It also had the potential for crises, growth, and enlargement. Its first major crisis, indeed, concerned enlargement, when President de Gaulle vetoed the first British application to join, in 1963. The second crisis, two years later, was also provoked by de Gaulle, who objected to the extension of majority voting. Richard J. Mayne
Weathering both crises, the EC proceeded to broaden its scope and to expand beyond the organization’s original six members—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. First came Britain, Ireland, and Denmark (1973), followed by Greece (1981) and then Spain and Portugal (1986). The Single European Act, promulgated July 1, 1987, built upon ongoing efforts at further social and economic cohesion and established a timetable for the completion of a common market. The Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union), signed on Feb. 7, 1992, created the European Union (EU), comprising three main components: a common foreign and security policy, an enhanced cooperation in domestic affairs, and the EC, renamed the European Community, which became the anchor of the EU with broader authority. Moreover, the treaty established EU citizenship, which allowed citizens, regardless of nationality, to vote and run for office in elections in the country of their residence both for local office and for the organization’s increasingly important legislative body, the European Parliament. Enthusiasm for the EU in the member countries was not universal (it took two referendums for Danish voters to approve their country’s involvement, and the referendum on membership was barely approved by the French electorate), but the treaty officially took effect on Nov. 1, 1993. ‘‘Convergence criteria’’ (relating to levels of government spending, inflation, public debt, and exchange-rate stability) were established for participation in a common European currency. Although some countries failed to qualify (Greece) or chose to remain outside the system (Britain, Denmark, and Sweden, the last having joined the EU in 1995 along with Austria and Finland), 11 countries on Jan. 1, 1999, relinquished control over their exchange rates and began a transition to the replacement of their national currencies with a single monetary unit, the euro.
Meanwhile, members of the EU began acting collectively in foreign policy, notably attempting to bring peace to the countries of the former federation of Yugoslavia, which splintered violently, beginning with the secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and that of Macedonia (later called North Macedonia) in 1992. Ethnic civil war was more protracted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (sparking UN intervention), and EU members helped halt the fighting there through participation in the brokering of the Dayton Accords. Acting under the aegis of NATO, a number of EU countries intervened militarily in the conflict in Kosovo (1998–99), between that region’s ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority and the government of the rump Yugoslavian state (comprising Serbia and Montenegro), and again in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime had provided a home for the radical Islamists responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Terrorist bombings by Islamist radicals also struck Europe, in Madrid in March 2004 and in London in July 2005.
In 2004 the EU admitted 10 more countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia (independent states formed by the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992), as well as Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. Other than Cyprus and Malta, the 21st-century additions were all former members of the communist bloc. To the consternation of Russia, many of them also joined NATO. In 2008 Russia showed its support for Serbia (a solitary country after the split in 2006 of Serbia and Montenegro, the renamed loose successor state to Yugoslavia), when Kosovo declared its independence despite Serbian opposition. Russia’s relations with the EU and NATO, particularly those organizations’ former communist members, were sometimes tense, as when Russia objected strenuously to U.S. plans to deploy a missile-defense radar system in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Efforts begun in 2002 to draft a constitution for the enlarged EU led to the signing of a document in 2004 that failed to be ratified by French and Dutch voters in 2005. A reform version of the failed constitution, stewarded by Germany, resulted in the Lisbon Treaty of December 2007; however, it too was scuttled, at least temporarily, when Irish voters rejected it in 2008. In October 2009 Ireland approved the treaty in a second referendum, and Poland completed its ratification process as well. That November the Czech Republic became the final country to ratify the treaty, which entered into force on Dec. 1, 2009.
The EC was founded in response to a checkered half-century of European history, when some of the world’s most civilized countries had plumbed depths of savagery, folly, tyranny, and genocide that in a work of science fiction would be hard to believe. The EC’s most obvious purpose had been to reconcile former enemies and prevent war. Its second aim was to avoid the economic errors Europeans had made in the 1930s, when, instead of collaborating on a global recovery policy in response to the Great Depression, they worsened the crisis through economic nationalism that was the breeding ground for dictatorship. Moreover, Europe’s individual countries, once great powers, were dwarfed numerically, politically, and militarily by the United States and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991–92) and economically by the United States and Japan. By the early 21st century the gigantic countries of India and China had also become economic rivals for the European Union and for a Europe that increasingly saw greater cohesiveness as the path not only to holding its own vis-à-vis political and economic superpowers but also to maximizing its power to meet its wider responsibilities in the world. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Europe
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 19 July 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading Prehistory
A comprehensive introduction to European prehistory is offered in Timothy Champion et al., Prehistoric Europe (1984). Specific periods are covered in Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (1986); Clive Bonsall (ed.), The Mesolithic in Europe (1989); and Alasdair Whittle, Neolithic Europe: A Survey (1985). Among studies of economy and subsistence, Robin Dennell, European Economic Prehistory: A New Approach (1983), deals particularly with hunter-gatherers; Marek Zvelebil (ed.), Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their Transition to Farming (1986), includes regional studies of postglacial hunter-gatherers and the beginnings of agriculture; and Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (1985), is a detailed study of early agriculture. John M. Coles and Andrew J. Lawson (eds.), European Wetlands in Prehistory (1987), contains information on the unusually well-preserved archaeological finds in various European countries. N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 2nd ed. (1985), is a well-illustrated introductory survey; other useful studies of prehistoric art are Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld, Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967); and André Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting (1982; originally published in Italian, 1981). For the Indo-European question, the best account of the theory of invasions is J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (1989). Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987), considers the issues and argues for the spread of the language with early agriculture. Timothy C. Champion The Metal Ages