Maastricht Treaty Signed
The Maastricht Treaty was signed in February 1992 and turned a common market into a European Union. The European Community had been an economic arrangement with political ambitions since 1957. Maastricht supplied the political architecture: a union built on three pillars, with the existing community institutions in the first, a common foreign and security policy in the second, and justice and home affairs in the third — the latter two run by governments rather than by the Commission. It created European citizenship, a right to vote in local and European elections wherever a citizen resides, the Committee of the Regions, and the principle of subsidiarity. The core of it was monetary union. The treaty set out a timetable to a single currency, convergence criteria on inflation, deficits, debt and exchange-rate stability, and an independent central bank on the German model — which was the price of German agreement, since the Bundesbank had no wish to share the mark. Britain negotiated an opt-out from the currency and from the social chapter; Denmark obtained opt-outs after its voters rejected the treaty in a referendum in June 1992 and accepted it in a second one in 1993. France ratified it by 51 per cent. The negotiations ran alongside German reunification, and the currency is often read as the political counterpart to it. The euro arrived in accounts in 1999 and in notes in 2002. The debt and deficit rules were broken first by France and Germany in 2003. The treaty is also where the modern European argument begins. It moved the union past economics into currency, citizenship and foreign policy without a comparable move in accountability, and every subsequent quarrel about democratic legitimacy dates from it.
- Year: 1992 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
