This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

The media tends to portray a European Union lurching from one crisis to the next. And in this brief history I have had plenty to say about problems, dangers, risks, and threats in the decades-long process of European integration. The founders were well aware of this aspect. Jean Monnet always believed that ‘Europe would be built through crisis, and that it would be the sum of their solutions’. Indeed, the European Union – as the European Communities before it – does seem to have a knack for turning crises to its advantage. Rather than leading to any kind of reversal, challenges have tended to reorient and expand the European project. So, we should not get carried away by excitable headlines, which often fail to do justice to the EU’s complex and sometimes contradictory trajectory.

At first glance, social justice seems to be absent in the history of European integration, which ultimately led to the European Union of our own times. This chapter arrives at a different conclusion. It focuses on the period from the 1950s until the Maastricht Treaty and argues that European integration was not simply the neoliberal project it is often described as. Already the Schuman Declaration of 1950 called for a ‘solidarité de fait’. While social justice never became a key concept defining the policies of the European Community, the EC started to develop a distinct approach to social issues since the 1950s. It primarily sought social progress through economic cooperation, not through redistributive social policy. Moreover, the EC served as a platform for the exchange of experts, complementing the role of national actors, transnational forums, and other international organizations such as the International Labour Organization. But it also started developing a highly diverse set of policy instruments with deep implications for social justice. These policies remained patchy. They gained importance only incrementally and never seemed to be driven by an overall logic. Even if the EC was a hidden actor on questions of social justice, it clearly mattered.

This chapter provides a historical overview of the evolution of European cooperation. It first sketches the historical background to several initiatives for international cooperation after the Second World War. It then discusses the way the EU evolved from the initial founding of the European Coal and Steel Community into what is now the European Union. In doing so it looks at the evolution of its policies, institutions and membership over the decades and highlights major international events and crises that affected developments. The chapter shows that the process of bringing the European countries together was long and winding with many fits and starts. Periods of rapid change and innovation have alternated with long stretches of gridlock and stalemate. The process was often erratic because of fundamentally different views on the nature, pace and scope of integration. While the term ‘European Union’ suggests that the organization was swiftly put in place on the basis of a solid design, the EU in essence is a patchwork that has been stitched together in a step-by-step fashion over the course of seven decades.

National judicial systems within the European Union (EU) face pressures toward alignment under the policy agendas for judicial cooperation connected with the Lisbon Treaty and the widespread practice of ‘transnational borrowing’ among courts. Using the CJEU and ECtHR as case studies in the phenomena of judicial culture and transnational judicial communication, this chapter explores how constitutional norms and formal policies interact with contextual influences (including informal judicial interaction and evolving national ideas and practices regarding judging and judicial organisation) to produce increasing legal alignment among the member states. In doing so, the chapter explicitly highlights the need to combine comparative legal analysis with socio-legal research methods in order to understand the evolution of constitutional law.

In 1971 Norwegian ecophilosophers Sigmund Kvaløy, Arne Næss, and Nils Faarlund traveled to the periphery, to the faraway mountains of Nepal. It was a transformative experience for them. In the lives of the Sherpa, they saw an alternative environmentally friendly way of living. Upon their return to Norway they wrote about Sherpa life as an Oriental harmony juxtaposed with the harsh Occidental values of their own Western culture. This demarcation between Oriental ecological wisdom and the Occidental stupidity of the West eventually came to frame the deep-ecological debate at home and abroad. Sherpa life was to be a model for all Norwegians, and Sherpa-informed Norwegians were to be a subsequent model for the world.

These days ‘Europe’ is assumed to mean the European Union and Brussels. The majority of European states are part of the EU, and its various policies have a profound impact on its member states and the international system. It is therefore easy to equate Europe with the European Union, or at least with international cooperation in Europe. This chapter argues that such an approach is problematic, particularly from a historical perspective. It underestimates two aspects: firstly, the European Community as the EU’s predecessor was a fragile latecomer in a densely populated field of international organisations. Seventy years ago (and more recently too) it appeared rather unlikely that this particular organisation would one day come to be identified with Europe as a whole. And secondly, the integration process was not only shaped by the histories of the participating states and the general historical context, but also influenced by a veritable web of relationships with other Western European organisations and transnational forums. Europe was never just the EU, and the EU never all of Europe. So we need to understand how that equivalence became so strong and how the EC was able to morph from humble origins into Europe’s pre-eminent international entity.