ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the changing nature of the European Union (EU) and focuses on features of its evolution. It examines the renewal of integrationist tendencies in the 1980s and the 1990s, and demonstrates the limitations of greater union in the latter decade. The chapter considers some of the significant challenges facing the EU at the end of the 20th century. The EU was conceived as an institutional framework for European integration in the 1950s, in conditions which were very different to those of the 1990s. The Treaty on EU was one of the high points in the process of cumulative European integration. The process of cumulative integration has, though, been uneven with tensions between differing levels and political and economic arrangements. There have been two main, and interlinked, battlegrounds in the contested progress to economic and political union in the 1980s and the early 1990s: the Single Market programme and the Maastricht Summit.
