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IdentificationThe Treaty on the Establishment of the European Economic Community (referred to today as the Treaty on the Establishment of the European Communities (EC)), also known as the Treaty of Rome, was signed in 1957 between “The Six”: West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Denmark formally joined the EC in 1973. With the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the European Union (EU) was established. However, Denmark ratified this treaty with optouts. The Treaty of Rome emerged from the political and cultural movements which after the horrors of the Second World War sought to establish the basis for peaceful cooperation in Europe.
The dream or hope of promoting peace, trade, relations and growth by means of political cooperation between European states is old. In the Age of Enlightenment the idea of a European union enjoyed great support, especially with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who tied the hope of peace to the development of an international legal system. After the First World War, the European movement of the time attempted to formalise the hope of peace by means of the League of Nations, albeit with little success. After the Second World War, the establishment of the Council of Europe in 1949 was the first concrete expression of organised cooperation. However, the Council of Europe has no authority to make binding majority decisions and has primarily confined itself to the discussion of democracy, human rights and judicial cooperation. Neverthe - less, the Council of Europe with the European Convention on Human Rights and the attached International Court of Justice has provided a system of wide-reaching importance in the organisation’s many Member States. It was not until the Treaty of Rome that the idea of cooperation was effectively manifested, in that the Member States transferred important powers to common bodies, particularly with respect to the development of a “common market”. Later, the EU’s powers have been strengthened by the fact the Council has to an increasing extent been authorised to make decisions by qualified majority among the Council’s members. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the European Union (EU) was established. This happened in 1992 with the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht, which gave the cooperation a far stronger political dimension. The Treaty led to the establishment of the Economic Monetary Union (EMU) and the European Central Bank (ECB), and it also gave the European Parliament greater influence in legislative decision-making. In addition, a number of new areas of cooperation, such as culture and education, were inserted into the EC Treaty. With the Treaty of Maastricht, the values upon which the cooperation is founded are accentuated. The Treaty of Maastricht makes reference to human rights; rights which the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1998 highlighted as the very foundation of the Union. Furthermore, with the Treaty of Nice in 2000, work was done to draw up a politically binding charter of fundamental human rights, which became legally binding with the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Besides human rights, the values encompassed tolerance, solidarity and gender equality. The ambition is that cooperation in the EU should build upon “European values” and constitute the foundation for a European sense of community. In other words: common values are to create cohesion. At the beginning of the 21st century, there is every reason to ask the question: Has democracy found its final form, with nation states as the framework? Or do we stand at the gateway to a third phase in the history of democracy? In Greek democracy, citizenship and democratic partici pa - tion were limited to city-states. With the establishment of the modern nation states, citizenship and democracy are widened to include millions of people. With the development of European cooperation over the last few decades, it is possible, according to the American democracy theorist, Robert A. Dahl (1915), to glimpse the preliminary stages of development towards democratic institutions of a transnational nature. Whether these preliminary stages will develop to an extent that can be characterised as a third phase in the history of democracy remains an open question “Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the
strength of the United Nations organisation. Under
and within that world concept we must recreate the
European family in a regional structure called – it
may be – the United States of Europe…”
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This page is part of the electronic publication "The Danish Democracy Canon"