This article deals with a significant institutional step in the history of European integration: the decision to hold EEC heads of state and government meetings on a regular basis.
Regular meetings of heads of state and government seem, in 2012, a common feature of international affairs. About forty years ago, however, such meetings did not really exist: ad hoc summits were the rule. Comparing the emergence of the European Council in 1974 and the G7 in 1975, this article explains why and how summitry has become routine in international politics.
This article explores three central issues of the European Council’s development, from its inception in 1974 until its constitutionalisation in 1986: the need for an approach encompassing globalisation and Europeanisation processes; the need to coordinate Community affairs and political cooperation; and finally the privileged capacity of heads of government to fulfil the two above-mentioned aims.
I will be giving a paper at the next symposium of the research programme “Digital Humanities Luxembourg” (DHLU 2013), “Reading historical sources in …
Although its inception gave birth to lively debates and that it influenced the mode of decision making in the EEC, this chapter shows how the European Council found its place relatively smoothly in the Community decision-making process.
How did the emergence of the European Council (EUCO) affect an established order in a specific European policy area? This chapter shows the capacity of the EUCO, created in December 1974, to steer and change elements of the established order in one of these policy areas, namely European Political Co-operation (EPC).
A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS). This account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity.
The EMS, created in 1979, is part of the prehistory of the euro: it was a first concrete attempt at organising the European Union’s – that was still then the European Economic Community (EEC) – currency relations. And the discussions that took place then bear a striking resemblance to our current predicament.