European Integration. Mark Gilbert
Angela Merkel (Germany) and President Nicolas Sarkozy (France) call for additional biannual meetings of the European Council to provide “true economic government” for the EU.
January 3, 2012: All the EU states except for the Czech Republic and Great Britain vote for a new treaty regulating the stability and governance of the economic and monetary union. The treaty is signed at the beginning of March.
July 1, 2013: Croatia joins the EU.
January 1, 2014: Latvia joins the euro.
May 22–25, 2014: European Parliament elections. In Great Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) takes 27.6 percent of the vote, increasing pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a special deal for Britain.
August 30, 2014: Donald Tusk of Poland replaces Herman Van Rompuy as president of the European Council. Federica Mogherini of Italy replaces Catherine Ashton as High Representative.
October 22, 2014: Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg) becomes president of the Commission.
February 19, 2016: The European Council negotiates a special deal with Great Britain that exempts Britain from involvement in political union and allows Britain to restrict the welfare benefits it pays to immigrants from other EU countries.
June 23, 2016: Britain votes to leave the EU by 52 percent to 48 percent; 17.4 million British citizens vote to leave. Prime Minister David Cameron resigns the following day.
March 1, 2017: The Commission publishes the White Paper on the Future of Europe.
March 29, 2017: Prime Minister Theresa May formally notifies the European Council of Britain’s decision to leave the EU under article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon. Britain has until March 29, 2019, to negotiate and ratify a treaty withdrawing from the EU.
December 20, 2017: The EU sanctions Poland for its reforms to the judiciary, which are widely interpreted as being a deliberate attempt to reduce the independence of the legal system from political control.
July 17, 2018: The EU and Japan conclude the largest free trade deal in the EU’s history.
November 14, 2018: Publication of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) between the United Kingdom and the EU. It is subsequently approved by the European Council and provokes a challenge to May’s leadership of the Conservative Party.
January 15, 2019: WA rejected by the House of Commons by 432 votes to 202. It is the largest defeat by a British government in parliamentary history. The WA is subsequently rejected on March 12 by the fourth largest margin in parliamentary history.
March 21, 2019: The European Council approves a British request for an extension to the article 50 procedures. Britain is given until May 22, 2019, provided that the House of Commons approves the Withdrawal Agreement. Otherwise, Britain must leave on April 12. On March 29, 2019, the WA is again rejected by the House of Commons.
April 10, 2019: Following a further British request for an extension, the European Council sets a new date of October 31, 2019, for “Brexit.”
May 23–26, 2019: European Parliament elections are won by the European People’s Party. Right-wing populist and nationalist parties make gains, but so do pro-EU Greens and Liberals. In Britain, the Conservative Party is defeated by the newly formed “Brexit Party.”
July 2, 2019: The European Council chooses Charles Michel of Belgium to replace Donald Tusk as its president beginning on December 1, 2019.
July 16, 2019: Ursula von der Leyen (Germany) is narrowly nominated as president of the Commission by the European Parliament. She is the first woman to hold the office.
October 17, 2019: The European Council approves a revised WA with the British government, which is now headed by Boris Johnson. The October 31 deadline for Britain to leave the EU is subsequently extended to January 31, 2020, and Britain holds a general election on December 12, 2019, in a bid to break the parliamentary deadlock.
European Union
1
Introduction
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This book is a new edition of an earlier work, Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945, which was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003 and reissued, much revised, under the title European Integration: A Concise History in late 2011. This new edition shares many continuities with its two predecessors but also exhibits several discontinuities.
Like its predecessors, this book is a narrative general history that inserts the story of European integration into the wider history of this period. Imperial decline and decolonization; the threat and then fall of communism; the impact of American foreign, fiscal, and monetary policy; and the democratization of the Mediterranean countries and the nations of central Europe are just some of the contemporaneous historical developments whose stories intersected with the history of European integration and have been woven into this book’s fabric. The book deals, in short, with a central development in the postwar political history of the “West,” to use a phrase redolent of the Cold War.
What is meant by European integration? In the previous two editions, integration was defined as the historical process whereby European nation-states have been willing to transfer, or more usually pool, their sovereign powers into a collective enterprise. The European Union (EU), which today counts twenty-seven member states, nearly 500 million inhabitants, an economy almost as large as that of the United States (US), and a complex institutional structure that includes a supranational central administration (the European Commission), an elected parliament, a court of justice, and a central bank, is the outcome of this process. This edition preserves this definition, which has the effect of concentrating the narrative on the high politics of European integration. I make no apology for this. Quite aside from the fact that I am a scholar of political history, a book that dealt in depth with the full administrative history of the European institutions or tried to trace the impact of European integration on the economies, political systems, and peoples of its member states would be many times longer.
There have, of course, been many efforts to find a root cause for the development of supranational institutions in Europe. The desire to supersede ruinous nationalism and ensure peace; the original member states’ need to provide economic welfare and geopolitical security; the need of European states, prodded by domestic lobbies, to adapt to changes in the global economy; the intended and unintended consequences of experiments in supranationalism; and the lingering conviction of the original member states that they could better maximize their relative power (i.e., the extent to which they counted in the world) by uniting are five more or less plausible overarching hypotheses. Other hypotheses might be added, but not by this book, which, like its two predecessors, has no pretensions to do anything more than tell a very complex story clearly and concisely.
That said, this book underlines the idea that European integration would not have occurred had Western European states not abandoned the “autistic power politics” that had dominated their relations hitherto. Finding themselves in a world dominated by the rival superpowers and longing to rebuild their devastated economies and provide welfare for their citizens, postwar leaders realized that they could no longer pursue their own short-term interests with scant regard for the consequences of their actions on their neighbors.1 In an age of nuclear weapons, moreover, war could no longer be regarded as an extension of foreign policy. The aura of moral approbation that has