The treaties establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) contained, from their very beginning, the possibility of enlarging the initial number of six member states. Article 98 ECSC provided that ‘[a]ny European State may request to accede to the present Treaty’ and laid down the enlargement procedure. When the EEC and Euratom Treaties were concluded in 1958, no ECSC enlargements had occurred. The main elements of the enlargement procedure of Article 98 ECSC would not only remain the principal features of the accession provision in the EEC Treaty (Article 237) and Euratom Treaty (Article 205), but also continue to be the key references in the unique accession provision in later versions of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

It is tempting to interpret the convoluted narrative that led to Brexit as a story of British exceptionalism. The fit between European integration and the United Kingdom (UK) had never been easy – much less natural, it would appear, than for any other country in Europe. It was for this reason that the British initially stood aside from the process, spurning repeated chances to join the institutional precursors to the European Union (EU). When they did belatedly change their mind and join the European Economic Community (EEC), moreover, they did so amid sustained domestic controversy. The deep-seated mismatch between Britain and its European partners was to become a leitmotiv of the country’s forty-six years as an EC/EU member state. The UK was never at ease within the EC/EU, but instead at odds with important aspects of the process, divided internally on the necessity of membership and liable to see itself as an ‘awkward partner’, the malcontent within.

The constitutional dimension of the European Union (EU) has to account for the fact that the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (TECE) seems to have failed in 2005 in the Dutch and French referenda. Thus we are unlikely to have a legal document officially called a ‘constitution’ in the foreseeable future. Yet, the designation is not decisive on its own (cf. the German Grundgesetz or the Hungarian Basic Law). Treaties can also be constitutions, as the examples of Cyprus (1960, Treaty of Establishment),1 the Constitution of Württemberg (1819), the Constitution of Saxony (1831)2 and the Norddeutsche Bund (1867) show.

In 2000 the European Union (EU) entered the new millennium after two substantial treaty reforms, those of Maastricht and of Amsterdam, that had significantly expanded its mission and objectives, capacity for internal and external action and democratic credentials. Two fundamental treaty objectives, Economic and Monetary Union and the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), had been added, with the first resulting in the successful introduction of the euro on 1 January 2001 and the second equipping it in time with possibilities for action in a common European response to the new challenges of global terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that was unprecedented in terms of the range of instruments used.

Since its very beginnings, a central narrative of European integration has been that only a form of profound cooperation between the European states will allow the promotion of prosperity and social security. The narrative of prosperity is one of the oldest and most constant meta-arguments of regional European integration. The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 already stated that the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) would contribute to ‘raising living standards’.1 In the European Union’s (EU’s) self-portrayal, prosperity, growth and employment are still among its hardly questioned and fundamental goals, as former President of the Commission Emanuel Barroso put it: ‘Today the raison d’être of our Union is also the same that was there sixty years ago: peace, democracy, to be freed from fears, mistrust and divisions, to share security, stability and prosperity.’

The decade-long process of European monetary integration has been the most ambitious, and probably the most controversial, project of its type.1

The Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s reinforced the scepticism toward monetary integration experienced not only by populist politicians but also by disillusioned academics. Belke and Verheyen, for example, argued in 2012 that: ‘It is time to admit that under the prevailing structure and membership, the euro area simply does not work successfully.’

In ‘Göttingen’, the French singer Barbara, who as a Jewish child hid in German-occupied France during the Second World War, celebrated Franco-German reconciliation after the bloodshed and hatred that had marked bilateral relations in the past. The song, recorded in 1964 first in French and later in German, was hailed as a hymn to Franco-German reconciliation and credited for improving post-war Franco-German relations. The song’s melancholic tunes certainly captured the Zeitgeist of an era: it was recorded roughly a year after the signature of the Élysée ‘friendship’ treaty on 22 January 1963. The treaty was instrumental in forging a narrative of how the two countries overcame a shared history of conflict and rivalry to become a driving force of European integration.

This chapter sets out to conceptualise the institutional and legal evolution of the European Communities (EC) over time from the Treaties of Paris and Rome to the Treaty of Maastricht.

The founding treaties of Paris and Rome were essentially open-ended efforts for integration, despite their undeniable differences in nature. At the moment of negotiating the founding treaties and during the first years of the Communities, it was unforeseeable whether the Communities would go through a process of gradual and increasing federalisation, or whether member states would eventually manage to dominate the Communities. The balance between these contradictory tendencies inherent in the founding treaties was clarified only through the open political battles in the 1960s. In a sense, the battle between federalist and intergovernmentalist streams has continued beyond Maastricht to the present day.