game.
12 | Better Football
Started as the European Cup in 1955, dominated by Real Madrid in the early years, the Champions League now gets audiences from Minsk to Munster watching the same images, and the final each year has become Europe's Super Bowl. Plus: the Bosman case in 1995 — where the European Court ruled that players at the end of their contracts could move freely between clubs — enabled top teams to become the collection of international talents they are now.
13 | Erasmus
Since 1987, over 1.5 million university students have benefited from the Erasmus European exchange program and taken comparative knowledge of local beers to unimagined heights. The E.U.'s Lifelong Learning Programme has a $9 billion budget for the next seven years to develop areas such as cooperation in education policy, student exchanges and adult learning.
14 | Tabloid Heaven
British Euro-skepticism may irritate others, but let's be fair — it has much contributed to the gaiety of nations. What would the London red tops do without the constant supply of stories — most of them urban myths — about European standardization of everything from cucumbers to condoms? Our favorite: the widely reported claim that E.U. safety rules required circus tightrope walkers and jugglers to wear hard hats.
15 | The Fourth Movement of Beethoven's Ninth
To tell the truth, we find the "Choral" a bit crass, as symphonies go. But at least since Beethoven's tune was adopted as the E.U.'s anthem in 1985, kids learn at least one bit of classical music. It would be even nicer if they knew the words of Friedrich von Schiller's Ode to Joy. Plus: as flags go, those gold stars on a blue field make a pretty decent one.
16 | Clean Beaches
In 2005, 96% of Europe's coastal beaches were deemed clean enough for swimming, thanks to the 1976 Bathing Water Directive — toughened up last year — which set binding minimum water-quality standards. More than 200 pieces of E.U. environmental law, aimed at staunching toxic fumes, eliminating dangerous pesticides, phasing out cfcs, protecting birds and creating the European Environment Agency have generally made the place more pleasant.