Acta Economica (Sep 2005)
THE EUROPEAN UNION: A STATE OR AN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION
Abstract
The European Union was established on the basis of a treaty between sovereign and independent countries. The origins of the EU could be traced back to the European Community for Coal and Steel, the European Economic Community and the European Community for Atomic Energy, with the idea of creating an international community with certain mutual economic and political interests. The purpose of the aforementioned communities was to provide economic collaboration between the member states so that they could keep pace with the USA and the Eastern block. The economic development was enabled by overcoming political discrepancies, which often drove the European countries into war conflicts in the past. An idea was fermenting, over the course of functioning of the European communities, for these communities to become a strong economic and political community, which eventually took place in Maastricht in 1992. To the existing economic pillar (pillar I), two more pillars were added (pillar II - foreign affairs and pillar III - internal affairs and judicial system). The existing European Communities were thus joined into the European Union, but formally they never stopped to exist in legal terms. Within the EU, there are unique instruments of authority (legislative, executive and judicial), though they function in somewhat specific way; namely, there is no strict borderline between the first two, whereas the judicial authority is independent and separated, as is the case in every sovereign country. The member states remained sovereign, but they delegated some of their sovereignty and authority to the Union, which was arranged by an international treaty. The law of the EU, as community law, is above the legal system of any of the member states. That is why the EU is a real union, close to the system of authority existing in federal states.
