Sicherheit und Risiko

ESPRIT St.Gallen Business Review
The European Union: History
and Institutional Objectives
Scarred by two costly and tragic world wars and
newly threatened by a steely and increasingly unfriendly
set of Eastern neighbors, six Western European
nations – France, Germany, Belgium, Italy,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – founded the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951
and signed a treaty that would, in the words of the
EU, “tie their coal and steel industries so closely together
that they could never again go to war against
each other.“ This justification – that the predecessor
to the modern-day European Union was created out
of a drive for peace – conveniently sidesteps two significant
issues. First, the ECSC was established, in
part, to prevent a renewed rise in German dominance
by linking the country’s economic fate in key sectors
to those of neighboring countries. Second, the ECSC’s
formation stemmed from its members’ collective realization
that no single European nation-state was
powerful enough, by itself, to militarily subdue or
control its neighbors. In a post-war environment dominated
by the militarily and economically powerful
United States, the ECSC was an economic bloc forged
out of necessity in order to remain competitive with
the so-called superpowers. Peace was not its primary
function; the EU was, from its inception, designed to
yield economic returns for its member states, themselves
the strongest economies in Western Europe.
During the subsequent decades, the multiplying
and strengthening economic ties between Europe’s
nation-states began to gesture toward a broader program
of continental integration. In 1968, the European
Economic Community (EEC; the successor
to the ECSC, created by the Treaty
of Rome in 1957) abolished trade quotas
and tariffs but left non-tariff barriers in
place, thereby easing the flow of goods and
services between member states while preserving
their economic sovereignty. As the
EEC steadily attracted new members – including
Greece, in 1981 –, more and more
European countries became invested in the
fortunes of the common market. Following
the adoption of the Schengen Agreement
in 1985, its signatory governments passed
some 280 legislative measures to create
the institutional infrastructure of the single
market, a process which was largely complete
by 1993, when the Treaty of Maastricht
formally established the European
Union and its leaders began to speak of
a sea-change in terms of a supra-national
European identity. “Euro optimism” began
to infuse the continent’s cultural discourse. There was
a sense that the era of competing Great Powers had
finally ceded to a post-nationalist paradigm characterized
by European cosmopolitanism. L’Auberge Espagnole,
the 2002 French film which romanticizes a
French graduate student’s experiences during an Erasmus
exchange fellowship in Barcelona, is perhaps the
most well-known piece of popular culture capturing
the sentiment of that period.
But the tender moments of cultural, romantic,
and intellectual exchange between a French student
and his newfound Belgian, British, Danish, Spanish,
German, and Italian friends belie the disparate opportunities
and outcomes provided for in the Treaty of
Maastricht and the EU’s investment of political and
economic clout in its most economically competitive
member states. The common market created clear
winners and losers, and winning or losing was not left
to chance. Thus, inequality was built into the blueprint
of modern Europe.
Who Benefits from the
Common Market?
Earlier this year, Germany’s economy garnered
praise from the national press and political parties
for once again attaining the title of “Exportweltmeister”
(export world champion), as it re-surpassed China
in having the world’s largest positive trade balance.
With robust manufacturing, engineering, technology
and financial sectors, Germany continues to export
more goods and services than any other country in the
world. But its much-heralded success as “Exportweltmeister”
is not simply the reward of innate or histori-
Trade balances of select EU nations
Source: OECD Economic Outlook, Vol. 2012, No. 91-1
(Statistical Annex Table 47: Trade balances for goods and services).
Winter 2012 37