| Also
in this section:
In Europe
Europe's foundations
are built on 'peace and prosperity'.
 The
European Union
– a brief history:
The historical roots of the European
Union lie in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The first steps to European integration were taken in
1952 when six countries (Belgium, the Federal Republic
of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands)
created a common market in coal and steel known as the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Their aim
was to secure peace between Europe’s nations.
It brought them together as equals, cooperating within
shared institutions.
The success of the ECSC encouraged the
founding members of the EU to extend their cooperation
and build a European Economic Community (EEC) based
on a common market in a wide range of goods and services.
Customs duties between the six countries were completely
removed and common policies – notably on trade
and agriculture – were set up during the 1960s.
Impressed by this venture, Denmark, Ireland
and the United Kingdom joined the Communities - this
first enlargement, from six to nine members, took place
in 1973. Around the same time, the Communities took
on new tasks and introduced new social, regional and
environmental policies. Greece joined the Communities
in 1981, followed by Spain and Portugal in 1986.
The ‘Treaty on European Union’
(The Maastricht Treaty) came into force in 1993 and
the EEC was renamed simply ‘the European Community’
(EC). The Treaty added areas of intergovernmental cooperation
to the existing Community system, and thus created the
European Union (EU).
Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the
EU on 1 January 1995. The Union now had 15 member states.
Scarcely had the European Union grown
to encompass 15 member states when others began knocking
at its door. In the mid-1990s, it received membership
applications from the former Soviet bloc countries (Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia),
the three Baltic states that had once been part of the
Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), one of
the republics of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia) and
two Mediterranean countries (Cyprus and Malta). Membership
negotiations were completed in December 2002 and on
1 May 2004 the EU welcomed 10 more countries - Bulgaria
and Romania became the newest member states on the 1st
of January 2007.
Creating 27 member states and 23 official
languages with the addition of Irish, Romanian, and
Bulgarian, today's EU embraces 27 countries and over
492 million citizens.
Even after more than half a century the
European Union remains essentially what it always has
been; a family of democratic European countries, committed
to working together for peace and prosperity.
|
