Treaties, Frameworks, and Powers

This chapter surveys the development of the EU through a series of Treaties from Rome to Lisbon. The period since Lisbon is now the longest between Treaties of any time in the past 40 years, reflecting difficulties encountered during the Lisbon process and concerns at declining consensus over the fundamentals of the European project. Institutional innovations, in seeking to avoid the need for Treaty change, have led to significant compromises with the first best. With this background the chapter examines some of the key concepts in the workings of the EU in the context of this study: the four freedoms, equivalence, “muddling through”, hard power and soft power, majoritarianism, and finally neo-functionalism and post-functionalism.