The Single Market and Maastricht — The Birth of the EU

In the previous episode we watched the Community grow southward and westward, expanding from a small club of six nations into a sprawling household of twelve. Yet for all the new members, many invisible walls still stood across Europe.

Tariffs had been abolished, but checkpoints still lined the borders, and trucks were held up for hours under mountains of paperwork. Product standards differed from country to country, and a drug or machine approved in one nation could not be sold in the next. Qualifications, insurance, and banking rules were all fractured at the frontier. The market was said to be one, but in truth it was no more than twelve markets huddled side by side.

In the 1980s, a movement began to remake this ‘unfinished community’ all at once. What lay ahead was not merely an economic zone, but something entirely new — a political body called the European Union.

A Deadline Named 1992 — The Single European Act

The story begins with a single white paper.

In 1985, France’s Jacques Delors took office as president of the European Commission and set out to rekindle the stalled project of integration. That same year, the Commission published a white paper cataloguing some three hundred barriers to completing the internal market, along with a plan to remove them. Physical border inspections, technical differences in standards, fiscal walls — it would strip them away one by one and complete, by the end of 1992, a ‘single market in which people, goods, capital, and services move freely.’ It was a grand yet concrete roadmap.

The treaty that anchored this goal was the Single European Act (SEA), signed in 1986 and entering into force in July 1987. It was the first large-scale revision of the founding treaties since the Treaty of Rome of 1957, and it set the deadline for completing the single market in explicit terms: the end of 1992.

The four freedoms were no abstract ideal. A French worker employed in Germany, an Italian firm opening a branch in the Netherlands, Spanish savings flowing into Belgian bonds, a lawyer’s or doctor’s qualification recognized across borders — these were attempts to make everyday life continuous across the continent. The border checkpoints gradually vanished, and Europe drew closer to becoming a single great economic space.

Yet freedom casts a shadow of its own. Anxiety that cheap labor would pour across borders, the pain of local industries thrown into competition, fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ as firms fled to countries with looser regulations — these questions, it is said, had already begun to sprout at this very moment. Light and shadow were two sides of the same coin from the start.

A Union Born in a Small Dutch Town

Just as the single market was taking shape, tectonic shifts were underway beneath Europe’s feet. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War’s division began to draw to a close. A divided Germany started moving toward reunification, and the prospect of a vast unified Germany stirred complicated feelings in France and other neighbors.

At this turning point in history, momentum grew to push integration into a deeper stage — to bind together not only the economy but diplomacy, security, and even the rights of citizens within a single framework. The treaty that gave form to this vision bore the name of a small town in the southern Netherlands: the Maastricht Treaty.

The Maastricht Treaty was signed in February 1992 and entered into force in November 1993. With it, the European Union (EU) was born as a larger vessel encompassing what had been the ‘European Community (EC).’ From a community of economics to a union with politics in its sights — this was a moment when not merely the name changed, but the very reach of integration expanded.

The Three Pillars and a New Status: European Citizen

The EU drawn up by the Maastricht Treaty is often described through a structure of ‘three pillars.’

The first pillar carried on from the existing European Community, taking charge of economic and social fields such as the single market and monetary union. Here the supranational character was strong, an area in which member states entrusted part of their sovereignty to the Community. The second pillar was the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and the third pillar covered cooperation in justice and home affairs (later police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). The latter two were strongly intergovernmental in nature, with the sovereignty of each nation left more firmly intact. Under a single roof, forms of cooperation of differing character lived side by side.

And this treaty gave birth to one more thing of historic weight: European citizenship.

In reality, ratifying the Maastricht Treaty was no smooth path. In Denmark, a 1992 referendum rejected the treaty once, and only after adding conditions such as opt-outs was it finally approved in a second vote the following year. France’s referendum, though a majority in favor, was a narrow one, and in Britain fierce debate continued in Parliament. The ideal of uniting Europe was, among the very peoples it concerned, by no means a monolithic source of support. This swell of debate over sovereignty would return again and again in changed forms in later chapters.

One Market, One Union, and the Next Bet

Even so, the step Europe took in the early 1990s was, in hindsight, decisive. The border checkpoints vanished, people came to cross the continent on the strength of a single ID card, and firms spread their commerce across twelve countries as one market. This period, when the end of the Cold War overlapped with the deepening of integration, is said to have been one of the seasons in which Europe was most filled with optimism.

The Single European Act stripped away the walls, and the Maastricht Treaty gave the vessel of a union. Economic integration had, before anyone quite noticed, seeped out into the integration of politics and citizens. It was, too, one point of arrival for that first dream of never repeating war.

But on a continent where people, goods, and capital now moved freely, one last border remained uncrossed: the national currency each country still clutched in its hand. The franc had the pride and history of the franc; the mark, those of the mark. To tear down that wall and have Europe share a single purse — into this unprecedented experiment in history, the EU was about to step, toward its most ambitious bet of all.