European Community

 

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The European Community (EC) was originally founded on March 25, 1957 by the signing of the Treaty of Rome under the name of European Economic Community. The 'Economic' was removed from its name by the Maastricht treaty in 1992, which at the same time effectively made the European Community the first of three pillars of the European Union, called the Community (or Communities) Pillar.

History

European Communities was the name given collectively to the European Economic Community (EEC), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), when in 1967, their organs were merged with the Merger Treaty. The term now technically only refers to the EEC and Euratom, as the ECSC expired in 2002.

Soon after the establishment of the ECSC two more European Communities were proposed: European Defense Community and European Political Community. They were later rejected.

The EEC, established in 1958, soon became the most important of these three communities, subsequent treaties added further areas of competence extending beyond the purely economic. The other two communities remained extremely limited. The ECSC ceased to exist when the Treaty of Paris which established it expired in 2002. Seen as redundant, no effort had been made to retain it — its assets and liabilities were transferred to the EC, and coal and steel became subject to the EC treaty.

With the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in November of 1993, the European Economic Community changed its name and became the European Community. The European Community, along with the ECSC and Euratom, became known as the European Communities and, together with the two other pillars, became collectively known as the European Union which exists today.

European Economic Community

The European Economic Community (EEC) was an organization established by the Treaty of Rome (25 March 1957) between the ECSC countries Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, known informally as the Common Market (the Six). The EEC was the most significant of the three treaty organizations that were consolidated in 1967 to form the European Community (EC; known since the ratification 1993 of the Maastricht treaty as the European Union, EU). The EEC had as its aim the eventual economic union of its member nations, ultimately leading to political union. It worked for the free movement of goods, service, labor and capital, the abolition of trusts and cartels, and the development of joint and reciprocal policies on labor, social welfare, agriculture, transport, and foreign trade.

In 1956, the United Kingdom proposed that the Common Market be incorporated into a wide European free-trade area. After the proposal was vetoed by President Charles de Gaulle and France in November 1958, the UK together with Sweden engineered the formation (1960) of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and was joined by other European nations that did not belong to the Common Market (the Seven). Beginning in 1973, with British, Irish, and Danish accession to the EEC, the EFTA and the EEC negotiated a series of agreements that would ensure uniformity between the two organisations in many areas of economic policy, and by 1995, all but four EFTA members had joined the European Union.

One of the first important accomplishments of the EEC was the establishment (1962) of common price levels for agricultural products. In 1968, internal tariffs (tariffs on trade between member nations) were removed on certain products.

Community Pillar

The Maastricht treaty turned the European Communities as a whole into the first of three pillars of the European Union, also known as the Community Pillar or Communities Pillar. In Community Pillar policy areas decisions are made collectively by Qualified Majority Voting (QMV).

Within the EU

The term European Communities refers collectively to two entities — the European Economic Community (now called the European Community) and the European Atomic Energy Community (also known as Euratom) — each founded pursuant to a separate treaty in the 1950s. A third entity, the European Coal and Steel Community, was also part of the European Communities, but ceased to exist in 2002 upon the expiration of its founding treaty. Since 1967, the European Communities have shared common institutions, specifically the Council, the European Parliament, the Commission and the Court of Justice. In 1992, the European Economic Community, which of the three original communities had the broadest scope, was renamed the "European Community" by the Treaty of Maastricht.

The European Communities are one of the three pillars of the European Union, being both the most important pillar and the only one to operate primarily through supranational institutions. The other two "pillars" — Common Foreign and Security Policy, and Police and Judicial Co-operation in Criminal Matters – are looser intergovernmental groupings. Confusingly, these latter two concepts are increasingly administered by the Community (as they are built up from mere concepts to actual practice).

If it had been ratified, the proposed new Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe would have abolished the three-pillar structure and, with it, the distinction between the European Union and the European Community, bringing all the Community's activities under the auspices of the European Union and transferring the Community's legal personality to the Union. There is, however, one qualification: it appears that Euratom would remain a distinct entity governed by a separate treaty (because of the strong controversy the issue of nuclear energy causes, and Euratom's relative unimportance, it was considered expedient to leave Euratom alone in the process of EU constitutional reform).

The future of the European Communities

The signed but unratified European Constitution would merge the European Community with the other two pillars of the European Union, making the European Union the legal successor of both the European Community and the present-day European Union. It was for a time proposed that the European Constitution should repeal the Euratom treaty, in order to terminate the legal personality of Euratom at the same time as that of the European Community, but this was not included in the final version.

Timeline

Evolution of the Structures of European Union

See also

• History of the European Union
• European Union
• European Union law
• European Energy Community
• "Common European Home"

External links

• European Union website
• Treaty establishing the European Economic Community European NAvigator
• History of the Rome Treaties European NAvigator
• Europedia: Guide to European policies and legislation

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