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The 1991 Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) represented a dramatic new phase of European integration. The treaty called for intensified political integration, greater centralization of power in Brussels, and monetary union. Leading states including France and Germany made clear their commitment to see the treaty through to full implementation rapidly. However, controversial ratification processes soon unfolded in the post-commitment politics phases in both countries. In France, the TEU ratification struggle led to the near collapse of popular support for integration, and in a referendum in September 1992 passed by a narrow majority. Germany was one of the architects of the Treaty on European Union, yet it, too, experienced serious domestic political debates in the ratification phase.

In this case study chapter, four critical referendums are examined in greater detail: the two Danish referendums on the Maastricht Treaty and the two Irish referendums on the Nice Treaty. In both cases, the initial no‐votes were overturned in a second vote. This chapter ask the question: why did some voters change their minds? These case studies trace the dynamics of elite behaviour and public opinion formation during the course of the campaigns. Through in‐depth analyses of newspapers, campaign material, opinion polls, and interviews with key actors in the campaign, this chapter gives a rich description of political behaviour in the campaigns leading up to the referendum votes. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of how differences in the political environment — and specifically the information disseminated by political elites — influenced the behaviour of citizens in these referendums on European integration.

Analyses the developments from the Maastricht Treaty leading up to the approval of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. It is first shown that after adoption of the SEA, the role of national parliaments in EU decision-making has become an ever more salient item on the agenda of the member states. Asks whether this ‘trend’ towards empowering national parliaments follows the same logic as the empowerment of the European Parliament. Furthermore, the chapter explains why the empowerment of national parliaments still lags behind that of its EU-level counterpart, the European Parliament.

This chapter considers what can be learnt from the EMU negotiations and why an EMU agreement was possible. It looks at the nature and patterns of coalition building. It also examines the EMU negotiations in the context of European integration theories and outlines the theoretical implications of the study. Finally, it identifies the key problems in the Maastricht agreement, especially the risk of being locked into a politics of deflation in the context of imperfect legitimation.

Explains how variations in the structure of a country's economic system shape their preferences over other forms of multilateral international organizations. It specifically answers why Britain and Germany advocated different regulatory structures in the European Union's monetary, social, and industrial policies in the context of negotiating the content of the Maastricht Treaty. Theoretically, the paper explores ways in which the varieties of capitalism framework can be extended to the domain of international relations.

This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which argues that the Maastricht Treaty created a surveillance procedure that proved to be critical, at times decisive, in the making of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by determining which countries gained entry into the EMU. Understanding surveillance activities of Eurostat, an obscure agency in the EC, is the key to answering questions about how the EU influenced the fiscal policies of the member states, how it created harmonized and credible budgetary data, and how it attempted to control what it regarded as member state budgetary gimmickry. It discusses the use of principal—agency theory to analyze, first, the delegation of authority from member state principals through the Treaty to surpranational agents to conduct the procedure; second, the dynamic relationships taking place among the parties involved in the surveillance process; and, third, how autonomy and institutional design influence the credibility of the surveillance procedure. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter discusses the issues relevant to the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty or the Treaty on the European Union (EU). The ratification was expected to be a formality but the situation changed after the Treaty was rejected by the Danish electorate in a June 1992 referendum and a wafer-thin majority in a referendum in France. These issues and the worsening situation in Yugoslavia brought into question the very principles of European integration. The low level of support given to the European unification and Maastricht is attributed to the fact that foreign policy and security questions did not enter the ratification debate to any appreciable extent, and the public was not convinced that the Treaty provided an adequate response to what the public wanted.

The focus of this chapter is on the institutionalization of a space for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and on efforts since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) to link the CFSP with other European Union (EU) domains under a principle of coherence. In the light of unfavourable perceptions about institutional performance in the conduct of EU external relations, and the perceived need for change, two major questions are addressed: the kinds of institutional problems that have resulted from the TEU’s provisions on external relations; and the extent to which, and how, these problems have been resolved. The chapter first maps out the EU’s institutional space in the policy domains most directly concerned with external relations, and then shows how these mechanisms created new problems, and thus pressures for institutional change, once the TEU came into effect. These problems are defined primarily in terms of institutional gaps and contradictions across the EU’s external policy domains. Finally, the attempts of the EU to resolve these problems through two sets of institutional reforms, one informal and the other formal, are described.

The negotiation of EMU is situated in an historical context, notably the mounting tensions in the post‐war Bretton Woods system, the Hague Summit of 1969, the eventual collapse of Bretton Woods and the creation of the European Monetary System in 1978–79. An account is given of the relaunch of EMU in 1988, of the start of the detailed negotiations, of the nature and significance of the Maastricht Agreement, and of the end game in 1991.

New social risks are at the forefront of the EU's social policy agenda. In part, this is because a new social risk approach fits with open market policies, which stress constraints on state interventions and the importance of adapting social provision to meet economic goals; in part because old social risk areas are so heavily occupied by existing national government policies that it is difficult to find support for innovations. During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of attempts to develop international policy harmonization were pursued. These failed due to the difficulty of achieving cross‐national consensus. There are a number of relevant directives, chiefly in the areas of equality of opportunity for men and women and other labour market issues. The most important current developments, however, are in the area of ‘soft law’ through the Open Method of Co‐ordination and the National Action Plans in relation to employment, social exclusion, pensions, health and social care. The European Employment Strategy, with its stress on ‘flexicurity’, is the most advanced of these. It is at present unclear to what extent this process will achieve substantial changes in comparison with the importance of the economic pressures from the Single European Market.

The concluding essay in the book, written in 1994. It summarizes the factors and events that led to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in February 1992, and then gives the author's interpretation of events between the late spring of 1992 and early 1994, when the process of ratification and the crisis of the European Monetary System (EMS) interacted so powerfully. The concluding section reflects on the problems of implementing the treaty.

This chapter first briefly traces the history of European monetary integration. It then examines: the politics and economics of the Maastricht Treaty and Economic and Monetary Union/European Monetary Union (EMU); the convergence criteria and the transition to the final stage; and the institutional structure provided for in the treaty. It concludes with the main outstanding issues, drawing on the experience of the first two years of life with the euro, and the prospects for the future.

An analysis is made of the creation of new European Union (EU) spaces for cooperation in policing and immigration policies. The Treaty of Rome was silent on both topics, and before the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU), European Community (EC) states had begun to coordinate their responses to specific problems – such as terrorism, drugs, and asylum seekers – usually on a bilateral basis, with multilateral forms of cooperation fragmented, ad hoc, and outside EC structures. The chapter has three main sections, the first of which briefly describes the institutional landscape in policing and migration in Europe before the TEU. Section 2 assesses the major internal and external changes – the Single Market and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, respectively – that provoked the move toward institutionalizing police and migration cooperation at the EU level; it devotes particular attention to the domestic crisis in Germany resulting from massive migrations from the east, and the policy entrepreneurship of Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Section 3 analyses how the Third Pillar of the TEU, that on Justice and Home Affairs (in which policing and immigration policies were combined) borrowed from existing institutions – most notably the Second Pillar (the Common Foreign and Security Policy); the Amsterdam Treaty (1996) then partially separated policing and migration again – but with a completely different institutional structure within the European Union.

Monetary integration through the Maastricht Treaty in European Union was achieved by delegation to the Commission. This was fuelled by the need for centralised expertise to coordinate complex change and the member states' desire to commit themselves to future compliance with the stability and Growth Pact rules that were agreed upon to enforce budgetary discipline. The Commission built political support for the transition to a single currency. To ensure the credibility of member government commitments to the debt and budget deficit convergence criteria, the Excessive Deficit Procedure was devised and implemented by the Commission as was the Early Warning Procedure of the Ecofin finance ministers. The European Central Bank enforced the low inflation target.

The Maastricht Treaty raised the standards for transparency in the European Union to new supranational levels. Prior to Maastricht, transparency in member-state budgeting depended largely upon domestic institutions, both public and private, to assess the size, composition, and quality of public finance. Transparency at the member-state level served the traditional functions of encouraging democratic political accountability, promoting political control over bureaucratic institutions, crafting fiscal policy, and ensuring probity in financial management. Transparency for ensuring macro-budgetary treaty compliance promotes EU integration while helping to assure an often doubtful European public, international financial markets, and world press that the Economic and Monetary Union's (EMU) convergence process and excessive deficit procedure rely on reasonably credible budgetary data. This chapter discusses macro-budgetary rules and the creation of compliance information systems, transparency through bureaucratic politics, and the role of Eurostat in budgetary surveillance. It also examines the twin challenges to EU budgetary transparency, those of disclosure and interpretation, faced by Greece.