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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.

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.

This chapter examines the weaknesses and accomplishments of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union. Despite criticism of the CFSP, it has made a number of achievements during the period between the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht in November 1993 and the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam in May 1999. These achievements include the success of the CFSP in maintaining the independent sovereign status of Member States, and its contribution to international diplomacy.

The state of play in the stages towards European economic and monetary union is analysed as at 1991. The issues that had already been settled by negotiation in this year are briefly discussed, and then those that were still open at the time (which concerned the transition to the final stage of union) are examined in more detail. These are essentially three issues: the tasks and powers of the monetary institution in stage two (the European Monetary Institute); the conditions (convergence criteria) that must be satisfied before passing from stage two to the final (third) stage; and the procedures for deciding the date on which the third stage is to start—the issue of the ‘opting‐out’ clause.

This chapter looks into the historical background of the European Union’s (EU’s or Union’s) current commitment to human rights, by retracing the evolution of the EU from an economic community to a more political union based on shared fundamental values. The chapter aims at driving home three core messages that are essential for this volume, namely: (i) the Union’s internal and external human rights engagement have come about in parallel, and have grown somewhat organically, over the past fifty years, before becoming fully constitutionally engrained and intertwined in the Treaty of Lisbon; (ii) the EU’s gradual rapprochement to human rights was driven both by considerations of enhancing the Union’s internal legitimacy (constitutional checks and balances, assuring protection rights to citizens, safeguarding cohesion within an ever more diverse Union) and external legitimacy (being a responsible actor in the world, contributing to peace and stability); and (iii) in spite of all human rights-related provisions in the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU’s competence structure has not adequately followed through on these developments. The Union’s competences up to today remain primarily socio-economic in nature, with very limited law-making and enforcement powers in the area of human rights proper, resulting in an asymmetry that undermines the Union’s potential to effectively deliver on its own human rights commitments.

In this chapter the idea of the labour constitution is adopted as a framework through which to analyse the history of the EU and, in particular, the question of worker participation at different levels of economic organization—different sites of decision-making—within the Union. The focus lies with the European social dialogue at the supranational, cross-sectoral level, and its precursors in the Economic, and Coal and Steel, Communities. Viewed through the framework of the labour constitution, the key question to be addressed is taken to be that of the potential of the dialogue to function in a way comparable with the collective bargaining and corporatist arrangements of the (old) member states: to democratize the EU economic order, and to deliver improved substantive outcomes for European workers.

This chapter examines the judicial control of the intergovernmental pillars of the European Union. When the intergovernmental pillars were established by the Treaty of Maastricht they were excluded almost totally from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Some of the reasons for this exclusion include the short-term character of the European Political Cooperation (EPC) and the very nature and record of the ECJ.

The Treaty of Maastricht introduced the European Ombudsman into the institutional landscape of the Union. The emergence of an extra-judicial mechanism geared towards overseeing the administrative behaviour of the Union bureaucracy served a two-fold objective. In legal terms, it sought to enhance the protection of citizens' rights and interests in the Union space by establishing an alternative route to administrative litigation. In political terms, it was employed as a tool to put a smiling face to a largely distant, impersonal, and incomprehensible Community structure, sooth the growing uneasiness of the Union citizenry, and sugar the pill of further European integration. This chapter is organized as follows. It begins with a brief discussion of the historical emergence of the Ombudsman. It then considers the powers of the European Ombudsman and the restraints placed thereupon. It analyses the way in which the Ombudsman has defined and applied the concept of maladministration. Specific aspects of the institutional relationship between the Ombudsman and the Union judiciary are then addressed. The chapter concludes with some general remarks pertaining to the institutional evolution of the Ombudsman in the Union's political and legal order.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the European Union's (EU) commitment to human rights. The EU's de facto constitution has not always been endowed with human rights provisions. The original founding Treaties contained no mention of human rights — or ‘fundamental rights’ in EU jargon — and this remained the case until the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. As the pace of integration started to pick up and more policy areas became of EU relevance, human rights have also been gradually brought into the fold. Similarly to other aspects of EU law, judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have played an important role in establishing the EU's commitment to human rights at the outset of the integration process. Today, the EU is a recognised human rights actor both globally and in Europe and its neighbourhood. It has its own legally binding ‘bill of rights’ in the form of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights and a dedicated Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). Nevertheless, like other global political actors, the Union's human rights commitment faces both internal and external pressures from competing objectives, interests, as well as challenges which test the authenticity of its proclaimed human rights identity and aspirations.

This chapter suggests that the European Union has outgrown the original economic community but it remains unclear what it should become in the end. It first explains how the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, became a singular, supranational entity somewhere between an international organization and a federal state. It then examines the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht; how EU’s democracy problem is exacerbated by a yawning gap between decision-making power and accountability; and the European Court of Justice’s role in the economic integration process as well as its interpretation of the European treaties. It also discusses proposals for an institutional reform of the EU, such as enhancing the representation of EU citizens on the European Parliament. Finally, it considers plausible explanations of European integration and how the EU must be arranged so as to find greater acceptance.