The Pros And Cons Of The Maastricht Treaty

The Treaty on European Union also known as the Maastricht Treaty was signed in Maastricht 7th of February 1992 and the Treaty on the functioning of the

Indeed, the ideological foundations that gave birth to the EU were based on ensuring development and maintaining international stability, i.e., the containment of communist expansion in post World War II Europe (Hunt 1989). The Maastricht Treaty which gave birth to the EU in 1992 included considerations for joint policies in regard to military defense and citizenship.

The Austria created by the treaty was financially and militarily weak and therefore a chronic force of instability in Europe between the two World Wars

The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973. When the EU was formed in 1993, the European Economic Community was renamed the European Community and added into the EU’s systems. There was never a formal vote on whether or not the UK should join the EU, but any sort of polling having to do with it yielded support for the movement.

Lord Denning stated that signing the treaty was only the first step as Community law could not be implemented merely by signing a Treaty of Accession. Parliament passed the European Community Act 1972, which came into force on 1st January 1973, whereby Community law become applicable

In 1992, twelve countries came together and signed the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union (Krajewska, 2014, pp. 6-25). The last obstacle that the EU had to face was the different currencies of each country, therefore a decade later on January 1, 1999 the Euro was created. Many countries that adopted the new currency fell within the Euro Area. Each country had to discontinue their old currency and the monetary policies giving control the newly formed European Central Bank (ECB), but each separate country still had their own fiscal policies one of the key reasons for the current debt crisis (Krajewska, 2014, pp. 6-25). The union of multiple countries into a central body seemed to be a wise choice for greater economic growth, but the failure from one country is a failure for all.

The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992, promised to make this group of nations strong. A formal agreement to establish the European Union, it pledged to bring together the

Having met the euro convergence criteria in 19982, the governments of 11 European sovereignties began plans for the transition with Greece and seven other EU member states being admitted to the single currency area in later years. This process originated during the February of 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed by the existing members of the European Economic Community (EEC). The aim of this treaty, signed in Maastricht, Netherlands was to ensure that 'sound fiscal policies ' were retained by the member states of the European Union. With the signing of the Treaty, a new regulation is now imposed which declares any state newly ascended to the EU must join the Eurozone once 2 years of ‘turmoil-free’ years have been completed and the convergence criteria are met. This meant that after the Treaty was actually enforced new states have become pressured to meet the convergence criteria by any means possible.

In recent history, following World War II, the Paris Peace Treaty and The Potsdam Agreement, reorganized Europe’s countries dramatically and by the late 1940’s the idea of a European Union was presented. It began as a way to preserve peace among the nations of Europe. In 1951, the first

At the Laeken European Council of December 2001, government and state leaders of the European Union (EU) Member States decided to draft a `Constitutional Treaty' for the EU. The draft would then be discussed, amended, approved or rejected by an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) held in 2003. The aim of Fabbrini's article is thus to contribute to the understanding of the constitutional evolution of the EU through a comparison with the constitutional experience of the United States.

The Maastricht Treaty, which is formally known as the treaty on European Union represented a major step towards European economic, political and social integration. The main condition of the treaty was the immediate creation of the European Union and by the late 1990s the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union. The Maastricht Treaty is a part of an evolutionary economic process that began in Europe following the destruction of World War II. Many of the European leaders came to the conclusion that if social and political stability and economic growth was to be realized there

The Treaty of Maastricht marked a pivotal moment in European Unions formation for a few key reasons. It expanded and improved on ideas previously discussed in the Single European Act (1986). On a more important note, it established the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the European Monetary Union (EMU), which laid down the key foundations of the European Union, as well the Euro. The treaty also facilitated further developments such as the Treaty of Nice. The Single European Act (SEA)(1986) as well as the fall of the “Iron Curtain” made it easier to create the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. French

In this paper, it will be shown that the process of the creation and ratification of the Maastricht Treaty can be most effectively examined in terms of the state level of analysis, because it best explains the two-level games and challenges that each state had to overcome in order to ratify the treaty, the cooperation of member states in a means that privileged intergovernmental interactions, and state support for the creation of European Union resulting in the further development of complex interdependence, with states delegating some measure of sovereignty to the European supranational order as a means to assist them in realizing their interests through both the immediate benefits and long-term credibility provided by membership in European institutions. A review of the literature pertaining to when the issue of greater political unity was raised in 1988, and culminating in examinations of the 1993 Maastricht ratification, will be conducted in order to better understand the process and motivations of the states involved.

The Second World War is considered to be the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind with over 60 million deaths in a span of six years. After the end of the war in 1945, many people, Europeans, were determined to prevent any more bloodshed and destruction of that scale from happening again. The first step towards communion between the European countries was to implement economic cooperation. Economic cooperation is the cooperation between countries in terms of imports or exports of goods and borrowing or lending of capital and payments. This soon led to the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958. This increased economic cooperation between Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium. Over time, this economic union became an organization that was involved in the environment and aid. The EEC soon changed its name to the European Union (EU). So far, the EU has been successful in maintaining peace in Europe. It has brought many benefits to its member state. Since its creation, peace has been maintained and outbreak of a war has been prevented. The Lisbon Treaty came into effect in 2009 and was signed by 13 of the EU’s member states. The states benefited from a common foreign and security policy. The civil and political rights of its citizens are being protected under the European Court of Human Rights. However in the economic field, the EU has some problems. The Eurozone Crisis showed the inability of the member states to manage

The Maastricht criteria for convergences is a criteria for which European Union member states are required to meet to enter the third stage of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and adopt the Euro as their currency (Viskovic, 2012). The criteria includes five rules which act as instruments of macroeconomic stabilisation (Bukowski, 2006), which were implemented to avoid destabilising the EMU by the premature admission of countries whose underlying economic performance was not yet compatible with permanently fixed exchange rates. These criteria have been used as conditions since the implementation of the euro in 1999, however, even before the recent euro crisis there has been speculation about the effectiveness of this criteria.