Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Maastricht Treaty was adopted in December 1991 by EC heads of state and government and subsequently put to referendum or parliamentary approval in member states, often hotly contested, not least in the UK. As the formal outcome of the two intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) which had been convened at the end of the 1980s, the clear purpose was to promote the deepening of the EU (European Union) through ever closer integration, buttressed by reforms to the distribution of powers. The key provisions in the treaty were the creation of the so-called three pillars of economic and monetary union, common foreign and security policy, and internal and judicial affairs. Economic and monetary union (EMU) comprised the completion of the single market, also known as the “1992′’ project, to be accompanied by the creation of a single currency, in the sense of “one market, one money”.Nobody was in any doubt, however, that the underlying political purpose was to anchor a newly unified Germany into an EU deepened by monetary union, and to secure the course of economic integration among the western European nations, before widening took place to embrace the emerging central and eastern European countries (CEEC) which had escaped Soviet domination with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The strategy would lock a unified Germany into the west, free from temptations to recast a “Mitteleuropa” with the ... log in or subscribe to read full text